The V&A’s summer fashion exhibition, Club to Catwalk: London Fashion in the 1980s celebrates the style of London’s club kids and looks at the way in which many of the scene’s  core members went on to illustrious careers in fashion and beauty.

The club kids inspired each other to shatter beauty boundaries and created a glorious, seemingly-chaotic but actually carefully crafted aesthetic. Powder, glitter, colour and BIG hair helped them stand out in the dark clubs that were their natural habitat – catching enticing glimpses of themselves reflected in the mirrors that surrounded the dance floors of the Blitz, Taboo and White Trash.

MAC's Creative Director of Make-up Artistry, Terry Barber was part of the scene: “I always remember a lot of the palest foundation around, which I think was Rimmel’s Pale Biscuit, and lots of talcum powder! It was all about blanking out your face, looking like night time – there wasn't a 'day' version, day didn’t really exist for us!"

"It was all about blanking out your face, looking like night time – there wasn't a 'day' version, day didn’t really exist for us!"

"There was always a really big eyebrow – it came from Ray Petrie’s Buffalo Kids – that urchin, fragile face and sculpted brow. The aesthetic was unhealthily beautiful, gaunt, with lots of contouring and always a sculpted cheek.”

Over-the-top make-up blurred the boundaries between the sexes – if you couldn’t tell who was a boy and who was a girl behind all that eyeliner and powder, did it really matter? Of course not, that was the point. Terry explains, "There was definitely a lack of gender difference – a man at the time who was quite feminine was considered to be masculine – it wasn’t a gay/straight thing, it was very asexual, it was just that there were no boundaries between the sexes."

They were the descendants of the Bright Young People of the ‘20s – beautiful boys like Stephen Tennant with Vaseline on his eyelids and real gold dust in his hair – but they were working to a tight budget and that made them even more inventive, mixing in punk, glam and romantic references to create looks that were designed to shock.

Stephen Jones, Paul Bernstock and Thelma Speirs and, of course, John Galliano and Vivienne Westwood plundered the history books for inspiration and nothing was out of bounds – pirates, Madame de Pompadour and the French Revolution were referenced and this came through in the make-up as much as the clothes.

"We take great pride in our decadence"

You might think that these looks are too extreme to emulate today, but there's plenty to learn from the club kids - both their aesthetic and their attitude. For Terry, it's both: “It’s not about your eyeliner looking ‘couture’ or ‘50s’, we just put it on and smudge it in – it’s that idea of looking worn in and worn down. It suggests a coolness and intelligence and a fabulous lifestyle. We take great pride in our decadence.”

Click through the gallery for a few make-up lessons from London's club kids...