Lucy Bridge Is The Make-Up Maverick Bringing Sexy Back

There was plenty to talk about at Haider Ackermann’s Tom Ford spring/summer 2027 show in Paris earlier this month. The clothes – decadent, minimal, sharp lines, barely there – felt like a return to the Tom Ford of the 1990s. The seductive casting – Anok, Alex Consani, Kristen McMenamy… And of course, the make-up. There were impossibly glassy bright red lips, dark, deliberately unsettling eyes, bleached brows… After seasons of an almost religious devotion to looking as though one has made no effort whatsoever, this was make-up that was gloriously, unapologetically there. Sexy, sophisticated and in Ackermann’s words, “dangerous”. And the woman largely responsible for it? Lucy Bridge: the British make-up artist who, alongside Ackermann, has become instrumental in redefining the beauty identity of one of fashion’s most influential houses.

“It’s the first time he’s ever used the word ‘sexy’,” Bridge tells me of Ackermann’s beauty brief when we meet backstage in Paris. “It’s always ‘elegant’, ‘seductive’...” But this season, he wanted something altogether more provocative. “He was like, ‘It needs to be bitchy, sexy.’” And that wasn’t all, recounts Bridge with a laugh. “He also said, ‘I want a disturbing eyeshadow.’ And I was like, ‘Okay, what does that mean?’”

Evidently, she figured it out. The result was a myriad of show looks that managed to be both outrageously glamorous and just that little bit subversive. The acclaim from fashion and beauty  insiders was immediate. Among the many messages Bridge received after the show, one from a fellow make-up artist particularly resonated. “He was like, ‘You’ve really nailed the Tom Ford beauty formula.’” Bridge was delighted. “I just love that I’ve created that reaction, that people have had a  really strong and positive reaction to the beauty,” she says. “It’s honestly everything that I could have ever dreamed of.”

Not that she’s had much time to savour the response. When I hear from Bridge a few days after the show, she’s already in Tokyo, suffering from terrible jet lag and working with a schedule that has been, in her words, “absolutely loco”.  Still, having gone straight from Paris Fashion Week to Japan, where she’s hosting Tom Ford masterclasses and recreating the smoky eyes that caused such a stir on the runway, has not dampened her enthusiasm; she is still riding the high of the show.

“It’s always such an emotional feeling. The tension backstage as the models are walking out and everyone’s gasping and looking at the screen… Just seeing Haider so visibly happy and excited and glad that everything’s gone well,” she tells me. “It’s a really special moment. It always takes a little bit of time to come down from the high.”

A few weeks before the Paris show, Bridge and I met at a café near Hoxton station in London. She  spends an extraordinary amount of time in Paris, (“Petit pois,” she jokes when I ask how fluent her French is. “Absolutely zero.”) but London remains home. Warm, funny and wonderfully candid, she has none of the studied mystique one might expect from someone whose work is so visually arresting. She talks animatedly about her career, her creative influences and her relationship with Ackermann. “I feel like a lot of designers get scared of make-up,” she tells me. “They don’t want to overshine the clothing.” Ackermann, however, sees things differently. “He really cares about the make-up, and he really cares about the storytelling. He wants to really push it in the most amazing direction.” Bridge certainly doesn’t need much encouragement. Her work is bold, expressive and often brilliantly subversive. There are exaggerated lashes, graphic shapes, unexpected colours and faces that can look simultaneously beautiful and slightly otherworldly. It is a distinctive aesthetic, but one that has evolved organically over almost two decades.

Her fascination with beauty began as a child growing up in a tiny village near Preston, Lancashire. “We didn’t even have a corner shop,” she laughs. “You’d have to get in a car to do anything.” Her mother, however, brought a considerable amount of glamour into their home. “She had old magazines from the ’80s lying around, all the Vogues… She never, ever, ever left the house without her make-up on,” Bridge recalls. “I was just in awe of her. I was always rifling through her make-up bag, ruining all of her Dior and Chanel.” By the age of 12, she had already decided on her future, already experimenting with her appearance. “I was dyeing my hair different colors every week. I was, like, piercing everywhere. My teachers were going crazy,” she recalls, with a chuckle.

After studying hair and make-up in Manchester, she moved to London at age 20, settling in Shoreditch during its gloriously anarchic late-Noughties heyday. Living above the George and Dragon on Hackney Road, she immersed herself in the queer club scene, frequenting nights such as Boombox and Pony Step. “I used to wear crazy make-up,” she says. “I just felt really alive when I came to London.” It was a period of experimentation and self-invention, when make-up was less about enhancing conventional beauty than creating an entirely new identity, and Bridge embraced it wholeheartedly. And then, in 2009, came an encounter that would change everything.

She was travelling on a London bus, wearing one of her more flamboyant creations, when she noticed two men staring at her. Being what she describes as a “forthright northerner”, she was on the verge of confronting them. “I was so close to going, ‘What the fuck are you looking at?’” she says with a laugh. Fortunately, she thought better of it. One of the men handed her a note as they were getting off the bus. It was the fashion photographer Tim Walker. He told her he’d be interested in photographing her. Bridge could scarcely believe it. “I called my mum and I was, like, screaming down the phone, being like, ‘Tim Walker’s just handed me a fucking note. I can’t believe it.’” The encounter led to a 10-page story in i-D, photographed by Walker and styled by Jacob K, with whom Bridge still works. Walker has remained an important figure throughout her career. “I always call him my fairy godfather.”

At the time, Bridge was working part-time on the MAC counter at Westfield in Shepherd’s Bush, while developing her portfolio through editorials and test shoots. Eventually, she approached the agency Jed Root, hoping to assist make-up artist Maxine Leonard, whose work she admired. Instead, the agency signed her as an artist in her own right.

“I had a bit of a buzz around me because of the Tim Walker thing,” she recalls. It meant she largely bypassed the traditional route of spending years assisting an established make-up artist. “I’ve kind of learnt from my own mistakes,” she says. “And I think that’s quite important.” It’s this  independence, she believes, that allowed her to develop her own visual language. Her influences are wonderfully eclectic. “A lot of it comes from art,” she says. “Old fashion images, old make-up images, traveling, landscapes. Honestly, it can come from anywhere.” Over the years, she has amassed an extraordinary visual archive. “I have a database on my iPad. It’s got about 60,000 images. I’m not even joking. And they’re all in folders.” Which her assistants, she laughs, are rather intimidated by. But it is an invaluable creative resource. “When I’m on set and an idea changes, I can go into my visual library and pull out things.”

It is this approach to colour, character and storytelling that has made her such a natural collaborator for Ackermann. Their relationship began with his collaboration with Fila in Manchester, followed by his guest couture collection for Jean Paul Gaultier, a show Bridge still considers a career highlight. “We did so many different looks. We only had one test day. But everything just fit together so beautifully,” she recalls. Ackermann wanted “toxic tones, exaggerated lashes, broken lashes”. So when Ackermann moved to Tom Ford, he brought Bridge with him. Her appointment as the house’s first global make-up artist marked a significant new chapter. Their collaboration has already produced some of fashion’s most compelling beauty moments, and their partnership has also extended into product development: Bridge has been creating custom shades for Tom Ford, translating the colours and textures of the runway into cosmetics that women can wear beyond it. The result, she says, is an amalgamation of  “Tom Ford sophistication” with “a Haider and Lucy colour touch”.

There is something particularly poignant about Bridge’s relationship with the house today. Her mother was an enormous admirer of Tom Ford. “She thought he was the sexiest man on the planet,” Bridge laughs, recalling her mother’s affection for his fragrances. “It just feels like really the right house. I couldn’t honestly see myself anywhere else.” Sadly, her mother died suddenly in January, a loss that has made this period of Bridge’s life particularly emotional. Her mother’s influence is central to her new book, Colour Mode, a fully independent personal project conceived in 2023 with the graphic designer Veronica Ditting – years before there was even talk of an appointment at Tom Ford. Rather than compiling a conventional retrospective, the pair spent three and a half years commissioning almost entirely new photography, working with an extraordinary roster of collaborators including Walker, Paolo Roversi, Carlijn Jacobs and Luis Alberto Rodriguez. Walker encouraged Bridge to include a small archive section tracing her creative development and the book is dedicated to her mother. “That was really important,” says Bridge. “Because it all started with her.”

Post-Tom Ford masterclass in Japan, Bridge is looking forward to a few days off. There will be shopping, a little sightseeing and the chance to soak up some Japanese culture before the next round of work begins. Later this month, she will head to New York for more Tom Ford masterclasses. But Ackermann is already thinking about next season. “He said his brain is already ticking with ideas,” she tells me. “I don’t know what these are yet, but I’m very intrigued to find out.” And we wait with bated breath.