BULLET POINTS

Vanities/Beauty

A signature lipstick wears like a well-cut uniform: standard-issue, with flair. This spring, why not expand the ranks?

Laura Regensdorf

Before Wayne Thiebaud began painting pie slices and lollipops in his now iconic Pop pastels, he sharpened his pen in the postwar years as a commercial illustrator. "We often had lipstick ads to make, and you had to draw them quickly, with a kind of advertising Esperanto visual language," the 98-year-old says brightly, speaking by phone from Sacramento, after a morning round of tennis. For an artist drawn to commonplace objects, lipstick—like gumball machines, another Thiebaud musehad a candy-colored charm, but it also brimmed with "unlimited potential," he explains. Uncapped, with the pigment twisted up, the tubes resemble cathedral towers; arranged in single file, as in Lipstick Row (1964), they

become soldiers in formation.

But in Thiebaud's vivid lineup, there's no regimented uniformity (as was the case in 1943, when Elizabeth Arden's customblended shade Montezuma Red became the mandated accessory for the Marine Corps Women's Reserve). Instead, his painterly landscape—with "wonderful, soft color globs of fire-engine reds, violets, mauves"—suggests plenty of tools for transformation.

That sums up the season's lipstick proposition: forgo fidelity to a well-worn favorite in favor of an adventurous arsenal. Rodarte's spring show proved that a rose-red lip is perennially in bloom. Bright fuchsia at Chanel beamed 8os-era decadence into the present. Meanwhile,

Maryam Nassir Zadeh, behind

the self-titled label and New York boutique, sent shades of matte lavender, crimson, and raspberry down the runway. "The lipstick color brings out a vibration in the clothing," the designer says, musing on the reverb of her own offbeat signature: MAC'S Snob, a purplish pink straight out of Thiebaud's palette. Zadeh is daydreaming about her ideal warm-weather shades, including an opaque pale coral (she likes lllamasqua's Obey) and a mochabrown nude (see: Charlotte Tilbury's new capsule inspired by 90s supermodels). Why should an everyday lipstick go unnoticed? "The main thing," Thiebaud reminds us, is "to make some drama, even though you're working with a very ordinary subject matter."

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