FROM THE ARCHIVE: Lady Cube
When fashion becomes concept, image, and art from issue 216 Sep. 2023
Not every fashion story needs to begin with the question, What is everyone wearing this season?
Sometimes the more interesting question is simply: What can we create?
For this edition of From the Archives, we return to Lady Cube, one of PERIOD’s most visually conceptual editorials. Photographed by Andrey Lukovnikov and featuring Ekaterina Lukovnikova, the story strips fashion back to a handful of powerful elements: red, blue, white, geometry, movement, and an intentionally surreal sense of identity.
At first glance, the wardrobe is almost secondary. A simple white bodysuit becomes a blank canvas. The body is divided into blocks of saturated color, while the oversized red cube completely removes the face from the image. What is left is silhouette, gesture, proportion, and composition.
That is exactly what makes the story work.
Lady Cube sits somewhere between fashion photography, performance, and visual art. The figure becomes less of a traditional model and more of a graphic element within the frame. Blue hands stretch, bend, and interrupt the composition. Red legs cut through the pale landscape. The cube becomes both a mask and an object, turning anonymity into the strongest visual identity in the story.
It is a reminder of something we have always believed at PERIOD: fashion is not only about clothes.
Of course, fashion responds to seasons, collections, silhouettes, and trends. But editorial fashion has the freedom to go further. It can be about creating an atmosphere. Building a character. Exploring an idea. Taking something simple and pushing it until it becomes strange, beautiful, or completely unexpected.
Sometimes the most memorable image is not the one showing the season’s most important outfit.
Sometimes it is the image that makes you stop because you have never quite seen anything like it before.
That is where concept and creativity become just as important as styling. A photograph can become a piece of art, and fashion becomes the language used to build it.
Looking back at Lady Cube, that sense of experimentation is still what gives the editorial its impact. It is playful without becoming frivolous, minimal without feeling empty, and surreal without losing the discipline of a fashion image.
There are moments when fashion should sell you a jacket.
And there are moments when fashion should simply make you imagine something new.
Lady Cube belongs firmly to the second.
CREDITS
Photography: Andrey Lukovnikov
Model: Ekaterina Lukovnikova
GET A COPY OF PERIOD 216 HERE
From the Archives is part of OFF THE PAGES, where PERIOD revisits the editorials, ideas, experiments, and defining images that have shaped the magazine over the years.
