Just days after Pope Leo visited Paris for the first time, the roads are now blocked off around the Jardin des Tuileries for another reason: Jonathan Anderson’s spring 2027 Dior show. Backstage, models snacking on banana bread sit with glittering winged eyes and hair mussed into salty waves.

“He said, ‘I want surfing, like they’ve come from the beach or something; not too much, though,’” Peter Philips tells me of his conversations with Anderson over the weekend, who noted “maybe something on the eye—I want fresh.”

Playing off of the collection’s fabrics of inlaid Chantilly lace, double duchesse satin, printed jacquard plissé, and silk mousseline, Philips was inspired by the collection’s mix of pastels with “great silver metallic trousers” and “fantastic silver shoes,” plus “something bizarre—it’s the little unexpected twist.” The creative and image director for Dior Makeup chose his own surprising materials to create two versions of silver surfer liner. “It’s Mylar drag-queen jumbo lashes,” Philips explains of trimming the hair-thin metallic filaments from a strip.

The gleaming strands are scattered in a small porcelain plate on the table next to him, and he picks one up with a pair of tweezers. “One pair of lashes will do the whole show because I only need two per girl,” he says.

Half of the models will walk with the Mylar liner and half will have a chunky glitter wing. “It’s a wing just on the outside; it’s more about the side of the eye,” says Philips, who secured the loose silver glitter, sitting on another plate nearby, onto the edges of models’ eyes with a bit of NYX Glitter Primer.

“It’s just fun,” he notes. With no mascara and not even a hint of curl to avoid a “wall of lashes,” the effect is futuristic and unfussy.

To bring some life to the party, he applied Dior Backstage Rosy Glow Stick in 012 Rosewood and 103 Toffee onto cheeks for a believable flush. “If you don’t have a little color on the face, they become almost like they just went out and had a bit of a hangover,” he jokes.

Dior Backstage Glassy Glow Stick in 017 Glossy Jelly and Dior Addict Lip Maximizer in 001 Pink deliver watery, glossy effects as if the cast did just step out of the ocean.

“I think that’s a very young approach,” says Philips of not making things look too done. “It’s like surf hair,” he says of hair artist Guido Palau’s faux-surfer texture.

“It comes by being on the beach, and you actually think, Oh, wow, this looks great. So in a way, your hair is done without any effort.” At least it’s designed to look that way.

Anderson, as usual, had thoughts on what direction manicurist Ama Quashie might take. “With the nails, he was a bit more like maybe some color, maybe some red,” Philips shares of Anderson’s notes, which turned into Quashie doing a mix of Dior Vernis in a burgundy 047 Nuit shade on nails and ruby 853 Rouge Trafalgar on toes, after stylist Benjamin Bruno suggested not to match them.

“I love that it’s different,” says model Carol Monteiro, drinking a green tea nearby. It’s her fifth or sixth Dior show (she can’t remember), similar to Kaat Van Herbruggen, who thinks it’s her sixth.

When I ask Van Herbruggen if she’d wear the Mylar liner, she says, “Honestly, yeah, for a party,” though she admits she may not “have the skill” to do it herself. Monteiro agrees that the glitter eye is “something you can wear for a night out,” and while it clearly requires technique, may be something she could try at home.

“He lets you kind of freestyle in a way,” says Philips of Anderson’s freedom of movement and expression when collaborating with other artists. The shine, the waves, the mismatched nails—it’s all a bit perfectly imperfect.

In Anderson’s show notes, printed in the shape of the wenwan walnuts sourced from China that arrived with the show invitation, there’s a line that speaks to the feeling backstage: “What looks symmetrical in nature is often not quite. —JA”