Eye Shadows Mom Didn’t Wear
We used to spend hours piling on lavender eye shadow, false eyelashes, iridescent blush and frosted pink lipstick. To go to the 7-Eleven. That stuff sure goes on smooth when you’re 13. Now we just slap on some glycolic acid, smear our lips with a brick-colored matte and fly. The thrill is gone.
“Like, chill out, sit down and have some fun,” Jean Danielson tells women who, like us, have lost that girls’ locker-room feeling for makeup. She and twin sister Jane Blackford started their BeneFit cosmetics and treatment line in San Francisco 16 years ago, with the idea that like, hey, it’s just makeup. Now the company makes 800 products and sells to Henri Bendel in New York and, starting this week, I. Magnin in Beverly Hills.
This summer’s Route 66-themed eye-shadow palette is dotted with landmarks of the open road: Dairy Queen (hospital white), Road Kill (day-old Dijon), and Hojo’s (fried clams). “It’s not for everybody,” concedes Danielson. “Some people want aubergine.”
Sui Generis: The Beardsley prints and parrot-shaped sconces in place, the new Anna Sui shop on La Brea was ready for business Wednesday.
The New York-based designer celebrated the occasion later that night with friends and customers from Los Angeles and New York, including Cher, k.d. lang, Sofia Coppola, members of the Digable Planets and model Peggy Moffitt.
But they were all beaten to the punch by Sui’s first La Brea customer, Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran. “He bought stuff to take to Europe,” says Sui. Rhodes joins the ranks of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Steve Tyler, all of whom are partial to Sui’s slightly feminine, ‘90s hippie designs for men. As Sui reminds us, “These are the boys who used to wear their girlfriends’ clothes.”
Annie, We Hardly Saw Ye: Diane Keaton galumphed onto “The Tonight Show” stage the other night looking like a borderline fashion victim. From her cleric’s hat to her industrial-strength stomping boots, the quintessential Woodwoman was a vision in black (except for a tugboat-size crucifix). “Good to see ya, Padre,” cloying ex-comedian Jay Leno chirped, about an octave too high for a guy his age. He did have a point, though. Add a mustache and Keaton would have been a dead ringer for Father Guido Sarducci--only funnier.
Peep Shows: So you went out shopping and bought new clothes and now you want to show them off somewhere they’ll be appreciated? Take your makeupless face and velvet military jacket over to Cafe Med on Sunset Plaza, where we spotted George Michael a few days ago in a noncommittal purple T-shirt and facial stubble.
Next stop, the Whiskey, the new bar at the Sunset Marquis, in which the underdressed and the overdressed merge in a teeny-tiny space and pretend they’re at the Paramount. Then there’s Babylon, the restaurant that thinks it’s a club (or vice versa) on Robertson. The fashion parade there the other night included several women in see-through dresses with cleavage pushed up to their chins.
In Passing: At the time of his apparent suicide last week in San Francisco, Victoria’s Secret founder Roy Raymond, 47, was developing a line of products for women with breast cancer. Barry Reder, Raymond’s longtime attorney and friend, said the company, Peggy Knight International, started by making wigs for women with hair loss. Raymond planned to expanding the concept to include clothing and prosthetic devices. “He saw the big ideas,” Reder said Wednesday.
Raymond’s biggest idea was classy lingerie for career women. Starting with a Palo Alto store in 1977, Victoria’s Secret grew into one of the business success stories of the ‘80s. In 1982, Leslie Wexner, chairman of the Limited, bought the company and its catalogue in a deal worth somewhere between $1 million and $4 million. Raymond’s subsequent ventures were unsuccessful. An upscale children’s clothing store went bankrupt and a bookstore, Quimby’s, foundered and was purchased by Disney, but Raymond was not part of the deal. Nevertheless, said Reder, “Roy was twinkly and bouncing around. An entrepreneur has to be an optimist--it’s part of the job description.”
