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

a befuddling coroner’s photo of retired doctor John Bentley, 1966

Dear diary, today my heart leapt when Agent Scully suggested spontaneous human combustion…
-Agent Fox Mulder

Ho hum, the good old days. Pluto was still a planet, Nessie, Big Foot and leprechauns frolicked unfettered among us and the theoretical possibility of true Spontaneous Human Combustion seemed feasible. Well, to me, at any rate. I’m not really sure what’s to blame for that. (Repo Man? Krook from Bleak House? My unhealthy childhood obsession with Brad Dourif?) In any case, Ablaze! was required bathroom reading in my apartment for many years. Until quite recently, I clung to my hope that there was a chance, albeit remote, of my asshole ex being inexplicably reduced to a pile of ashes with feet.

Alas, thanks to a series of informative scientific articles and National Geographic specials, believers must face facts: SHC is a most likely myth.

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.

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What a year it’s been! New posts go up on this site, older ones recede into the past. Gone, but not forgotten. This New Year’s Eve, we’re resurrecting the Greatest Hits of 2007 in seven different categories: culture, music, style, art, film, literature and opinion. In selecting which posts to include, we realized that much of a post’s brilliance lies in the responses. From beverage-through-the-nose laughter to stroke-our-imaginary-beard contemplation (or, in Mildred’s case, her actual beard), your responses have informed/inspired/infected us as much as we hope we’ve done the same for you. Thank you for sharing in our obsessions.

What’s ahead for Coilhouse in 2008? More blog posts, of course, but perhaps even more exciting will be the publication of Coilhouse Magazine, Issue 1, which will be available on this site. What’s in the magazine, you ask? It’s a surprise! There will be lots of art and interviews, fun pieces that you can cut out and play with, and original, thought-provoking articles that you won’t be able to find anywhere else.

More news on the print magazine soon! And now, without further ado, the Greatest Hits of 2007. Hit “reload” on your browser to see random articles load each time:

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Twenty1f takes a look back at some of the future-forward designs of the year. I love the metal leggings from Balenciaga and the body contoured molds of McQueen, though much of the rest of his fall wasn’t to my liking.

Alexander Mcqueen Fall ‘07 collection

It is amusing, however, that this McQueen show, inspired by his bloodline tracing back to a victim of the Salem witch trials, got bad reviews not for the designs, but for use of darque imagery the audience found distracting. From style.com: “there was a pentagram traced in red in a black-sand circle, with an inverted pyramid hanging over it. As the show started, a macabre film—of naked women, swarming locusts, faces decaying to skulls, and blood and fire—started to play above the models’ heads”. Oh Alexander!

Balenciaga Spring ‘07 collection

This line was inspired by designer Nicolas Ghesquière watching Tron and Terminator. See it all here.

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.

No party dresses today! Time to throw on some battle gear and greet the new year with renewed powers. Welcome it sweetly and wrangle it at an opportune moment. We only get so many of these new years so don’t frown on resolutions, squidlings, especially if you’ve the capacity to stick to them. Find a night just for you this week and set some damn goals. You can doo eeet!

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.