Less than a week before Cardi B announced her fourth pregnancy—and first with her new boyfriend, Steffon Diggs—the rapper was busy delivering serving looks at New York Fashion Week. The cherry on top? Her plus one was her 7-year-old daughter, Kulture.
The mother-daughter duo arrived in Chinatown to celebrate Alexander Wang’s 20th anniversary show. They sat at one of the Mahjong tables—a Chinese gambling game—which were exclusively reserved for the VIPs on the guest list. Think: Law Roach, Kevin Aviance, and Martha Stewart included. Their fur wardrobe debuted two of the collection’s looks before the show even started. Of course this caused a stir, but the beauty looks? To us, were equal parts head-turning.
For Cardi B, a black mullet matched her nails while winged lashes gave her a cat-eye look. And, while the models’s look differed from the rapper, lead hairstylist Jawara Wauchope says he wanted the models to look like they had glass on their hair, similar to Kulture’s bantu knots.
“The look is a super-tight, lacquered chignon, we wanted to make it super glassy,” Wauchope tells ESSENCE exclusively before the show, using layers and layers of Got2b Invincible Styling Gel for a rubbery look. “It’s almost like creating this rubber-like texture with the hair,” he says. “I’m calling it ‘glass knots’.”
For the makeup, Isamaya Ffrench lead her team to “a powerful, oversized wing,” she says. While Cardi B opted out of eyeliner for a winged eyelash instead, Ffrench turned the liner into an exaggerated eyeshadow statement.
Using a gel liner to draw the wing, then black kohl to soften the edges, the look is just as severe as the hair, but still simple like the nails. “We’re keeping it all about the eye [and] keeping everything else natural and paired back,” which means bleached brows, taupe lips, and sophisticated matte skin.
To round out the look, nail artist Mei Kawajiri dissolved the color of the nails into the skin. “The nails are matching with the skin tone,” she says, as she shook open a bag of skin-toned nail polish from a mix of brands, including Essie, Chanel, Nails Inc., which she mixed together to achieve the perfect opaque match.
“I wanted to have variety in the nails,” she says. Although, “[they’re all] opaque, not too see-through to match with the skin.”