Remembering Pablo Manzoni, the Original “Make-Up Man”

That free-spiritedness was still in the future when Manzoni relocated to New York in 1964 at the behest of Elizabeth Arden herself. “Those were the days of Jackie Kennedy, and all the models were molded to look like her. It was fashionable to look like somebody famous, because it was a way to be noticed,” the makeup artist would later recall. The fashionable world certainly paid heed when Manzoni arrived: “The great Pablo is now here,” Vogue announced in the May issue, which featured his handiwork on the cover.

Within a year, the man known as “Pablo of Elizabeth Arden,” became the first in his field to be awarded a Coty American Fashion Critics Award. “Elizabeth Arden’s Pablo has done for make-up and the make-up man what Kenneth did for hair and the hairdresser, he has lifted cosmetics from an accessory executed by who knows to an important component of fashion executed by a star,” wrote Priscilla Tucker, a Herald Tribune News Service writer in 1965. “Following the era of the hairdresser,” Tucker continued, “where salons got more fantastic and a woman’s hairdresser began turning up at parties, we have the era of the make-up man,” a.k.a visagiste, or face designer.

For Vogue, then led by the fantasist editor Diana Vreeland, Manzoni transformed models into otherworldly creatures, adorned by zebra stripes or glittering with rhinestones.  In the magazine’s December 1966 issue, five pages were devoted to “the festive eye” as seen by “Elizabeth Arden’s brilliant young make-up inventor, Pablo.” (Arden is said to have referred to her protege as the “Picasso of eye makeup.” )