Golden Hour on the Boardwalk

Inside the Adamov Studio x Cat House Meow shoot with Katerina, where retro tennis whites meet Venice Beach’s last light.

Venice Beach does not do subtlety, and neither did this shoot. Adamov Studio brought its lens to the boardwalk for a golden-hour sitting built entirely around contrast: candy-pink heart sunglasses against a cloudless cobalt sky, terry-cloth wristbands against a body built in a gym, and a single white one-piece doing more visual work than most designers manage with an entire collection.

The concept sits somewhere between a 1970s tennis pro-shop catalog and a Baywatch fever dream, and Katerina — Cat House Meow’s newest face in front of Adamov’s camera — plays it completely straight. There is no wink to the camera, no ironic distance from the leg warmers or the terrycloth headband. The retro-athletic wardrobe is worn like a uniform, which is exactly what makes the images land: the styling reads as intentional rather than costume.

Location as Co-Star

Venice Beach earns its keep in this set. Adamov Studio didn’t scrub the backdrop clean the way a lot of swim editorials do — the sun-bleached storefronts, the volleyball-net silhouettes, the passersby blurred into the middle distance are all left in frame. It places the shoot somewhere real rather than on an anonymous stretch of sand, which matters for a magazine built on the idea that the fantasy should still feel tactile.

The palm trees do most of the compositional heavy lifting. Nearly every frame uses their trunks as vertical anchors or their fronds as a soft, blown-out canopy that catches the last orange light of the day. It’s the kind of detail that separates a shoot that was planned around golden hour from one that simply happened to be shot in the evening.

Styling Notes

The palette stays deliberately narrow: white swimwear, white leg warmers, white sneakers, white wristbands and headband, broken only by the swimsuit’s lilac underlay and the rose-tinted heart sunglasses. It’s a styling choice that keeps the eye on Katerina rather than the accessories, and it lets Adamov Studio lean hard into warm, high-contrast light without the frame ever feeling busy.

The cutout one-piece itself does the most work in the set — structured enough to hold its shape through the more athletic poses (the lunges, the raised-arm finishing pose), cut low enough to keep the silhouette lean against the wide horizon of the boardwalk.