Second Skin

There is a particular intimacy that happens when fashion enters the home, especially a home that feels slightly wrong. Our December cover starring Rebecca-Jo Dunham-Baruchel and featuring garments by Atelier Artifact leans fully into that unease. The team constructs a world where domesticity becomes unsettling, where clothing feels repurposed, softened, frayed, and made unfamiliar through how it hangs, slips, and shifts across the body. The images evoke the sensation of playing dress up with a doll that exists somewhere between real and imagined. Glossed skin, rigid poise, and an unnerving stillness turn the model into an Artifact figure: part muse, part mannequin, suspended in a mode of being that resists clear interpretation.

Set inside the home, the series becomes a quiet study in transformation. Rooms that should feel safe instead feel staged and slightly unreal. The model moves through them not like a person inhabiting space, but like an object rediscovered, returning to itself after long abandonment. The house becomes a stage where the doll is dressed and redressed in layered, undone, and repurposed pieces pulled from an ever-growing archive.

What emerges is a portrait of the uncanny. Not horror, but a softer disquiet: the feeling that something familiar has shifted a few degrees off its axis. Atelier Artifact invites the viewer into that threshold space, where clothing operates as a second skin and identity becomes textured, unstable, and performative. It is an invitation into a domestic world where beauty distorts, where the seams show, and where the uncanny reveals itself slowly, one frame at a time.