The sportswear brand was called Kova, and it was, in 2016, precisely the kind of label that occupied the gap between fast fashion and actual athletic wear: good quality, mid-price, ambitious about its aesthetic and not always successfully so. Lina knew, from everything she'd catalogued in her notebook, that Kova would sign a celebrity athlete endorsement in eighteen months that would push it into a different tier entirely. The catalogue she was shooting now would be the last one before they became a brand people cared about.
She intended to be in it.
The studio was in an industrial district, the kind of space that real estate developers had not yet discovered was worth converting into lofts. It smelled of floor cleaner and the ghost of a thousand spray tans. The lighting rig took up half the ceiling. There were six other women booked for the three-day shoot.
She arrived eight minutes early, signed in, and went to find the rack with her name on it.
