We’ve a lot to thank social media for. Aside from the cat-based lols and green juice recipes, it’s also opened up the previously secreted world of backstage beauty for us all to devour one Instagram photograph at a time. We flew over to Barcelona for P&G’s annual future trends conference, Vision House and sat down for a chat with two of its most prolific icons – Pat McGrath, global creative director for Max Factor and Coco Rocha, the Canadian model who managed to break the model mould – to discover how they cracked social media...

ON GETTING STARTED

Coco Rocha: I just had a little blog, a tiny little blog just for friends and family, it was really nothing, and then a lot of magazines started to quote me and I thought, ‘well this is an interesting time for social media.’ There were all these people talking about this model but really, I come from a generation where as models, we were all disposable - we looked alike, our names kind of aligned and you didn’t really know one voice from the other and so when I finally had a chance to have a voice I thought ‘this is my chance.’ So I got on this thing called Twitter, and then I got on this thing called Instagram and then got on thirteen different platforms. I keep telling people in our industry how important it is to use it.

Pat McGrath: We were watching Coco on Twitter all the time at work. Coco would have reports coming in from news stations and so I just said ‘would you sign me on, I’m not going to do it – you just show me.’ And I said, ‘but don’t activate it, just sign me up’. So I left work that night and on the way to the airport she left me a message saying, ‘oh, my goodness everybody, Pat’s on Twitter!’ And I was like ‘argh!’ I was watching all the names come up, just literally sitting there, so now I’m addicted. 

ON BEING PRESENT

Pat McGrath: I think it helps you to look at your environment and look at where you are. I’ve spent years going to Milan and working in New York and Paris and you’re just going from a car to a show to a car, whereas now there’s the challenge of looking at your environment, taking pictures of the city and having fun. You enjoy it and it does add a little bit of something – also there’s an element of healthy competition. My friend used to takes lots of snap shots of her life and I was always jealous when years later, I looked back and I hadn’t done the same, but now I have this archive. 

ON THE RECIPE FOR SUCCESS

Coco Rocha: Maybe it’s just about having originality. I mean, the model’s life is boring to me –sometimes I’m just laying down with my husband watching TV. But people want to know what you really do. So I think, what can I share that’s interesting in my life – being backstage with Pat McGrath or a Throwback Thursday - things that you can really share and inspire people with. On the other hand, it’s important to me that I make sure that it’s all in my own voice.

ON CAPTURING BEAUTY TRENDS

Pat McGrath: At first, it was fantastic that a lot of those in the beauty industry show their own make-up and I think that’s great, but then the attitude from brands to that was, ‘OK, we’ve seen so much make-up that now, we want nothing for the show look. We want bare, we want reality,’ and that was very much how it went this season. I’ve said this in New York, you have a 5 year old doing a 90-point eye that my team will train, you know, for hours and hours to do, so obviously they’re retouching shots on social media too. So I think now, the designers wanted to see the girls go back to a sense of beauty rebellion.  

That rebellion used to be about tonnes of make-up and really difficult ideas, but the true rebellion this season was about the girls looking as they really were, or for instance like at Givenchy, do something that no one can ever do. That was the message of the season. And it all played out on social media.