Up until this point, the New York shows had purported a rather sedate softly-softly approach to autumn beauty. Pretty complexions, neutral tones and curled lashes had found their way onto every catwalk. So far, so New York.

Expectations then, were mounting as we trekked en masse out to a freezing shipping yard in deepest darkest Brooklyn for Alexander's Wang autumn/winter14 show - particularly after a somewhat benign beauty mood at his spring/summer14 show last September. 

One cursory glance at the casting board reaffirmed one very important thing: Alexander Wang gathers together a model casting like no other; alongside the fashion world's model du jours, were the seminal faces of the 90s - Angela Lindvall, Bridget Hall, and Jacquetta Wheeler, reminding us, as if we needed it, that Wang himself is a child of the 90s, an advocate of grunge, of grit, of androgyny and sense of aesthetic nihilism that's completely lost on most other designers of his age.

And bingo. Scuttling in and around photographers, make-up artists and manicurists upon bloggers, the models were virtually unrecognisable: flattened hair that shone with boot polish, subtly radiant complexions that shone like stars and a sparsity of brows. Not a brow in sight, actually.

'We're bleaching the brows to keep the face very open,' explained make-up artist Diane Kendal, using Nars. 'Contouring the cheekbones, almost like mannequins, using NARSskin Luminous Moisture Cream as a base. Alex was talking about synthetic fabrics and he wanted the girls to feel androgynous.' Could Wang's woman be anything but?

Guido Palau on hair duty, explained his flattened shoe-polish shine by throwing words like 'boyish', 'futurism', 'minimalism', 'utilitarian' - words we've all come to know over the past few seasons. That's the thing; Wang and his team are not rewriting the rule book here - they needn't. 'It's not super referential to anything - most young designers don't want to anything too theatrical, it's not about showing loads of reference pictures of the 30s. Their references are much more oblique; it's about the wearability of the hair,' added Guido.

It may be completely devoid of reference – but somehow it still manages to so effortlessly chime off a thousand mini references in your own head. Olive oil. Prada spring/summer 2011 with all the finger waves and stripey dresses. Tron. Alien. All of it.

This is beauty that takes us somewhere, and not just to Brooklyn.