Beautiful people, beautiful collaborations in new i-D film

Beauty is a slippery notion – it’s scruffy for some, preened and polished for another, punk for someone else. It can be all these things together, shaped and subverted by subcultures – a fact that the people over at iD know more than most. Examining this idea of the beauty of subcultures and merging life and art, a new project from iD, Beautiful Collaborations , draws us into the world of the stylists and makeup artists that create punks, grungy girls and boys and ravers from their beautiful blank canvases. The Microsoft HP Spectrex360 tablet helped to create the film, which takes us from the 80s to the present day through the wild makeup, clothes and personalities of the New Romantics through to “Seapunks” (a new one on us, too).

The gorgeous looks are thanks to the collaboration between makeup artist Ralph Siciliano and directors Santiao & Mauricio (hence the Beautiful Collaborations of the title), and we’ve been treated to a whole bunch of gorgeous behind-the-scenes images, showing how even in the throes of off-the-cuff creativity artists often rely on smart, slick little bits of tech.

Talking us through the shoot in moody chiaroscuro, we see all the beautiful people goofing about and lazing around before a woozy camera swoop draws us into the heart of the “vision.” The aforementioned beauties are a mix of professional models (including Molly Bair, Fernanda Ly, Lili Sumner and Hari Nef) and “real people,” in the words of the director, cast through Instagram.

“Everyone has something special, something that’s about their personality,” the directors say. It’s the music that unites them, and indeed, it’s the music that formed the subcultures they dress in homage to throughout the film. While it makes for a hedonistic, glorious, holistic entity; we see that for that vision to be realised it takes one hell of a team and one hell of a lot of technical goings on. But for all the subtle shots of the aforementioned Microsoft tablet, when something looks this sumptuous and this much fun, we don’t mind too much. And THOSE LASERS!