THE FACE PAINTER.

Pat McGrath, a British makeup artist--the most powerful black woman in fashion who is not a model (and not an Irish man, as some of her early clients supposed)--flew to Paris in mid-January with three assistants and fifteen seventy-pound duffelbags that she takes everywhere. (One is marked "Everyday Bag”; another says "Lips”; and six bags hold scores of large-format art books--Fellini, Otto Dix, Andre Kertesz, "Ritual Art of India”). She had been booked to make up the runway models for the couture shows of Christian Dior, Yohji Yamamoto, and Valentino. On the day she arrived, she was driven to a preparatory meeting with John Galliano, to learn about the clothes he had designed for Christian Dior. "On the way, in the van, I'm always paranoid that I'm not going to be able to think of something,"McGrath said. "And then I get there, and, you know, something always happens, because the clothes are so beautiful. It stops being 'What on earth can I do?'--because they've already brought you the world."She was dressed all in black: a black untucked shirt worn over black pants, and a black headband pulling back shoulder-length hair. Her skin had the sheen of thorough moisturization, but she was wearing no lipstick.

In the Dior offices, Galliano described his collection, using references to the Peking Opera, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and the late Queen Mother. He showed McGrath scrapbooks filled with images collected on a recent trip to the Far East. Then McGrath and her assistants huddled in a corner and, in a flurry of productivity, began imagining makeup ideas, or "looks”--putting them first on paper, and then on the faces of four borrowed models. The first look was done in forty minutes. McGrath photographed it, and an assistant drew it and annotated it for her archives.

While McGrath is known for bringing a light touch to photo shoots, and for avoiding what she is known to call the "suede face"of heavy makeup (she once made Oprah Winfrey weep with happiness by avoiding it), her runway style is more elaborate. For Dior, she returned three times over three days, to produce about eighty looks. These included Chinese characters written on a model's face; an op-art felt target stuck to the center of a model's forehead; feather eyelashes; white makeup reaching from the chin to halfway up the cheek, directly inspired by a photograph of a half-made-up geisha in one of McGrath's bags; eyes covered with black masking tape (with pinpricks to allow the model to see); a mask of sequins, each placed by hand ("In a way, you're almost ...