Zombie Boy

I’m in a cab with Rico – aka Rick Genest aka Zombie Boy – and he’s wearing a Kill Me t-shirt and talking in animated terms about his beloved Lucy: “I love her. She’s so amazing,” he says, flashing a boyishly charming smile. It transpires that Lucy is actually Lucifer, his pet boa constrictor. This comforts me. Boys with cadaverous ta!oos need to date a Wednesday. Or a Desdemona. Or at the very least a Buffy, right?

RICK GENEST, A K A ZOMBIE BOY, 25: I wanted to leave no doubt. After this particular session, which lasted six hours, I was leaving for Milan to get checked by Guinness World Records, and I was going to make sure that nothing was going to come between me and the records for the most tattooed bones and most tattooed insects. I was awarded two medals, so the trip was successful. So far, I’ve spent 300 hours, give or take, to look like the living dead. I hope to be done by the fall or winter. In the meantime, I’m busy working. The day this photo was taken, I had three interviews set up, and I was preparing for a tattoo show. I perform in Lucifer’s Blasphemous Mad Macabre Torture Carnival all over Canada, and I model for Thierry Mugler, which is where Lady Gaga found me for her ‘‘Born This Way’’ video. Why did I decide to embark on this project? I guess I didn’t really think it over. Kids and tattoos, you know.

WITH something like 250 runway shows and parties crammed into the New York Fashion Week that begins Sept. 8, a lot of designers are saying that there must be a better way to show clothes, or at least some way to grab people’s attention for more than a second or two.

Naturally, most live models walking on a catwalk are three dimensional, or nearly so, but Norma Kamali, for one, sees a greater potential for showing clothes in a 3-D film format, as she plans to do on Sept. 14. The clothes can be seen in more detail, she said, and the exact same show can then be seen by anyone watching from home on a computer.