Elle Muliarchyk – the bold and the beautiful

Alone Hermès
self-staged photograph by Elle Muliarchyk.

Belarus-born Elle Muliarchyk, 23, blonde and beautiful, sets my heart racing. Not just for her beauty, but also for her artistic accomplishments, which she seems to have achieved with a curiosity and daring not easy to come by.

Elle Muliarchyk is a model and a photographer in her own right, modelling in her own photographs and staging the entire performance with clothes, make-up, props, lights, tripod and camera… in dressing rooms of high-fashion boutiques, and even in dangerous locations outdoors at night… within minutes and in most trying situations, to avoid getting caught.

What Elle Muliarchyk does is walk into some of the most glamorous boutiques, take photographs of herself wearing the choicest expensive clothes, posing for the shots, adding props and lights to compose her pictures, and then walk out of the store without buying anything. She usually has only minutes to do this daring act before getting caught by the store attendants and getting kicked out of the store or arrested by the police.

As she says in her self-styled profile on SHOWstudio: “Doing this I become my own photographer, model, art director, make up artist and hair stylist. I can be whoever I desire at that moment ‘a movie star, a Vamp, a Seductress’, and own those outrageously unaffordable clothes for a few moments, never having to pay for it!”

But that’s not all. While collaborating with fashion designer Bella Freud on a project, Elle Muliarchyk has walked around in some of London’s seedy areas at night, armed with her tripod and her camera, taking self-portraits in Freud’s latest collection. Apparently, during her first shot, she was attacked and mugged by a gang of eight men, witnessed a robbery of a boutique and had to escape the guys on the motorcycles. But, as she says in her SHOWstudio profile, “the images were totally worth getting.”

Fashion Television has featured Elle Muliarchyk and her daring acts on a couple of occasions, which can be seen here and here.

Elle Muliarchyk’s SHOWstudio profile can be found here, and a selection of her photographs can be seen on the German website Stern.de.

Zarah Crawford of The New York Times has done a story on Elle Muliarchyk in August 2006, called Pretty Larceny, which makes interesting reading. It also explains the ‘Alone Hermès’ photograph displayed in this post.

[Citation: Elle Muliarchyk profile on SHOWstudio; Elle Muliarchyk videos on Fashion Television; Elle Muliarchyk’s photographs on Stern.de; and Zarah Crawford’s story on Elle Muliarchyk, Pretty Larceny, on The New York Times, 27 August 2006. ‘Alone Hermès’ photograph reproduced from Elle Muliarchyk’s collection on Stern.de.]