It's no secret that the StyleCaster crew is an eclectic bunch of hipsters, neurotics, downtown kids, fashion darlings and cynically humorous denizens that spend each day together gossiping and gabbing about everything and anything under the sun -- crushes being no exception.
Sure, they run the norm from Ryan Gosling to Jared Leto, but then there's a brave soul or two (like myself) who never let a little thing like societal norms stop us from enjoying the strange, beautiful and definitely unusual.
Want to become an international fashion model and appear in a music video with Lady Gaga?
A young Canadian named Rick Genest has done just that. All he had to do was spend 7 years getting himself tattooed from head to toe to look like a Walking Dead extra. The Quebec-born Genest, 26, hung out in the Montreal punk-rock scene at age 17 and started appearing in freak shows. At age 19, he began working with tattoo artist Frank Lewis to transform his entire body into a decaying corpse.
Around this time last year, Montrealer Rick Genest received a Facebook message from Nicola Formichetti, Lady Gaga’s famous stylist sidekick who had been newly appointed as creative director for fashion label Thierry Mugler. Formichetti was curious about Genest’s body art – tattoos covering nearly every centimetre of skin, which make him look like a walking corpse. Think elaborate Day of the Dead makeup – blackened circles around the eye sockets, a smile that extends past the lips to reveal a skeletal jaw – in permanent ink. And that’s just his face. Genest’s shaved head has been detailed with the brain’s twisting hemispheres. Overtop his all-too-real ribcage depiction: a massive biohazard symbol.
Genest, 26, hails from Châteauguay, Que. He left home at 17 for Montreal, where he moved in punk-rock circles, starting off as a squeegee kid before joining and developing travelling freak shows.
With much effort (Genest didn’t have a passport at the time), Formichetti was able to get him to Paris, where he appeared in a men’s-wear presentation for Mugler followed by Lady Gaga’s Born This Way video. Dermablend, a line of professional skincare makeup, cleverly recruited Genest to show the effectiveness of its tattoo-concealing product; a video of his transformation has been viewed on YouTube more than 7.4 million times.
It was at the age of 19 that the now 26-year-old Rick Genest, known commonly as “Rico” and “Zombie Boy,” committed to his full-body tattoo project, putting his then pristinely pale skin in the hands of tattoo artist Frank Lewis to began transforming his body into a veritable piece art that depicts a decaying body. Strangely enough, it was the death-laden images inscribed onto his flesh that gave birth to Genest’s career as an icon, muse, circus act and high-end fashion model. Following his inking, Genest joined sideshows and contemporary carnivals, and even started his own traveling freak show titled Lucifer’s Blasphemous Mad Macabre Torture Carnival. Then one day, Thierry Mugler’s creative director, Nicola Formichetti, came calling, and in no time at all, Genest was walking the runways of Paris, starring in ad campaigns and globetrotting with the likes of Lady Gaga (Formichetti’s personal client). It seems this is just the beginning for Genest, who, despite a growing mainstream persona, longs only to give his punk rock cronies “a place to live” back in Montreal and return the favors they did for him.
Describe your personality in 10 words or less.
“Gonna end up a big ole pile a them bones.”
