NOT SINCE PAT McGRATH has the fashion world been this excited about a make-up artist. Alex Box, 34, with her white-blond hair, pale skin and red lipstick, is shaking up the fashion world with her unstoppable creativity. Beauty journalist Bethan Cole recently wrote in The Sunday Times, 'Watching her on a shoot, painting on an intricate metallic eye with swooping curves of gilt pigment and tiny gold flecks, I'm transfixed. It is part Sun Ra, part Doctor and the Medics psychedelic-gothic, part Edie Sedgwick, part Maori anthropologica.' It takes a deft stroke and a touch of genius to pull off a look such as this with such aplomb.
A career in fashion was never part of Box's original plan. 'I'd always wanted to be an artist for as long as I can remember and had been keen to draw and paint instead of read and write as a child,'
she says. She went to Chelsea College of Art and Design in London and studied fine art.
Then, while Box was working on an art installation using skin and prosthetics at the Milsch Gallery in London, she was spotted by designers Suture, who saw her work and, thinking it was make-up, asked her to do a fashion show.
'I had never thought that my art could be interpreted that way,' Box says. 'It gave it a completely different perception and reference. Now I approach my make-up exactly like my art, sketching, going to galleries for inspiration and so on.
'The crossover from art to make-up came quite organically as I think they are one and the same; only [with make-up you are] using the face as your canvas.'
Box travels constantly for her job, but it is still her home base, London, which excites her most. 'It always changes just when you think you know it; it surprises you.' She works with the city's brightest, brashest talent, including avant-garde designer Gareth Pugh, who used her for his autumn/winter 2007 show, and stylist and photographer William Baker.