LIFE of the PARTY

Dance the night away with looks inspired by PARTY MAKEUP of the PAST. Grab BLACK EYELINER and lots of GLITTER, but leave perfection at the door. Here, how to re-create the coolest EYES, LIPS, and FACE for any FESTIVE OCCASION.

- KATIE INTNER

This past year, Charli XCX's Brat album became a cultural movement. Lyrics like "365 party girl" and "club classics"on the heels of the nightlife hiatus since 2020-satiated a desire for midnight dancing, fun with friends, and abandoning responsibilities in a club for a few hours. The devil-may-care idea of Brat became such a success, and even influenced beauty trends, in part due to the nostalgia for an easygoing, somewhat grungy way of dressing up and living in a pre-iPhone era-the origin of modern party makeup. Without knowing it, Charli XCX and her flock of club rats gave us all permission to wear delightfully messy smoky eyes and pounds of glitter.

"After years of striving for perfection-from block eyebrows to cut creases in the 2010s-and then doing the minimalistic clean-girl aesthetic more recently, party makeup returning is the pendulum naturally swinging the other way," says makeup artist Troy Surratt, founder of Surratt Beauty. "Makeup for a fun night out should look lived-in and reminiscent of how it would appear the morning after."

Whether you're speaking with makeup artists or just scrolling TikTok or Instagram, the same reference image comes up again and again: an off-duty Kate Moss from the '90s with a cigarette pressed between her youthful, just-bitten lips and kohl-rimmed eyes with just a hint of sparkle. Fellow party girls emulated and remixed Moss's look, including nightlife perennial Paris Hilton for her memorable 21st-birthday look in 2002, featuring sooty eyeshadow and a nude frosty lip. "I did my makeup myself that night, and my inspiration was Kate Moss's smoky eye," Hilton says. "She was my style icon, and I wanted a look that was both bold and iconic for my 21st."