Bearded and bespectacled, Mr. Nars, who is in his early 50s, spoke last week at his rarely seen studio on Wooster Street, where he dreams up colors for four seasonal collections, with an average of a dozen products each, that Nars puts out annually. One wall was crowded with portraits of Tahitians and still lifes from a forthcoming book he’s putting together about his inspirations from the French Polynesian island Motu Tané. He bought the island after Shiseido Cosmetics bought Nars in 2000, a deal that left him with a remarkable amount of creative control.

Mr. Nars, who wore a black Dior Homme suit, was unfailingly polite and exacting, complaining at one point about how the studio’s black-stained wood floors scuff too much for his taste. He and Fabien Baron, the veteran art designer who helped create the space, made sure the ones at 413 Bleecker would not.

During a two-hour meeting discreetly attended by an assistant, the closest Mr. Nars came to showboating was pointing out a portrait of him and Madonna that sat on the floor along another wall of his studio with more than a dozen framed photographs.

On the set of a long-ago magazine shoot, Mr. Nars, then clean shaven, stands embracing Madonna, in blunt-cut bangs and wearing a skin-tight pale pantsuit that exposed an oval of her rear end. His thumb was on this peephole, a smirk on his face. Nor was he shy when meeting Marc Jacobs on the set of a Steven Meisel shoot, back when Mr. Jacobs was the creative director for Perry Ellis. “Steven wanted him naked in a bed, and I had to apply makeup on him,” Mr. Nars said. “I think it was for American Vogue. It was very laid back the way we worked at the time, always laughing, never formal.”