Emily Schubert

EO

I’ve been thinking about your book, Beauty of the Beast, because while it’s ostensibly about makeup, I don’t think that's actually the subject. I kept coming back to everything else you’ve done, and I realized that collaboration seems to be at the center of your entire practice, it’s paramount. Does that live in the realm of truth for you?

ES

I love that. I actually think that’s true. When I think about makeup, I don’t really think about cosmetics at all. I think about the last detail. By the time I arrive, there are already hundreds of hours of work inside a film. The costumes are finished, the production design is finished, the lighting is ready, and then someone calls “last looks.” That’s where makeup enters. You’re making these tiny adjustments right before the camera rolls, but those adjustments determine whether someone stays inside the story or suddenly notices the performance. If you zoom in on someone’s face and it doesn’t feel like the way that character would actually treat themselves—if their eyebrows are wrong, or their makeup is too heavy, or something doesn’t belong—you lose the illusion. It’s like a bad internet connection. For a second everything gets fuzzy, and the audience comes out of the story. My job is really to prevent that from happening.

EO

Can you talk about what drove you to make the book? What is it about for you?

ES

What’s interesting to me is that there are already so many tutorials online teaching people how to do makeup on themselves. I wasn’t interested in making another version of that. The book is about doing makeup on somebody else. The makeup chair is really a portal. Someone walks into the room as themselves, and when they leave they’re ready to be photographed, filmed, or immortalized as someone else. That’s always been what makeup is to me. The reason I wanted to make the book is because I worry that part of the craft is becoming a lost art. Between CGI, filters, and everyone learning how to do their own makeup online, we’re slowly losing the bedside manner that comes with filmmaking and photography. That’s the thing I wanted to preserve—not products or techniques, but the relationship itself.

EO

“Bedside manner,” is such a beautiful phrase because people usually associate it with medicine, not filmmaking.

ES

I know. But that’s really how I think about it. Bedside manner is about making room for somebody else. When someone sits in the chair, I ask them what they love about their face, what they naturally like to emphasize, what products they use, and whether another makeup artist ever showed them something they’ve carried with them ever since. There’s this incredible exchange of knowledge that happens before you’ve even started working. That’s what I love about doing makeup on another person. You’re not arriving with all the answers. You’re learning how someone already understands themselves, and then the work grows out of that. The relationship comes first; then the makeup follows.

EO

The way you describe this way of working almost sounds like it’s inevitable. But where did it actually come from? When did makeup stop being something you were interested in and become the way you understood making?

ES

I actually started doing makeup in high school. My brother had a friend who went to the New York Film Academy, and I did makeup on all of his projects. I was especially interested in special effects because it felt like another way of building a world. Then, before classes had even started at Wesleyan, I emailed the head of the film department and asked him to forward my information to every senior making a thesis film because I did special effects makeup. It turned out to be this incredible niche because I immediately had something very specific that people needed. By the time I graduated, I’d worked on films all across campus, and those students became my first professional network beyond college. More than anything, it showed me that makeup was a way of entering someone else’s project and helping bring it to life.

EO

What do you think drew you to special effects in particular? Were you looking at other artists, or were you pulling from somewhere else entirely?

ES

A lot of it came from my dad. He’s a retinal surgeon, and he films all of his surgeries, so when I was growing up there were always eye surgeries playing on the television. I remember watching them and wondering how I would recreate them. He was always thinking about lenses, perspective, and looking closely, even if that wasn’t how he would have described it. I think that probably shaped the way I learned to see. Special effects makeup was really just another way of recreating a kind of reality, even if it was a gruesome one.

EO

What made makeup the thing that stayed with you?

ES

Because it felt like the most precise place to enter a film. By the time makeup arrives, everything else has already been built. You’re making one final adjustment before the camera rolls, but that tiny decision can determine whether a character feels believable. Again, the work isn’t about adding more, it’s about making sure nothing breaks the illusion.

EO

Where do you encounter the character in your process? When do you meet them? Is it in the script, in the makeup chair, or is it something you begin to conceptualize before for yourself?

ES

It always begins with the script. That’s the first thing I read because I’m trying to understand who this person is and how they move through the world. A script tells you how somebody behaves in the world, but it doesn’t necessarily tell you what happens when they’re alone. Makeup starts asking a different set of questions. How much time do they spend getting ready? Are they meticulous? Do they forget to look in the mirror? Are they trying to hide something, or emphasize something they already love? Those details usually aren’t written into the screenplay, but they’re still part of the character. Then I want to talk to the director about who they had in mind while they were writing the character because there are usually things that never make it onto the page. But most of the information actually comes from the actor. I spend a lot of time talking to them about who they think the character is because, to me, I’m really just a translator. I’m not interested in imposing my own style onto a character. I’m trying to pull something out of the actor that already exists. Makeup is almost never something you simply place on another person. They have to activate it. Then it’s photographed by somebody else, lit by somebody else, and shaped by everyone else on set. That’s why I’ve never thought of makeup as an isolated practice. It’s always been one part of a much larger collaboration.

EO

That idea of translation feels important because it also explains why your work never really stopped at makeup. You were just finding different ways to participate in the same process.

ES

Makeup was simply the first language I learned. The thing I’ve always loved is storytelling—helping another person’s ideas become more fully themselves. That’s why moving into wardrobe, fabrication, or product design never felt like changing careers. They were all different ways of solving the same problem.

EO

It also explains why your collaborations look the way they do now. From the outside, people see SOPHIE, Matthew Barney, Sean Price Williams, Daniel Lopatin, Charlie Fox—but it seems like the real continuity isn't the people. It’s that you’re always entering someone else’s world while it's still taking shape.

ES

That’s always been the part I’ve loved most. There’s no greater pleasure than talking to somebody who’s completely consumed by an idea. They’re trying to describe a world that only exists in their head, and they’re inviting you into it before anybody else has seen it. It almost feels like they’re blindfolded, reaching out in front of themselves, trying to find the edges of something they can’t quite articulate yet. Sometimes all you can do is ask, “Is this what you mean?” or “Is this what you're feeling?” Those are always the most rewarding collaborations because you’re discovering the work together instead of simply executing a plan.

EO

SOPHIE feels like the clearest example of that because she wasn’t asking you to make a dress. She was trying to figure out who SOPHIE was.

ES

When we met, she was still becoming SOPHIE. She would always say, “I want to be a really classy lady,” and that became the starting point for everything we made together. We’d trade references back and forth, look at fabrics, and little by little this visual language started to emerge. The first time we worked together I was helping with her costume changes between songs. She was wearing this latex look, and I remember saying, “What if the last outfit felt like Carrie at the prom? What if it was just completely red?” She immediately understood what I meant, and from there I started making custom dresses with Coco. None of it felt like costume design in the traditional sense. It felt like helping another person give physical form to an identity that was still taking shape.

EO

That dress has stayed with me. It feels much more like an object than a costume. Can you talk about making it together?

ES

That was completely SOPHIE’s idea. For the cover of Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides, she wanted every track to have its own material and its own reference, so the dress became a way of holding the entire album together. Each fabric corresponded to a different song, and the dress became this single object that contained all of those different worlds at once. She’d studied sculpture, so she naturally thought through materials and structure, but she was also deeply committed to collaboration. She brought in Kieran to develop fabrics for each song, and she trusted everyone she invited into the process. I remember building the bustle out of chicken wire, weaving LED lights through it, wrapping it in PVC, and then covering it with this thin iridescent fabric so the whole skirt seemed to glow from within. I think she brought out the best work in everyone around her because she understood that authorship didn’t have to be solitary.

EO

It’s funny because I don’t think I’d realized this until now, but all of the people you’ve mentioned today are trying to build complete worlds. SOPHIE. Matthew Barney. Sean Price Williams. Dan Colen. Charlie Fox. They’re obviously making very different kinds of work, but they’re all obsessed with creating an internal logic that extends through everything they make.

ES

I think that’s exactly what I’m attracted to. Once someone has built that kind of world, every decision starts making sense because it belongs to the same internal logic. That’s what made working with someone like SOPHIE so exciting. Every material, every reference, every image belonged to the same universe. Matthew works that way. Dan works that way. Charlie works that way. The medium changes, but the commitment is always the same. Those are the people I want to spend my time with because they’re not asking you to decorate an idea. They’re asking you to help discover it.

EO

So where does this way of working actually begin? You knew you wanted to work in film, but you were also moving toward makeup, special effects, architecture, and design all at once. What were you responding to before you had a language for any of it?

ES

When I was a teenager, I wanted to be like Bobbi Brown. I got one of her books for Christmas, and it completely changed the way I thought about beauty. She had studied stage makeup through Emerson’s film program, so I thought, “Oh, I’m going to study film.” I even looked at the stage makeup program at USC. I’m very glad I didn’t do that, but at the time it felt like the clearest path into the world I wanted to enter.

EO

What was the distinction you were making between stage makeup and movie makeup?

ES

Movie makeup is immortal. Once you capture something on film, it exists forever. Theater is beautiful in a completely different way because you feel everyone else in the room, and the performance can change every night. Film is more like catching lightning in a bottle. You’re preparing someone for a single moment that can never happen in exactly the same way again.

EO

What did you think makeup could do that made you want to build your life around it?

ES

I think I really love people. I love sitting with someone and helping them see themselves differently. There’s a moment after I finish someone’s makeup when they look in the mirror, and I try to catch their face before they have time to compose themselves. That moment makes the whole thing worth it to me. It’s the realization that there was more possibility in the way they could look than they had imagined. I could cry thinking about it because it’s so vulnerable. You’re not just showing somebody a new face; you’re giving them another way of seeing themselves again for the first time.

EO

Can you remember a moment when that became particularly clear?

ES

I did makeup for the Pornhub Awards once, and Richard Kern was photographing the twenty-five most popular performers. A lot of them were accustomed to wearing an enormous amount of makeup, so I did this very restrained, no-makeup makeup instead. One of the women looked in the mirror and almost started crying. She said, “I look like a baby. I’ve never seen myself like this before.” That killed me. I wasn’t replacing what was already there. I was drawing out the features she already had and emphasizing the things I thought were already beautiful.

EO

So even then, it wasn’t really about transformation. It was about recognition.

ES

You sit down with someone, notice what’s beautiful about them, and then your job is to amplify those things. That’s what makeup is to me when we’re talking about beauty. It’s also why I love doing weddings for my close friends, even though I don’t really do them professionally. You meet both families, you meet the mothers, and you understand the whole emotional structure of the wedding before the ceremony has even happened. By the time everyone walks down the aisle, I feel like I’ve already attended the wedding because I’ve been in the room where everyone is becoming ready for it.

EO

It’s interesting because everything you’ve described is about seeing people differently. But instead of going to school for makeup, you applied to Wesleyan as a math major.

ES

I’m the daughter of an immigrant. Do you hear that? I did. What can I say? You can’t exactly announce that you’re going to college to study makeup. I applied as a math major because I genuinely loved math, but I also knew Wesleyan had a major film department and that I wanted to work in movies. I chose the school largely through intuition—I liked the way I felt on campus.

EO

So before classes had even started, you’d already written yourself into everyone else’s projects.

ES

It was the greatest thing. Everyone had these small projects they were trying to make, and if you treated them as seriously as your coursework—or, in my case, more seriously than my coursework—they became completely real. There were ideas everywhere, and I loved being able to grab onto one and help someone make it tangible. By the time I was a senior, film students were actually writing projects with me in mind. One of my best friends made a boxing film because he knew I could do the injuries. Someone else made a monster film because they knew I could build the creature. I became a creative resource for the people around me, and I loved that I didn’t have to choose only one world to participate in.

EO

It’s funny because you’ve spent this entire conversation talking about details, but every detail you’ve mentioned is emotional.

ES

They are. The way someone’s hair wraps through a hoop earring can make you cry if it feels completely right. Those are the details that suddenly make you recognize a person. Even with special effects, a monster isn’t frightening unless there’s still something human inside it. Maybe the eyes remain recognizable, or there’s some expression that you can identify in yourself. If the creature feels completely alien, it loses some of its power. The horror comes from seeing enough of yourself in it that you understand what has been changed.

EO

You were already deeply inside filmmaking, so how did studying architecture come into existence?

ES

Architecture felt like visual math. I loved calculus and geometry, and it was probably the only thing in the art department that sounded rigorous enough for my parents to accept. But that wasn’t really why I stayed with it. I loved systems, rules, and then figuring out how to break those rules. Architecture taught me that every design could have a thesis and that every decision should follow from it. I realized very quickly that you could apply that same logic to makeup or wardrobe. You could decide that every mucus membrane shared the same color, or that every costume followed a particular structural rule, and suddenly an entire world became coherent.

EO

So architecture gave you a vocabulary for what you were already doing intuitively.

ES

Architecture felt like the grandfather of design. I thought that if I wanted to design anything, it would give me the strongest possible foundation—and the vocabulary to explain why a decision worked. I was also deeply interested in typography. David Schorr, who taught in the art department at Wesleyan, gave the most influential class I took there. He approached design as the process of finding a solution. The question was always, “What is the solution?” I’ve carried that way of thinking into everything I’ve made since.

EO

So, in theory, your education and your career were basically happening at the same time.

ES

Completely. During fall break I would come back to New York and work on commercials because the seniors I’d met as a freshman had already graduated and entered the industry. By the time I finished Wesleyan, I had four years of relationships with people working in commercials and independent film, and they started hiring me immediately. There was never a clean separation between school and work. I was learning systems and design in class and then testing those ideas on actual shoots. One side gave me the language, and the other gave me somewhere to apply it.

EO

Did you ever consider becoming a creative director and pursuing a more conventional commercial career? 

ES

Yes, for a while, I thought I would work in advertising. Again, David Schorr had taught us everything we needed to know about typography, branding, and graphic design, and I loved all of it. I spent a summer at Mother New York as a design intern, and I became fascinated by products and the way a brand could define an entire worldview. That eventually became Fur because it brought all of those interests together. I wasn’t interested in making another beauty product. I wanted to reorganize the meaning around something people already thought they understood.

At the time, every women’s care product was designed to be shoved underneath the bathroom sink. None of it was supposed to sit on the counter as a beautiful object. Wax strips, sprays—all of it was buried and presented through this language of embarrassment and concealment. The idea behind Fur was that a product for pubic hair could be something elegant enough to leave on your boudoir. You could be proud of it rather than treating it as evidence of something shameful. It was an accessory to your body instead of a correction of it. That approach felt completely absent from the market when we began.

EO

What made the branding feel so radical at the time?

ES

This was 2015, before Hims, Hers, Billie—any of that. I have heard that Fur became one of the references those companies were using, and you could see pieces of the language begin to appear elsewhere: the naming, the typography, even the idea that personal-care products could be designed as objects rather than hidden necessities. I designed the Fur logo in Big Caslon and altered the letters so the F and the R looked almost like drops of oil. On the back of the packaging, I arranged the typography into a triangle so it subtly formed a bush. That was completely connected to what David Schorr had taught me at Wesleyan: design could communicate an idea before you consciously understood what you were seeing. The packaging referenced old Chanel boxes, but the object itself was doing something much more bodily. I’m still very proud of it.

EO

Can you tell me about the design logic of the bottle? 

ES

I wanted the bottle to feel organic and bodily—almost like you were cupping a breast, a butt, or a pair of balls in your hand. I was told that in terms of traditional marketing  it made no sense because it was an orb. In business school, you’re taught to design packaging that makes people think they’re getting more product than they actually are, and a sphere does the opposite. I didn’t care. I cared whether somebody would remember it. For lack of a better word, being iconic mattered more to me than following those kinds of marketing schemes.

EO

How did the final design come to mind? 

ES

I bought an antique bottle at Housing Works on 96th Street while I was researching what Fur’s packaging could look like. At first I was studying the bottle itself, thinking about it as the reference. It had a traditional glass perfume stopper—a round glass top with a narrow piece meant to fit snugly into the neck of the bottle. Then one day I took the cap off, turned it upside down, and held it in my hand. I looked at it and suddenly realized, “This is the Fur bottle.” The shape I’d been searching for wasn’t the body of the antique bottle at all—it was the cap. I was twenty-four when that happened, and I remember thinking, This is Fur.

Then the first batch of oil came back this beautiful chartreuse green, and it made my cofounders uncomfortable. I kept hearing, “It has to be pink,” because that was what a product for women was supposed to look like. But I looked at it and thought, “No, this is our brand color.” The green came naturally from the ingredients, and that was really the thesis of Fur. You take what comes naturally to your body, and your comfort with what is natural becomes elegance. Changing the oil to make it more conventionally feminine would have contradicted the entire project. Those are my favorite moments in design, when something suddenly reveals what it was always supposed to be.

EO

Where did the idea for Fur itself begin?

ES

I was working for Rushka Bergman, who was Michael Jackson’s stylist and worked with Vogue Italia. My college boyfriend had connected us because she wanted an assistant who had studied architecture, which technically described me. Rushka thought almost entirely through shape and color. She had this incredibly consistent internal rubric for everything she chose.

EO

What did that experience teach you about fashion?

ES

Rushka isa real artist, but as for the fashion industry, there was also something about the pursuit of cool that felt misplaced. Fashion is so often about wanting to look cool, and there’s nothing cool about wanting to look cool. I could understand the internal system and execute it, but I didn’t necessarily want to live inside it forever. I loved clothes, but I didn’t love fashion as an industry. I was much more interested in using clothing to build a character or to help a musician create a world.

EO

And somewhere inside all of that, Fur begins to emerge.

ES

At the time the fashion was brazilian waxes across the board.  It was presented as this glamorous, fashionable ritual, but one day, at the end of the appointment, they handed me the little mirror they give you to inspect the work. I held it up, and my technician walked behind me at exactly that moment. We made eye contact in the reflection while I was looking at my completely bare body, and I remember thinking, “This is insane.” It was a genuinely awkward and painful experience, and it was the only possible standard. I left knowing that this wasn’t going to remain the norm forever. The whole culture around it felt cooked.

EO

What changed once you started researching the alternatives?

ES

I learned that Marilyn Monroe used to bleach her pubic hair with a toothbrush to match the hair on her head, and something about that completely shifted the frame for me. Pubic hair could be treated as an elegant accessory rather than something that needed to be removed. Marilyn was the blueprint for conventional glamour, and she wasn’t approaching her body through shame. That became the idea: people could do whatever they wanted, including getting a Brazilian, but it shouldn’t feel like the only acceptable option. Years later, an assistant on a film set told me she and all of her friends used Fur in college because it made them feel like having pubic hair was okay. That meant everything to me because that was the whole point. The product was never really about oil. It was about permission.

EO

And is that when you first started thinking about taking authorship seriously? 

ES

My first job after college was fabricating sculptures for Paola Pivi. It was the summer of 2013, and we were working on these enormous taxidermied polar bears shipped all the way from the Yukon Territory. We covered them in feathers bought in bulk from feather boas, which by the way are turkey feathers. Because of my makeup background, I became the face specialist. I studied the direction the fur grew around the eyes and recreated it feather by feather. You could only use the tips, never the fuzzy middle, and because the feathers would blow everywhere, we couldn’t use fans or air conditioning. It was July in New York, you could just feel the sweat rolling down your face as you perform  this incredibly precise work. At night when I would blow my nose my snot was always the color of the bear I was working on.

One night, there was an after-party at the Russian Tea Room, and I showed up and discovered I wasn’t on the list. I was twenty-three and I kept thinking, “But I made those”. Pharrell was there, all these people were there, and I couldn’t understand why the people who had physically produced the sculptures weren’t considered part of the work. It was the first time I confronted the distance between the artist and the object. After that, I became fascinated by art fabrication because it forced me to ask what actual making was worth and how far authorship could be removed from the hands that brought something into existence.

EO

It’s so real. The absence of those who labored for the product or experience is endlessly fascinating for me, because you still don’t bypass any of it in white collar jobs either. You still will be excluded. Can you talk about styling Devonte Hynes’ Better Than Me video shoot in 2016 with Carly Rae Jepsen? Was that your first time working with him?

ES

It was, which is crazy because that’s where you and I met too. I had about two thousand dollars for the entire wardrobe budget, so I went to Goodwill and bought everything secondhand. I probably spent fifteen hundred dollars there and used the rest to hire an on-set tailor. We altered everything directly onto the performers that morning so it looked and moved in a way that was completely specific to them. I loved that the money went toward the handmade part of the process rather than overnighting expensive clothes from a showroom. It was the exact opposite of how I’d worked with Rushka, where everything depended on whether the DHL package had arrived. We were taking discarded clothes and using somebody’s skill to make them feel intentional.

EO

How did those collaborations begin multiplying?

ES

A lot of it came through my friend Imogene Strauss and Sara’o Bery, both who I’d gone to Wesleyan with. Through ImogeneI met Eliza Ryan, and that really made my career during those first few years. They brought me into film sets and projects when they needed someone who could move between production design, styling, fabrication, and makeup. They gave me opportunities, but I also made those jobs happen once I got there. My reputation became: whatever the problem was, I’d figure it out.

EO

What did “figuring it out” actually look like?

ES

Mostly problem-solving. Usually there wasn’t enough time or enough money, and somebody needed something that didn’t exist yet. On one of Josh Kline’s videos, I was tasked to recreate the inaugural suits and ties of all the American presidents so face-doubling software could be layered over the actors. I was preparing to hand-paint polka dots onto a tie because I couldn’t find the right one anywhere. Then I walked into Macy’s and saw every tie I needed lined up neatly together in Donald Trump’s collection. His tie line was basically a collection of ties that past American presidents had worn at their inaugurations. Those were the kinds of bizarre solutions the work constantly demanded. I liked being the person who could arrive, understand what needed to happen, and make it happen. If I knew somebody genuinely appreciated what I brought to the work, I’d go to almost any limit for them because they understood I wasn’t just completing a task. I was bringing a way of thinking to the project.

EO

Is that part of why Hollywood never appealed to you?

ES

I think so. I wanted to be an artist people collaborated with. The idea of sitting in a makeup trailer supervising other makeup artists never interested me because, to me, the work is in the hand. It’s the touch, the bedside manner, the intimacy of actually doing it yourself. I grew up in a very hand-centered household. My father is a surgeon and my mother is a harpist. Hands were understood as incredibly valuable because they were the instruments through which both of them worked. I think I was always afraid Hollywood would separate me from that part of the process and turn the work into management instead of making.

EO

You were also hand modeling during that period, which somehow feels connected to all of this.

ES

It really was. Hand modeling let me be in front of the camera without fully being in front of the camera. It gave me the experience of being the talent, and that actually made me much better at doing makeup because I understood what someone needed in those exposed moments. You become aware of how strange it is to be watched, adjusted, and expected to perform while people move around you. That made me much more sensitive to the person sitting in my chair. It also paid surprisingly well, which supported everything else I was doing. And I’m the hand on the Halloween edition of Kim Petras’ Turn Off the Light album cover, which is good lore.

EO

The hands keep coming back.

ES

They really do. I worked in the woodshop at Wesleyan too, training people to use the table saws and band saws. Somebody would come in with an idea, and I’d help them figure out how to make it. That’s exactly what I love about art fabrication. An artist says, “How do I do this?” and then you solve the puzzle together. You aren’t simply carrying out instructions. You’re discovering what the object can become through the act of making it.

EO

Earlier you caught yourself replacing the word money with value. That felt important.

ES

Because that’s really what I meant. I was watching things we’d made sell for enormous amounts of money, and at first the whole system felt unreal. Now I’m older and I understand the money is very real. But what I was actually questioning was how value gets assigned—to an idea, to the person whose name is attached to it, and to the people whose hands made it possible. My life was never organized around money as the bottom line, even though I obviously needed it to live. I was much more interested in the value of ideas and handiwork. That distinction shaped the people I wanted to work with and the projects I was willing to give everything to.

EO

Fur launches in 2016, you begin working with Dev, and all of these collaborations that define the next several years start taking shape and now almost seem inevitable. Did it feel that way while you were living it?

ES

Not at all. Honestly, I was pretty depressed at the time. I needed to distract myself, so I took every single job that came my way because I couldn’t sit still long enough to think. I ran for years. My apartment was always filled with whatever project I was working on, and the moment I cleared it out, another pile of clothes or materials would take its place. There was no master plan. At the time it felt much more like survival than ambition. I wasn’t trying to build a career. I was running for my life.