While you're likely familiar with MAC beauty products, you may not know what those three initials stand for. "Make-Up Art Cosmetics," the company's creative director, James Gager, clarified at Marilyn Minter's third-floor walkup on Mercer Street, the first stop on what would be a marathon evening celebrating the brand's fall color collection of the same name. As an exercise in artistic crossover—not to mention a unique opportunity for advertising imagery—MAC had asked three New York-based artists (Minter, Maira Kalman, and Richard Phillips) to create works using products from the forthcoming line.

Minter, who says the only makeup she wears is lipstick and blush, took her cues from a range of glitter pigments, a "decadent and violent" red shade in particular. That was featured prominently in the photographer's large-scale contribution to the initiative, as well as on the tight T-shirts of the models/waiters who passed out bowls of ice cream to overheated attendees. Next up: chilled pomegranate mojitos at Kalman's West Village studio. The illustrator had taken a set of bold eye shadows and eyeliners as the inspiration for a portrait of a young woman from Russia who came to visit her recently. With a stainless-steel egg slicer in hand as a parting gift (not your usual goody bag offering), it was on to painter Richard Phillips' Chelsea space, where air-conditioning and a coveted time slot, after Tara Subkoff's auction at Deitch, brought out the late-night crowd in full force.

Designers Gareth Pugh, Erin Fetherston, and Justin Tranter posed for pictures as models Siri Tollerød and Ataui Deng listened to a live set from electropop outfit Xeno and Oaklander. "It's cool," Tollerød said of Phillips' completed piece (the artist had worked with photo retoucher Pascal Dangin to re-create the palette of pastel-to-bold MAC lipsticks and then apply that digitally to one of his paintings). Added the catwalker: "I've always thought of makeup like drawing, whereas hair is more like sculpture." Maybe it was getting late, but that sounded like a pretty astute observation to us. Celia Ellenberg