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"  Two days before his fall show, Alexander McQueen is standing in his temporary Paris HQ looking\u2014with his shorn head, baggy jeans, and Abercrombie &amp;amp;amp; Fitch sweatshirt\u2014more like a Mall of America escapee than fashion&amp;#039;s one-time enfant terrible. Eyeballing a stalklike model in a baroque, cross-festooned black ball gown, he picks up the hem of the dress in one hand and, using the foot-long shears in his other, slits its billowing, thousand-yard skirt straight up the middle. He grabs a bolt of iridescent green taffeta, rolls it out on the floor, hacks off a swath, and deftly pins it to form an underskirt. The entire transformation takes three, maybe five, minutes, after which the designer stands back, mops his brow, and moves on.  A rather more labored metamorphosis is taking place on the other side of the room, where makeup artist Charlotte Tilbury painstakingly traces a hard black arc of eyeliner across the brow of lanky, baby-faced English model Rebecca Chandler. Tilbury is test-driving the look that will appear on the runway in 48 hours, one based on a long and circuitous list of McQueen&amp;#039;s fall inspirations\u2014starting with the Salem witch trials (where, apparently, some of his own ancestors were accused), wandering into paganism, veering back to ancient Egypt, and, makeup-wise at least, somehow landing at Elizabeth Taylor&amp;#039;s sphinxy, mesmerizing look in 1963&amp;#039;s Cleopatra. &amp;quot;Lee is more specific in terms of makeup direction than any other designer,&amp;quot; Tilbury says, using McQueen&amp;#039;s inner-circle moniker.  Indeed. Once she gets the eye&amp;#039;s hexagonal shape just so and mixes up the exact Liz-like shade of aquamarine shadow, Tilbury calls McQueen over. He instantly redirects a false eyelash and nixes the shimmer on the lids. &amp;quot;More green. More vibrant. More dense,&amp;quot; he says thoughtfully. &amp;quot;Way more.&amp;quot; He requests a pink-lidded variation, pointing to the rosy wording on an Evian bottle. &amp;quot;Like that, but more...&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Pepto-Bismol?&amp;quot; someone suggests.  &amp;quot;Right. Pepto-Bismol,&amp;quot; he says.  At this, a small group of observers huddles up. It&amp;#039;s a team from M.A.C, which is planning to turn the runway look\u2014sight hitherto unseen\u2014into a limited-edition makeup collection (the result lands on counters this month). Will eye shadow inspired by a cartoonishly pink digestive aid test their resolve? Gordon Espinet, a backstage aficionado and M.A.C&amp;#039;s vice president of makeup artistry, remains undaunted. &amp;quot;McQueen hates subtlety, and he knows a lot about makeup,&amp;quot; Espinet says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s about taking it to the next level.&amp;quot; Besides, he laughs, &amp;quot;Try and control Alexander McQueen? Whatever!&amp;quot;  Radical runway looks inspire the beauty industry the same way avant-garde designers propel fashion toward its future. To wit: In the &amp;#039;90s, it was hard to imagine anything even vaguely wearable about the actual mud and paint that hairstylist Julien d&amp;#039;Ys used in sculptural coifs at Chanel and John Galliano\u2014but, before long, texturizing pomades and mattifying hair sprays began to work their way into the bathroom cabinets of women everywhere. Thus, a Pepto-pink eye shadow on the runway could potentially spark a flood of gentler imitators on cosmetic counters around the world.  Besides, when you&amp;#039;re dealing with a man who has been known to shower his catwalk with golden rain or turn models into life-size chess pieces, you consider yourself lucky when he uses traditional makeup to begin with. After all, M.A.C could have been looking at a counter full of transparent theatrical tape and white concealer (like those McQueen used for the fall 2001 season, when the models couldn&amp;#039;t even move their mouths to speak\u2014rumor has it that Karolina Kurkova almost lost an eyelid to a particularly adhesive dab of spirit gum). For McQueen, hair and makeup aren&amp;#039;t icing on the cake; they&amp;#039;re part of his designs from the moment he sketches them\u2014as integral to his grand spectacles as the clothes themselves. &amp;quot;Some people do shows with no hair and makeup\u2014what&amp;#039;s the point in that?&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;We already know what we really look like in clothes. We want the fantasy.&amp;quot;  Skip forward two days, to the backstage area at a theater in the massive Parc de la Villette, 45 minutes outside of central Paris, where &amp;quot;fantasy&amp;quot; is careening toward &amp;quot;nightmare.&amp;quot; Countless models are wandering around in various stages of gravity-defying coiffure, courtesy of legendary headsman Eugene Souleiman. (&amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s Alien meets Predator, a really bizarre silhouette, with a kind of Cleopatra-slash-Joan-of-Arc-y front,&amp;quot; Souleiman explains, in that way only hairstylists can. &amp;quot;Lee sees the beauty in darkness.&amp;quot;)  Meanwhile, Tilbury is commanding her team like an all-business British Stevie Nicks. The Pepto, she reports, has been ditched, as of a phone call from McQueen that afternoon. All in a day&amp;#039;s work. &amp;quot;Oh, this one&amp;#039;s always a real show. It&amp;#039;s high drama, so of course there&amp;#039;s more backstage tension,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;Really gets the adrenaline pumping.&amp;quot;  Chandler, the soft-spoken novice, who has never before walked a runway, looks like an outtake from Goldfinger. She&amp;#039;s standing in an anteroom wearing next to nothing while three people smother her in head-to-toe gold pigment. Is she scared? &amp;quot;Terrified,&amp;quot; she confesses. &amp;quot;But, I mean...it&amp;#039;s McQueen.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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