• Dame Pat McGrath, Cosmetics Creative Director at Louis Vuitton, designed the make-up for the Louis Vuitton Cruise 2027 show around the refinement of Paris and the downtown cool of 1970s New York.

• The look is naturally elegant and slightly raw: softly contoured eyes set against a blurred, stained lip in nude, berry, and red tones.

• Eyes were built with LV Ombre 150 Beige Memento and LV Ombres 896 Monogram Rouge; lips used LV Baume 010 Nude Poetry and LV Crayon 896 Monogram Rouge.

• LV Crayon 896 Monogram Rouge is a new launch, available June 25.

A tale of two cities, told on the face. For the Louis Vuitton Cruise 2027 show, Dame Pat McGrath, Cosmetics Creative Director at Louis Vuitton, set out to capture both the refinement of Paris and the downtown cool of New York in the 1970s with a make-up look the house describes as naturally elegant and slightly raw.

The brief came from the collection itself. For Cruise 2027, Nicolas Ghesquière forges connection between the distinct identities and realities of Paris and New York, and between the cities within that city, its dichotomies and dualities. McGrath's contribution translates that duality into the oldest language in beauty: polish on one feature, instinct on another.

Louis Vuitton's framing of New York explains the look's temperament. The city, in the house's telling, has always been comprised of multiple identities, divergent cultures and experiences fused. Never singular, it is an amalgamation, uptown and downtown, past and future, a place of alternate sensibilities and simultaneous attitudes. Beautiful contradiction, perfect differences.

That is a fashion thesis, but it is also a workable beauty direction. A face that is both refined and raw, finished and undone, holds the same tension Ghesquière built into the clothes. McGrath's 70s reference sharpens it further, reaching for the decade when downtown New York style defined cool against Parisian polish.

The emphasis of the look sits on the eyes, with softly contoured lids built from two shades: LV Ombre 150 Beige Memento and LV Ombres 896 Monogram Rouge. The pairing keeps the contouring soft rather than graphic, a wash of warmth and structure that reads as composed without tipping into severity.

This is the Paris half of the equation, precision applied quietly. The lid work gives the look its sophistication and provides the counterweight for what happens below.

The shade choices do their own storytelling. Beige Memento supplies the neutral architecture, the kind of tone that shapes a lid without declaring itself, while Monogram Rouge brings the warmth that keeps the contour from going cold. Together they produce an eye that photographs as finished and reads in person as effortless, which is precisely the balance the brief demanded.

Against the composed eye, McGrath set a more instinctive lip: blurred, almost perfectly stained, in nude, berry, and red tones. The products behind it are LV Baume 010 Nude Poetry and LV Crayon 896 Monogram Rouge, worked into the lips rather than drawn onto them.

The blurred, stained finish is the look's clearest 70s gesture, color that appears lived-in rather than applied, as if the evening were already half over. It is the downtown answer to the uptown eye, and the contrast between the two is the whole idea.

The range of tones matters too. Nude, berry, and red is not one lip but a spectrum, which gave the show's faces variation within a single direction. On the runway, that reads as individuality rather than uniform; at home, it means the look adapts to the wearer rather than demanding a single shade.

Three of the four references come from the existing Louis Vuitton cosmetics line. The fourth, LV Crayon 896 Monogram Rouge, is a new launch, available June 25. For readers who want the runway version at home, the formula is straightforward: soft contour through the lid in Beige Memento and Monogram Rouge, then a stain of Nude Poetry and the Crayon pressed into the lips until the edges blur.

The shade numbering tells its own story. Both the Ombres and the new Crayon share the 896 Monogram Rouge designation, which means the eye and the lip draw from the same color family even as their finishes diverge. That coherence is what keeps a deliberately raw lip from reading as unfinished; the look holds together because its warmth does.

The timing gives the launch a natural runway-to-counter arc. The show look arrives first as imagery, then as product, with the new Crayon landing late in June while the season it was made for is still in full swing.

Runway beauty often functions as theater, designed to read from the last row. This look runs the other direction. Naturally elegant and slightly raw is a wearable instruction, and with the products named shade for shade, the Cruise 2027 face may prove as portable as the collection it accompanied.