THE HOURGLASS

It is likely safe to say that Elle Muliarchyk is the only person to have been arrested in both a Gucci boutique in London and a Roberto Cavalli boutique in New York. It is even safer to say that she is the only person to have this distinction and also to have studied quantum physics at Stanford.

The six-foot-tall, Belarus-born beauty caused a sensation in fashion and photography circles in 2006 with an irreverent, surreal collection of photographs taken in high-fashion dressing rooms. Muliarchyk, a model at the time and only 21, would select couture to try on, then, with props she had sneaked in, cleverly stage and photograph elaborate scenes in the semi-privacy of the changing room. “I wouldn’t just try it on and take a picture,” she says. “I would create a set. I would bring crazy things. I brought an inflatable gorilla hand that was six feet long.” Casting herself as a modern-day Ann Darrow, Muliarchyk draped herself in the gorilla’s palm for a picture she named “King Kong.” “With the most elaborate sets, if they opened the door and I got caught, they would think I was crazy and call the police.”

The series, “Dressing Rooms,” brought Muliarchyk not only instant international fame but also a distinguished career in photography. Her oeuvre soon broadened to include film and fashion portraiture, but she remains best known for her self-portraits. Most recently she took the designer Chadwick Bell’s spring collection on a road trip across the United States. “Chadwick invented this woman, who was like a contemporary version of Georgia O’Keefe,” Muliarchyk says of the character she embodies in the series, “Escapes from Paradise.” “The girl who lives in New York but becomes sick of it all. She’s this independent woman, this modernist artist, and she just leaves her environment and travels and discovers her inner artist again.”

Shop Muliarchyk's edition for Whisper here.