17 Men Who Made Makeup Look Good: From Boy George to David Bowie

Today, to celebrate his 69th birthday, David Bowie released his 25th album, Blackstar. Capturing news headlines with the seven-song rule-breaking record and a simultaneous sold-out Manhattan play, Lazarus, the musician continues to defy expectations of creative boundaries (and age limitations). But when has Bowie ever felt comfortable with the status quo? It was the moment he ditched his image as just another long-haired crooner from Brixton for the otherworldly and heavily made-up Ziggy Stardust that he experienced a meteoric rise to fame.

While some critics found Bowie’s chromatic, gender-bending looks a distracting display of smoke and mirrors, the Pierre La Roche–designed celestial makeup had a resounding influence. Contemporaries and collaborators Mick Jagger and Marc Bolan also exhibited a flair for cosmetics, using daubed-on eyeliner and splashes of glitter to set themselves apart from the average frontman, finding that femming up their looks only heightened their masculine edge onstage.

Not long after the glam rock ’70s came the culture club ’80s, where the likes of Leigh Bowery and Boy George made a habit of dressing as though their lives depended on it, down to the angular flush of their cheeks. Across town, while Brian Ferry waxed poetic on redecorating Roxy Music’s hotel rooms, bandmate Brian Eno could be found in front of their best-lit mirrors, strategizing oblique slashes of blue eyeshadow and multi-tonal hair chalk. Robert Smith and, later, Marilyn Manson enjoyed the unease their powdered porcelain skin, dark black eyeshadow, and blood-stained lips caused on the streets. It’s an effect Manson enhanced with a milky white eye contact—is that not a wink at Bowie’s arresting, permanently dilated pupil?

Of course, Bowie was not the first male celebrity to ever dip into a cosmetics bag. His own eyeshadow, blush, and lipstick referenced a history of men before him. Before he sang “I’m an alligator,” he learned the art of kabuki makeup from Japan’s most famous onnagata, Bando Tamasaburo V, and he also spent considerable time among mimes, training with Lindsay Kemp in the 1960s. And where would dancer Vaslav Nijinsky or actor Rudolph Valentino have been without the transformative power of makeup? In honor of David Bowie’s birthday and a full day of listening to Blackstar on repeat, a look back at 17 men who made wearing makeup look like the most masculine thing a person could do.

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