How do you turn Basquiat into a make-up collection?

Jean-Michel Basquiat has become one of the most imitated – or ripped-off – artists of all time. Almost forty years after his death, social media is still awash with aspiring painters spinning around a canvas, only to reveal a derivative jumble of crowns, scrawled figures and fragmented phrases. This art is often criticised for mindlessly copying and pasting the visual language of an artist whose work was responding to a specific context – the New York art world of the 1980s – and his own experiences as a young Black man. Much like Keith Haring, his style has become instantly recognisable and, in turn, easily reduced to cliché.

So how do you honour an artist’s legacy without simply replicating what came before – or turning it into another marketable aesthetic? It’s a question MAC Global Creative Director Nicola Formichetti had in mind when creating the brand’s new Basquiat collection, developed alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat’s family.

“Basquiat built an entire visual language from colour, crowns, words, repetition and symbols – almost like a code,” explains Formichetti. Some of those references appear directly in the collection’s packaging and colour palette. But Formichetti argues that the more meaningful translation lies in how the make-up can be used, rather than how closely it reproduces Basquiat’s imagery.

“The goal was to translate his process – layering, texture, interruption and unexpected colour – into the formulas themselves,” he says. “It is an artist’s kit for the face: paint-like liquids, chalk-inspired powders, loose pigments, lipsticks and professional tools that can be mixed and used in many different ways. It can be layered, smudged, crossed out, intensified or left deliberately unfinished.”

It was that same approach to creativity that drew Formichetti to Basquiat. “What excited me most was his refusal to separate disciplines or clean up the process,” he says. “Painting, language, history, music and the energy of the street could all exist at once.” This is part of what has kept his work feeling so current decades later. “Young people recognise when someone has created from a place of real urgency and refused to dilute their identity,” says Formichetti. “Basquiat built a language entirely his own from fragments, symbols, music, history and the street – the same kind of sampling and remixing that still drives culture now.”

That way of thinking feels familiar in Formichetti’s own career, which has long moved between disciplines. “I have never really thought in categories,” he says. “I am drawn to the space where fashion, music, art and beauty collide, because that is usually where culture is being made.” His influences are just as wide-ranging, with hardware stores among the more unexpected places where he finds beauty: “I love paint charts, grease pencils, masking tape, industrial brushes and steel toolboxes. Everything is designed for function, but there is a raw beauty in it.”

This appreciation of the imperfect has also shaped the way he approaches make-up. “I would happily retire the idea that every face needs to be perfected or made conventionally beautiful,” he says. “Make-up can conceal if you want it to, but it can also reveal, exaggerate, disrupt, invent or simply make you feel more like yourself.”

If the internet’s distaste towards Basquiat clones is proof that imitation only gets you so far, MAC’s new collection shows that legacy is best when honoured through interpretation. “I never imagined one prescribed ‘Basquiat look,’” Formichetti says. “I see an art student wearing a single flash of blue, a club kid covering their eyes in black paint, a make-up artist mixing pigments backstage, or someone who usually wears almost nothing adding one small mark of gold.” For MAC, that means giving people the tools to create and letting them decide what comes next.