NEW YORK — Carly Mark, the designer of Puppets and Puppets, is known to enjoy a Surrealist “little joke.” Her best-known creation is a black leather purse slapped with a lifelike resin sculpture of a chocolate-chip cookie. (Every season she releases new iterations; most recently, they included green velvet and leopard print bags affixed with bruised bananas, fried eggs, candy-coated brownies à la Little Debbie and a landline telephone.)
But the best joke from her latest runway show wasn’t on a bag. It was on the arms of a model who sat “very patiently,” Ms. Mark said, for about three hours while hundreds of black star-shaped stickers were applied to her forearms. From a distance, the stickers looked like opera gloves, an omnipresent accessory on runways these days.
The punchline was that they weren’t stickers at all: They were pimple patches by the skin care company Starface, whose signature product is a tiny star-shaped hydrocolloid patch that comes in various colors. Fans of the brand often wear them out and about. (Or at least in selfies. The idea, as Fashionista put it in 2019, is to “make acne instagrammable.”) The black version seen on the Puppets and Puppets runway is not yet for sale.
Tiny star-shaped pimple patches made by the Starface skin-care company.
The pimple-patch gloves came from a desire to “elevate the collection in unexpected ways,” said Ms. Mark, who worked on them with the makeup artist Fara Homidi. But they also appealed to her as something that existed between makeup and a garment — and fit into the brand’s sense of humor through displacement.
“I love Surrealist moments, anything trompe l’oeil, things that feel fresh,” Ms. Mark said. — Jessica Testa
