Making Faces
Allure|October 2019
THE NEW AUTOGRAPH IS A SELFIE WITH YOUR FAVORITE STAR—AND THERE’S NO BETTER PLACE TO GET THAT SHOT THAN MADAME TUSSAUDS. BRENNAN KILBANE TAKES A TOUR THROUGH THE UNCANNY VALLEY.
Brennan Kilbane
Making Faces

It was lunchtime in Paris, 1793, when the gravediggers tasked with keeping watch over Marie Antoinette’s guillotined corpse decided to take a break, giving Marie Grosholtz a brief but valuable window of time to take a wax imprint of the late queen’s head. Before photography, death masks were used as records of a person’s likeness for bust- or statue-making purposes, and during la Révolution, the busts of slain nobles were displayed as totems of the people’s victory. (Grosholtz, a talented wax artisan, was attempting to score points with the proletariat after almost nine years living at Versailles, teaching sculpting to princesses.) Within the next decade, Grosholtz would marry, become Marie Tussaud, and move to London, where she’d exhibit her growing collection of macabre wax sculptures to an eager public for profit.

Two hundred years later, her dazzling empire sprawls across four continents and 23 cities, and we continue to benefit from the spoils of the French Revolution by having the opportunity to appear in photos next to note-perfect depictions of celebrities.

This is how I meet Priyanka Chopra Jonas, tilting her head ever so slightly backward and dangling her fingers a few inches from her mouth as if about to eat them like French fries. This is the pose Chopra Jonas had insisted on when her Madame Tussauds wax sculpture was being rendered months earlier, and now it is the pose she is trapped in for eternity. The deft artisans at Tussauds will age it as deemed necessary, carving crow’s-feet when they come home to roost, shading the skin to replicate the merciless passage of time. If Chopra Jonas tattoos the Pittsburgh Steelers logo on her cheek, there will be somebody standing by to carefully etch it into the wax record.

This story is from the October 2019 edition of Allure.

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This story is from the October 2019 edition of Allure.

Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.