If you felt like MAC Cosmetics had been quietly coasting on its own legacy for a while, you weren't imagining it. The brand that once felt like the cosmetics counter of a particularly unhinged fever dream had gotten, well... a little safe. A little beige, spiritually speaking.
Enter Nicola Formichetti. You may know him as the creative director who helped build Lady Gaga's visual mythology from the ground up, or as the designer who turned Mugler into a maximalist religion. The man doesn't do subtle. He doesn't do beige. And according to i-D, he's now stepping into MAC with one apparent mission: to drag it back to the glorious, chaotic, inclusive spectacle it was always meant to be.
Why this actually matters
This isn't just a celebrity-adjacent brand deal to shrug at. Formichetti is someone who has spent decades genuinely reshaping how fashion and beauty think about identity, gender, and self-expression. The fact that he's bringing that energy to a mass-market makeup brand - not a niche luxury house - is kind of a big deal.
MAC built its reputation on being for everyone before that was even a marketing slogan. Drag queens, club kids, theatre professionals, your aunt who swears by Ruby Woo - the brand's whole deal was that makeup was a tool for transformation without restrictions. That edge had been dulled. Formichetti seems to understand that, and he seems annoyed by it, which is exactly the right energy.
More color, more chaos, more everything
Per i-D's coverage, the vision involves restoring MAC's appetite for spectacle and leaning hard into inclusivity as an actual aesthetic commitment, not just a buzzword in a press release. Which is, frankly, the only way to do it with any credibility.
Formichetti's portfolio speaks for itself. When he works, things get interesting. Things get weird in the best possible way. Things get photographed and argued about and copied for the next five years.
MAC under his influence could mean the return of beauty as a genuinely subversive act rather than a wellness-adjacent self-care ritual. Not that there's anything wrong with a good serum, but sometimes you want to look like you escaped from a Thierry Mugler show and you simply don't have the infrastructure for that right now.
Nicola Formichetti apparently does. And he's bringing it to a drugstore near you.
