October 2025 – Necromantic

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Naya Kotko

The fashion photography of Naya Kotko is defined by stunning contrast, bold visual impact, and gorgeous, sumptuous dark costumes. Her imagery often features knife-sharp black crescent moons, Renaissance-style swords, long demonic nails, and red or blue backgrounds against which the monochromatic clothing shows up deliciously. Elaborate headdresses as well as both romantically draped and architectural garments form the mysterious and sibylline attire of the subjects of the photographs, whose faces are often obscured by veiling and cloaking. These semi-visageless figures are intensely dramatic, often being preternaturally extended by the extremely long trains of the outfits, while they contort their poetic, nightmarish hands. Some of the images are deceptively simple and take their effect from striking composition. Some appear to be captured in a kind of void, an atmosphere vaguely but theatrically colored, while others are set amidst the brutal and ornate beauty of natural landscapes defined by sea, rock, or cave. The craggy textures of these settings add depth to the images highlighting the severe black of the clothing. Witchy and eerie, Kotko’s photography is stylishly ominous, occupying a perfect space between surreal and elegant.

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Dark Botanical Jewelry from Dusky Meadow

Dusky Meadow is a handcrafted jewelry brand that takes inspiration from nature, history, and fairy tales. Unique and one of a kind, with a complicated yet raw look, Dominika’s pieces often incorporate images of butterflies and moths, vines and plants, toadstools, ribbon-like branches, moons, and mourning eyes. These wonderfully charming rings and necklaces are sinuous and fluid, but very ornate, like 19th-century household objects. The result is almost finicky, highly encrusted, at the same time having an unfinished naturalness and whimsical imprecision which gives a quality both ethereal and earthy to the pieces. Dominika’s influences range from Victorian accessories, anatomy, Eastern European folklore, Art Nouveau illustrations, to Gothic architecture and celestial bodies. I feel that moonstones are the perfect gem to set off her fantastical designs, and adore her imaginative envisioning of Baba Yaga’s hut with the stars and little gemstone moon in the sky behind it. The lavish creativity, whimsy, and preciousness of Dusky Meadow jewels make them some of the most coveted pieces I’ve lately laid my eyes upon.

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The Domestic Uncanny: Photography by Marianna Rothen

Marianna Rothen’s ultra dreamy, nostalgic photographs explore themes of womanhood, beauty, power, and domestic spheres. Many of them look as if they could have come straight out of the 1970s. With their gorgeous styling, the voluminous retro hairdos of cigarette-wielding housewives, the strange and slightly unnerving spaces that these glamorous beings seem to inhabit, Rothen’s images have a spontaneous feeling of the momentary, candid life caught on the move, yet at the same time a carefully composed, poised look. They are saturated in color and have a lush vagueness – the dreamy fading of the light around windows and skies suggests someone’s loveliest and most undying memories.

Many of Rothen’s photos make use of mannequins, emphasizing the uncanniness of the scenes she is capturing. The results are a mysterious and spectacularly beautiful depiction of the intimacy and eerie violence of a life seemingly lived in domestic obscurity – the drama of a psychological existence made up of husbands, babies, neighbors, girlfriends, isolation, eroticism, rebellion, and psychic death. The playful banditry in several of the tableaux, with the women holding knives and guns, seems to subvert the violent games of little boys – and the fact that only mannequins represent men is a reversal of the perceived doll-like nature of little girls who grow up to be wives and mothers.

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