Own concept brand · Fashion

CITRA

A self-initiated swimwear campaign built to test how believable swimwear imagery could become across a full set.

CITRA was created to explore one of the harder areas in AI image-making: swimwear, fabric and the body in water. I built the campaign around a calm seaside world to create a feeling of holiday, ease and quiet luxury. Instead of relying only on fashion portraits, I included full-body frames, a swimming shot, fabric detail and still life imagery to show how the product looks dry, wet and in motion. The biggest challenges were keeping the swimwear, fabric behaviour and body in water believable while making the whole set feel like one location campaign.

Services
  • Creative direction
  • AI image production
  • Campaign development
What I made
  • Swimwear launch campaign
  • Location-based imagery
  • Water + fabric studies
  • Still life + detail frames
How I work with fashion brands →

The brief

CITRA is my own concept brand, a resort swimwear label I invented and gave a spring/summer 2026 launch. I wanted to see whether AI swimwear photography could hold up across a whole seasonal campaign, with the same swimsuit in every on-model frame. No client asked for it, and the model is made with AI, like everything else in the set.

I imagined CITRA as an effortless resort brand, made for slow mornings and days that move from poolside to coastline. Swimwear is one of the more interesting challenges in AI imagery, because the result has to feel natural and tasteful and still read as fashion. The SS26 after the name is the season I planned it for. I built the set the way a label plans a seasonal drop, with campaign, product, lifestyle and social frames that share the same model direction and styling.

The swimsuit at the centre of the set is a chartreuse bikini, a warm yellow-green in a matte textured weave, gathered at the front into a small gold ring.

The direction

I set the swimwear campaign on a sun-bleached Cycladic terrace in Greece, where the swimsuit could become part of the landscape rather than something overly styled. The terrace is not a real place, and nobody travelled to find it.

The light is hard Greek noon sun from camera right, a single warm directional source, and an olive tree throws dappled shadow across the white walls and the model's skin. Whitewashed plaster and cobalt blue shutters sit above terracotta tiles, with the deep blue of the Aegean beyond a low terrace wall. The table is laid with white linen and a pile of lemons.

One blonde model carries the campaign. She leans against a sunlit wall with damp hair and lies on a woven lounger above the sea. Then she walks barefoot down a whitewashed lane to the water, and the aerial frame follows her into the swim. The lemons come back too, halved in her hand and whole behind the fabric close-up.

What was hard

Many AI tools are very restrictive about body-led images, even when the intention is clearly editorial, and on-model swimwear falls straight into that. Getting some frames made at all was part of the job, before quality came into it.

Then the swimsuit had to stay the same swimsuit. I created both the model and the swimsuit before developing the campaign, so I had a clear character and product design to work from throughout. In every frame the chartreuse colour, the textured fabric, the cut and the small gold ring at the front had to stay the same, and the model had to stay the same woman, from the frame at the wall to the walk down to the sea. I checked each frame against the established model and swimsuit, then retouched the images in post-production to correct differences and bring the set together. Each image needed to work on its own while still looking like the same woman in the same bikini.

Water brought its own test. In the aerial swim, skin and fabric are both wet and moving, and the swimsuit still had to hold its shape and colour. Keeping one light helped the set read as a single location, with the same hard noon sun from camera right in every frame.