Vogue World Milano Spotlights Renaissance Beauty and Italian Craft

Vogue World: Milano turned Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II into a five-act celebration of Italian craft on September 22, pairing Milan Fashion Week with a beauty story that stretched from Renaissance luminosity to archival glitter and futurist color, Vogue reported. Dame Pat McGrath led makeup for a cast of more than 300 models, dancers and performers, detailing the era-by-era looks in a separate Vogue backstage interview published September 23.

The show’s theme centered on “craftsmanship and the human touch” in an age of technology. Francesca Ragazzi, Vogue Italia’s head of editorial content, said the event offered a global stage for Made in Italy as a story of genius and craft “in the era of artificial intelligence.” Anna Wintour framed the Galleria — between La Scala and the Duomo — as the ideal Milanese meeting point of heritage and modernity.

Acts moved from The Artisanal Revolution through Industrial and Made in Italy chapters into The Age of Intelligence and The Imagination Revolution. McGrath told Vogue the first act began with luminosity: “a lovely cheek, beautiful pale eyelids, and little stains on the lips” — romantic Renaissance-coded beauty worn by models including Mariacarla Boscono and Fei Fei Sun. For the gray-suited Industrial Revolution looks, she worked levels of smoky eyes from strong blacks to sooty lids and dark lips.

La Dolce Vita-inspired Made in Italy moments brought “rebellious” color-blocked wings drawn from McGrath’s own archives of purple, pink, gold and baby blue glitter dating to the 1990s and 2000s. “Glitters that were used in some very iconic shows — and they’re back,” she said. The Age of Intelligence pushed lip color pops in purples, blues, navy and acid orange, while the closing Imagination chapter used silver glitter fingerprint lids, white lashes, gray-brown eye structure and stained lips for a doll-like, otherworldly finish.

Hair lead Cyndia Harvey and nail artist Eri Narita rounded out the glam department, with Narita’s Italian-manicure spectrum visible backstage at Palazzo Giureconsulti as models waited in La Perla robes. Vogue’s overview also credited creative director Juan Costa Paz, fashion lead Lady Amanda Harlech, choreographer Charm La’Donna and a deep production bench spanning music, lighting and extended cast styling.

The runway mixed supermodel generations with entertainment names: Gigi Hadid opened; Jennifer Lopez, Cardi B, MGK, Madelyn Cline and Iris Law walked; Alicia Keys closed singing Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” in a custom hand-painted Francesco Risso look. Front row spanned Miuccia Prada, Donatella Versace, Demna, Raf Simons and other house heads alongside actors and musicians from Hunter Schafer to Pamela Anderson.

Charity remained central. Vogue said the Milano edition supports revitalizing the Quarto Oggiaro Library in northwestern Milan with an investment of at least €2 million for a new center promoting fashion, music and artistic talent. City cultural officials cast the project as neighborhood-scale cultural infrastructure beyond Milan’s historic center.

Presenting sponsors included ALO, eBay, Eli Lilly and Company, and Meta Glasses, with additional support from FedEx and OpenAI. Select fashion and accessories were sourced from eBay as Vogue’s official vintage partner — a detail that tied the craftsmanship theme to circular shopping as well as atelier work.

For Lifestyle readers who followed McGrath’s recent commercial beauty news via the Pandora collaboration, Milano underscores a different register: live event beauty as cultural storytelling rather than product drop. McGrath joked she traveled with only 30 trunks this year — “backpacking” after past Vogue Worlds that required hundreds — a streamlined kit that still spanned Renaissance blush to Y2K glitter.

A livestream directed by Becky Garner is available for rewatch, Vogue noted, extending the Galleria spectacle beyond the front row. Between the charitable library pledge, the five-act craft narrative, and McGrath’s era-hopping makeup map, Vogue World: Milano positioned Italian beauty less as a single trend and more as a living archive audiences can still walk through — glass arcade overhead, glitter cups backstage, and craft framed as a counterweight to fully automated fashion futures.