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Interview With the Zombie Boy
There Are three topics that Rick Genest -- the 26-year-old Nicola Formichetti muse, Lady Gaga collaborator, entrepreneur and, as of last week, freshly appointed spokesman for L'Or(c)al's Dermablend Professional line more commonly known as "Zombie Boy" or "Rico the Zombie" -- likes to talk about. They are: music; his aggregation of body-covering tattoos in an effort to resemble a living, walking, rotting corpse; and Lucifer's Blasphemous Mad Macabre Torture Carnival, his Montreal-based "traveling circus-freak show."
On a bright and cold morning during New York Fashion Week in February, Colin Singer, Genest's immigration lawyer-cum-manager (his official title is managing partner of rickgenest.com), lists each on his fingers as his client smokes outside the MAve Hotel in the Flatiron District, where they are staying. Genest spent the day and the next sitting front row at runway shows for designers like Nicholas K, Duckie Brown and General Idea. Following New York, he traveled to Milan, Moscow and Copenhagen for various fashion weeks and tattoo-festival-related appearances.
Genest attended the Cannes International Film Festival last month, and the Web-based October 2011 advertisement he shot with Dermablend -- before becoming its official spokesman for the next two years -- is nominated for a Lion Award at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity that runs until Saturday. He is the brand's first male spokesmodel. In the Dermablend "Go Beyond the Cover" video, which ran under the tag line "How do you judge a book?" a clear-skinned Genest stares at the camera and strips nude to the waist before rubbing off concealer to reveal the bones, ligaments, insects and lung-size radioactive symbol emblazoned across his skin. The video has over 15 million hits and has spawned endless debates on Internet forums, where teens argue that he was "beautiful before the makeup" and bemoan the shallow nature of society. He has more than 60,000 Twitter followers, who voice their rabid adoration and clamor for his "Kill Me" T-shirts and flat-brim caps. His personal Web site...