Against all warnings from the United States State Department, I touched down in Kyiv on 27 March 2014. My hotel was approximately 500 meters from Maidan Square where buildings had been burnt to the core just days before. Across the street from where the building had burned, a memorial for the one hundred (+) people who were martyred by their government. Barbed wire and walls of burnt tires and cars blockaded the square on one side, and in the center of the square the columnar monument was decorated like a tree with a prominent portrait of Vladimir Putin at the top, adorned with a Photoshopped moustache à la Adolf Hitler.

I was, strangely enough, in Kyiv for Fashion Week. I felt very strange about this, but I grew up in a town with a large portion of the Ukrainian Diaspora, and I had always been curious as to “what it was like.” I was, however, very afraid to go. I remember telling my late friend, Nabile, that I was scared, and he said, “Don’t be afraid, it’s not that bad, where I’m from they’ll pour concrete down your throat if you say the wrong thing!” and somehow that calmed me down.

Nabile and I walked down Khreschatyk Street towards Maidan with our cameras in hand. Military tents bolted to eyebolts pressed into the pavement lined the streets. Civilian men in camouflage. Women with head scarves crying. Bearded Orthodox priests delivering speeches and blessings to the victims. Enough of that, though, we needed to be at Olympiyskiy for a fashion show…ugh. This didn’t feel right.

This trip was a watershed moment in my career and life. This trip started all the other trips. Over the next years I would visit 45 (or more) new countries for fashion weeks. I’d barely ever be home again, until March of 2020 when COVID-19 struck. And on this trip, I met Lilia Litkovskaya. Or at least that was her name in 2014 before she legally shed the Russian suffix of her last name as a beautiful “fuck you” to the oppressors.

Jump ahead. Paris, 2023. I message Lilia and ask her if I can document the fittings and backstage of her show in Paris. And I ask if I can come to her home. She obliges and thanks me and I head to a location somewhere in the 20th Arrondissement where she is hosting the fittings. I do my best to disappear in the small space. I snap photos of the wheat strewn on the floor for styling (the yellow of the Ukrainian Flag represents fields of wheat) and a few portraits of Lilia.

I visit the hectic backstage of her show on Boulevard Hausmann. I focus mostly on Lilia and her process before the show. I’ve been to enough backstages that I do not need to shoot another one “for fun”.

On 3 October I ride my recently un-stolen bicycle in the pouring rain to Lilia’s home which happens to be just across the street from the space she had her fittings in. I’m soaked. Lilia greets me from a window on the top floor in a very fairytale-like way. She points me to the door and welcomes me inside and offers me tea and breakfast.

While we sit at her dining table, she tells me how she left Ukraine in the first days of Russia’s escalated invasion in 2021. She tells me that she begged her mother to join her, but that she had refused. And she tells me how shortly after leaving, her mother was forced to flee Ukraine from Bucha where she left by foot and was forced to run TOWARDS Russia’s front line as it was her only chance to flee.

Shortly after hearing this story her mother walks in the door. Her mother who escaped a massacre. Her mother looks like any other mother. It’s a bizarre thought that this normal person could have been put in such a situation. My brain is racing with these thoughts, and Lilia asks her mother (in Ukrainian) to play the piano for us. She plays Chopin and I listen from the kitchen until the last notes.

I thank Lilia and her mother for the hospitality. I take one last portrait in another room, and I get on my bike and ride back home. I don’t know if I was prepared for such an emotionally intense morning, to be honest. I’m grateful to have been able to have had this morning exactly as it was (minus the rain). I’ve known Lilia since the first days of Russian annexation of her country’s territory and I know her still. Countless things have happened in both of our lives since I first walked the streets of Kyiv, but I’m glad we are both still able to be here and sit down together, regardless of the circumstances.

War sucks.