Getting backstage at Vogue World 2026: Milano is about as easy as it is at the Met Gala. In other words: it’s not! And securing some one-on-one time with fashion’s favourite make-up artist Dame Pat McGrath as she and her team prep a cast of over 300 models, dancers, actors, skateboarders, musicians and more? Well, that is another level of challenging.

Over here, Iris Law checks to see if her angelic, sparkling gaze is good to go (everyone loves it!) and over there, Vittoria Ceretti is barefaced and ready to be transformed. “Now we know we’re at the last few girls and we’re doing very well,” McGrath tells me as she makes her way through the rows of glam tables a couple of hours before curtain call.

Inside the Palazzo Giureconsulti, models in black La Perla robes tap-tap-tap on their phones with nail artist Eri Narita’s rainbow of Italian manicures, as McGrath and team create a symphony of make-up looks to illustrate the many acts of Vogue World: Milano celebrating Italian craft and innovation. And who better to do it than the Dame herself, who’s been handcrafting innovative beauty looks for many of the houses we’re celebrating, from Versace to Valentino? Down the historic hall, hair artist Cyndia Harvey is busy wrapping low ponytails and slicking buns to support the vision.

Photographed by Sofi Adams

Photographed by Sofi Adams

“It felt like we were really travelling through all of the eras of Italian creativity and each one has its own beauty language – we began with luminosity,” McGrath says of playing off of the “richness of the fabric” and textiles in the first act, the Artisans. Models including Mariacarla Boscono and Fei Fei Sun wear this Renaissance-inspired beauty “with a lovely cheek, beautiful pale eyelids and little stains on the lips”, says McGrath. “Very romantic, but just exquisite.”

For the second act, the Industrial Revolution, the fashion went grey, and the beauty followed. “It’s a lot of suiting,” McGrath says of the wardrobe that Adriana Lima and actor Adria Arjona will stroll the Galleria in. “What we’ve played with is the levels of smoky eyes,” she says, with looks ranging from “really, really strong blacks” to sooty eyes and dark lips. “Some girls have both, some girls have just an eye and some girls will have just a lip. It’s very gorgeous.”

A table across from us is dedicated entirely to an entire colour spectrum of sparkling flecks and pigments laid out and meticulously labelled in tiny cups, and I find it hard not to reach out and touch them. Italian cinema and La Dolce Vita inspired the third act, embodied by Imaan Hammam’s bedazzled Versace Vogue catsuit and Jennifer Lopez’s sparkling strapless Dolce & Gabbana dress. “There are a lot of really strong, bold patterns, and what we’ve done is make our own rebellious wing,” says McGrath of tapping into her own archives of purple, pink, gold and baby blue glitters to create a “beautiful colour-blocked eye, very, very strong, very sharp” for the more colourful looks. I press her on her archival glitter collection on display. “I’ve got ones from the year 2000 all the way back to the ’90s,” she reveals. “Glitters that were used in some very iconic shows – and they’re back.”

For the “cinematic beauties” in the more tonal looks, “we’ve done a gorgeous eye and a little structure with an eyeliner, then we’ve got different levels of lips ranging from burgundies to reds and nudes.” It’s a much more surprising range as the show goes on to the fourth act, the Age of Intelligence, where MGK strolls past model Victoria Fawole wrapped in her blue quilted Moncler x Pierpaolo Piccioli and matching mouth. “It’s all about a colour pop on the lips: purples, blues, navy blues, acid oranges – a real smorgasbord of colour,” McGrath laughs.

I get a taste of the making of the fifth and final act, the Imagination Age, as McGrath instructs one of her team members to take “just a little bit” of silver glitter and apply it to a model’s lid like a fingerprint. “What we’ve done is created almost like a doll’s eye, an otherworldly eye, white lashes, white and beautiful grey-browns around the eyes, lots of beautiful sparkle and perfect skin stains on the lips,” McGrath says. “It’s another world. Dreamy.”

And it truly is a dream world to see it all in motion, every cup of sparkle and trunk of treasures. How many suitcases of beauty products did she travel with this year, I wonder, knowing the lore that for past Vogue Worlds it was in the hundreds. “For this one, it was 30,” she says. “Travelling light!” I cry. “Yes, we were backpacking,” McGrath says with a laugh. “We were being very streamlined.”

Photographed by Sofi Adams