How Pat McGrath Transformed Your Favorite Celebrities for Vogue World 2025

When actor Julia Garner arrived at Los Angeles’s Paramount Pictures lot for her 2 p.m. Vogue World: Hollywood call time, she was the bleach blonde, pixied Julia Garner that we all know and love. But after she spent a few hours in Building 7—the sound stage designated as a glam hub for the day—and quite a few layers of Pat McGrath Labs, she was now Julia Garner playing Marie Antoinette. It was the stuff of movie magic.

“To me, Hollywood has always meant fantasy,” Vogue World’s lead makeup artist, the one and only Pat McGrath, told me backstage during a short break from winging liners, powdering foreheads, and okay-ing faces. “It’s the stuff of dreams. It’s the past, it’s the future, and it’s so much more to come.”

Her assignment for Vogue World was no small feat: Create signature makeup looks for each of the models and celebrities that would appear on the runway. The show was divided into seven thematic acts (Hollywood Glamour, The Renegades, Historical Heroines, Summer of Love, Avant-Garde, Afrofuturism, and New World), each inspired by a film. To get the job done, McGrath says, she brought 50 makeup artists out to Los Angeles with her to do the makeup of the more than 200 people who graced the runway.

“This really feels like a reunion of sorts,” McGrath said of the backstage get-together. She pointed out some of her past Met Gala collaborators like Jeremy Pope and Elizabeth Debicki, and while we were chatting, Cara Delevigne came up to the table to get McGrath’s seal of approval on her Summer of Love-section beauty look. “I haven’t worked with Jeff Goldblum since we were at Prada a few shows ago!”