At first glance, supermodel Iekeliene Stange looks like another cool specimen of Alien Beauty, joining the ranks of Sasha Pivovarova and Gemma Ward. But snapshots of Iekeliene’s personal style reveal another, charmingly goofier portrait.

Iekeliene (pronounced Ee-kel-een-ah) was discovered as a multimedia student in Holland, and didn’t know much about fashion before becoming a model. “I was a little punk rocker with red dreadlocks, a nose ring, and covered in rainbow bracelets,” she recently told Teen Vogue. Though she’s had to tone down her look for the runway, Stange still keeps it weird in regards to personal style, as can be seen below. Her hobbies include “photography, making amazing tutu’s and keeping it real.” Too cute!

• Iekeline Stange fan page (tons of pictures!)
• More pictures of Iekeliene’s personal style
• Video interview with Iekeliene on Flasher

– her cheekbones are very distracting in this video

Thew new issue of Elegy is out! Actually, I think it’s more that the cover got leaked, which means that it’s about to come out. On the cover, a mask by Madame Khufu, as photographed by Spanish photographer Eccehomo.

Every time I get a new issue of Elegy, I mourn the fact that I’ve forgotten all my French. Luckily, every issue of Elegy is so packed with gorgeous full bleeds of photos and art from all over the world that even though I can’t understand a thing, the magazine is worth every penny. As Elegy’s main focus is music, each issue comes with a CD sampler; last issue, it included Neil Gaiman, Neubauten and Nurse with Wound.

• Alyz Tale – Rédactrice en chef, photographer and muse
• Official Elegy Site
• Elegy Magazine on MySpace

Artist Soomi Park from Seoul has created a set of LED eyelashes that light up in the dark. In an interview with We Make Money Not Art, Park describes the motivation behind her design:

I tried to project Korean’s obsession to big eyes, and how this fetishism is interpreted into excessive plastic surgery done on the eyes among Korean women. I really thought the obsession with big eyes can be represented through media design, because both yearning for bigger eyes and projecting the look through lights can be done by distorting the representation and creating new images. The LED Eyelashes have a mercury sensor that controls the light on the face. When wearing the LED eyelashes, you look embellished as if you were wearing a piece of fashion jewelry.

Politicized wearable art that invokes cybernetic technology? Marry me! In truth, you had me at “light-up lashes.” Read the article for more about the eyelashes and about Park’s compelling Digital Veil projet. The article mistakenly refers to Soomi as a boy, but she corrects the misconception in the comments. The interview is excellent nonetheless.

Related:

• 5 Ways to Feel Like a Replicant
• May Your Nights be Aglow with Cats

I came across this image from Julie Heffernan’s new series, called Booty, in the new (very NSFW) blog of Trevor “don’t click it, mom” Brown:

Self Portrait as Post Script by Julie Heffernan

What is there to say, really? Trevor Brown writes the following:

while wasting countless hours and days lazily surfing the net (the cause of konomi’s beleaguering), stumbling upon amazing work like the above by julie heffernan only further reinforces feelings of inadequacy – while i’m “busy” right clicking and saving, konomi rants on, with incisive perception, artists must work like hell while they are young – skills improve until around the age of fifty – then, after building up momentum, it’s just blithely regurgitating the same old shit for the rest of your life – only craftsmen continue to improve in their old age – artists are too “me! me! me!” – smug

Last week, via Allison, I found a calculator that shows you Things Other People Accomplished When They Were Your Age. I tormented myself with this thing for a good 45 minutes: at 25, Orson Welles had coscripted, directed, and starred in Citizen Kane! T.S. Eliot wrote “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” when he was 23! Damn them, damn them all to hell.

Thinking that Julie Heffernan was another hot young artist who would only add to the complex about under-achievement ignited by the calculator, with Brown’s words fresh in my mind, I masochistically clicked on her bio to make an ecstatic discovery: Julie Heffernan, who completed the series above this year, was born in 1956! And then, of course, more research followed: Picasso completed his masterpiece, Guernica, when he was 55; Daniel Defoe wrote his first novel, “The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,” when he was 59.

Every accomplished person has another accomplished person that makes them feel like a slacker; catching a glimpse of that is somehow inspiring.

This common-sense guide to the heterosexual lifestyle may help you come to grips with the strange, shop repressed feelings that have been haunting you since puberty. Reading it opened my eyes and made me love myself for who I am. Someone gave me this flyer a few years ago on campus, purchase and, viagra as a public service, I now pass it on to all of you. May it help to guide you in your internal struggle.

Bob Carlos Clarke, why did you jump in front of a moving train last year and end your life? You were one of the greatest fetish photographers that ever lived, and it’s not the same without you.

What passes for fetish photography these days is a joke, and you were one of the only people who got it: you understood that it was more about clothes staying on than taking them off, that it was all about contour and personality. The girls in your pictures didn’t make stupid faces while holding their boobs, and you could bring sexuality to any object you photographed, even if it was a stone or a fork.

Wish you were still with us.

• Bob Carlos Clarke Official Site
• “Shooting Sex” and “Love Dolls Never Die” – His books, now collector’s items.

In 1997, director Alex Sichel was given a grant to make a film about the riot grrrl music scene. She created the film All Over Me, an intense coming-of-age film with a unique cast. The film is about many things: sexual orientation, trying to start a band, drug use, losing your best friend and being just on the verge of discovering all that makes you who you are.

The film’s greatest strength is the way it shows how emotional your relationship with music can get, especially as a teen. Almost every scene has something to do with music, right down to the opening, where the main character tries to play a guitar that she finds on the street. There are scenes of singing along to a song while crying, awful but earnest music rehearsals, rooms covered with drawings and posters of musicians, meetings at guitar stores and gigs.

The score is raw and emotional, and the sounds of Babes in Toyland, Sleater-Kinney, Helium, Patti Smith and Tuscadero figure heavily into the film’s soundscape. The cast is full of musicians as well. Pat Briggs from industrial/gothy/glam band Psychotica appears as a charismatic next-door neighbor, and Leisha Hailey from The Murmurs and Uh Huh Her plays one of the lead roles. Mary Timony from Helium also appears in the film, and together with Hailey they appear on stage in the form of a fictional band called Coochie Pop (video after the jump!). Also of note is non-musician actor Wilson Cruz, who many will remember as Ricky from ahead-of-its-time teen drama My So-Called Life.

“I don’t think that art, if it’s isolated and specialized, can really create culture. It needs a cult.” – Ernst Fuchs

Ernst Fuchs is a man of many talents; he’s taken turns as a painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, architect, stage designer, composer, poet and singer. Born in 1930 and still working today in Vienna, Fuchs is a strong proponent of fantastic and often disturbing art that’s all over the map, thematically and stylistically.

Left: David and Bathshebah. Right: Ernst Fuchs.

Some of Fuchs’ paintings make him look like a deeply religious man, others make it seem like he’s a total heathen. There are the hyper-detailed, religious-themed, Durer-inspired etchings and brush drawings: my favorite of these is Satan’s Heaven, created in 1954, along with Christ Before Pilate and Ahasverus Repudiates Vasthi. Not since Bosch has religion looked so satisfyingly demonic! Parallel to the his tormenting depictions of the Bible, there are many mythological themes: his Procreation of the Unicorn/Temptation of the Unicorn/Triumph of the Unicorn series is not to be missed; unicorn chaser it’s not!

Making still images with bodypaint is becoming a bit of a lost art in the age of Photoshop. Why sit there and paint on someone for 13 hours, a nightmare of smudges and sore muscles, when you can just copy, paste and apply a mask? Body painter Nelly Recchia would explain that it’s the same as digital video vs. film; each is a legitimate medium, but that sometimes the “old way” of doing something can bring out a certain depth that you just can’t achieve with easy new techniques.

To Recchia, body painting is a ritualistic act, dating to the prehistoric age, which communicates our desire to transform ourselves and transcend the human body. She does use Photoshop occasionally, but only for minor corrections; the bulk of the work has to be done with models posing the same way for hours, a task that requires patience and strength. In the end, the models in her work glow with a type of poised discipline that Photoshop could never give.

• Nelly Recchia Official Site
• Nelly Recchia Interview with Senze
• Nelly Recchia on MySpace

To cleanse your palate of the awful goth fashion I inflicted on you yesterday, here are pictures of some hawt men wearing fashions from centuries past, mainly Victorian.

You can see the rest of the images here, courtesy of my friend Kat. Not sure which fashion magazine these came from, but YEAH!

Gloves + cane + covered neck = I’d hit it like the angry fist of god.