STEPHEN KAMIFUJI CREATIVE DIRECTOR’S NOTE

If you’re fortunate enough to be rifling through this print issue of GENLUX while at our issue release party on June 22, 2023, you’ll soon discover how extraordinary our cover model, Lola Astanova, is in the world of classical music. She’ll be shredding the keys of the Yamaha C7 grand piano at 8:30, so you’re in for a special evening. This Emmyaward-winning piano virtuosa has over 1.1 million Instagram followers and 1.1 billion (yes, with “B” as in “badass”) shared YouTube views. That’s no easy feat for a classical performer, but she’s far from your garden variety pianist.

Andrew Matusik photographed Lola in the Presidential Suite of the Peninsula Beverly Hills , where, it was just our luck that it has a baby grand piano (p84) . The shoot was styled by the always-enthusiastic and on-point Coco DiGiaimo.

Our newest advertiser, Jedora.com, the online jewelry website, sent their creative director, David Miller, to guard and style Jedora’s precious collection of fine jewelry on Lola.

Also in this issue are photos by top New York fashion shooters Marc Baptiste and Jamie Pavon. Marc shot swimwear on the beach in Bridgehampton (p28), as Jamie took talented musician Bec Lauder to the Four Seasons New York Downtown for the shoot styled by Jessie Ajluni’s brilliant eye (p72) the team by stepping into those freezing Laguna Beach waters.

In LA, stories by star shooters Nathalie Gordon (p36) , Tracey Morris (p62) , and Geoff Ragatz (p44), captured summer fashion and swimwear.

Friend or Faux?

While we prefer to shoot different models for each story, Tracey and Geoff photographed the same stunning Ukrainian stunner Sofia Girich. She’s a special talent with great energy and took one for G

True to Earth’s AI zeitgeist, our photo story by photographer Erik Almås is the beautiful merging of artificial intelligence with real life (p52) . Model Allie Leggett flew up to Erik’s Sonoma-based studio to be photographed against a clean backdrop. He then photoshopped her into his AI backgrounds, and it’s hard to detect what’s physically real and what’s AI—which should give us all pause. As these innocent still images give way to potentially harmful AI-generated videos that serve up misinformation comes our need for hypervigilance when discerning “real” news and threats from faux ones.