Model Suvi Koponen, photographer Richard Burbridge, and stylist Joanne Blades serve up scads of all of the above in the May issue of Italian Vogue, for a story called A Summer Blend. It's the kind of seasonal round-up that could have been a grab-bag of trends tied together incoherently by lesser hands — but here the craziness works. We don't care to know what Suvi is "doing" in these shots, or wonder as to her motivation, or whatnot — it's enough that she's there, moving, jumping (but not in that U.S.Vogue way), twisting and dominating every picture. It's the kind of spread that's an end in itself.

Yes, Suvi can balance on the wooden-ridged lid of a steamer trunk in six-inch heels. That's the kind of stuff they teach you when you're Finland's Next Top Model.

And yes, she can do the same trick upside down. Remember the all the pretzel contortions and weird angles of last season's Calvin Klein campaign? This is a woman who knows how to throw the kind of poses that make you look twice.

This is kind of a don't-call-it-a-comeback moment for Koponen. While she still appeared in major campaigns as recently as last fall, she's been absent from the international runways for two seasons now, preferring to travel. If only we all could announce our returns from abroad with 13-page editorials in Italian Vogue.

While I love narrative fashion spreads as much as the next person, they can sometimes suffer from a certain cloying quality, a kind of intrusive nudge-nudge of the viewer. Even as you're flicking through the pages, you recognize that now you're supposed to think this, and now you're supposed to realize this is true, but wait, here's a reversal! Et cetera. Also sometimes models aren't good at acting, or the stories are trite — how many times have we seen the "woman takes a lover" arc? Editorials like Burbridge's here are bombast, color and light signifying little, perhaps, beyond themselves — but they're so damn for-the-heck-of-it impressive it's hard to look away.

The abstracted, angled black shadows on the white background, the strong, slanting light that hit the model just so, the black-and-white photography, and the simple lines of the featured clothes, all made one clear announcement: the cashmere brand pointed to the latest Calvin Klein campaign with Suvi Koponen, and told its creative team to copy like their lives depended on it. But then I got to thinking, haven’t I seen the architectural black and white theme elsewhere in fashion photography this season? In a business as crowd-sourced and trend-based as fashion, how can you tell the difference between recycling an aesthetic and taking inspiration from an old idea, anyway?

Suvi Koponen — Finland’s next top model, would you believe — has been favored for Calvin Klein Collection campaigns for the past few seasons. This fall, she was shot by Fabien Baron for a series of images that took dramatic delight in the lines of Francisco Costa’s garments, which this season were a little like 90s minimalism gone very good. Dodai is on record calling this campaign one of fall's worst ads, but I gasped when I first saw it. Working with so little — no props to create an atmosphere, no other models to generate charisma — could easily result in a tedious set of images. Sure, Suvi looks a little like a robot (an awe-inspiring fashion robot). And I don’t love the Stepford coiffure, which seems to unhelpfully contrast in era with the clothes. But I think these pictures are unmistakably beautiful. And I prefer their flirtation with high-concept self-serious absurdity to a million here’s-a-pretty-girl-now-buy-our-product luxury campaigns any day.

So clearly any images that distinctive were going to get knocked off. TSE photographed both its men’s and women’s lines in a style that looks like a dumbed-down retread of Baron and Koponen's Calvin Klein campaign.

The buttons on this coat don’t lie flat down the front, and the shadows cast by the lapels make the man’s chest look hollow. The coat hangs like it’s too big and nobody cared to pin it. Whereas in Baron's images, the bare-bones minimalism worked, here the same aesthetic looks under-thought and under-inspired. The result is boring.

Another fashion personage supping from the black-and-white cup this season? Patrick Demarchelier. The iconic photographer had an editorial in November’s Italian Vogue with models Mariacarla Boscono and Anja Rubik where the nearly all-black styling, plain white studio set with angled walls, and dramatic spot lighting all point to the same originating idea as the Calvin Klein campaign. But Demarchelier is enough of a creative mind to push the edges of the concept just enough to spread it over some different ground.

Gone is any attempt to make the models look 'natural': their poses are exaggerated, their torsos and legs twist and weave to bizarre effect. The shadows they throw are occasionally grotesque, and the weird black shapes on the walls play with the same ideas of scale as the built-up shoulders, jutting collars, and rigid teacup peplums of the clothes.

Hair is a frizzed bowl cut in bleach blonde (Rubik) or jet black (Boscono); makeup an ungodly pallor etched with mannequinish black lines at the jaw and lips. It all feels a little stagey, but that is the point: Demarchelier is reminding us that everything we see in the pages of a fashion magazine is artifice. Any magazine is an experience engineered by the conscious aesthetic choices of hundreds of individuals, and the same hours of of styling, hair, makeup, and post-production go into a 'natural' Steven Meisel editorial as into one where the models look like aliens experienced in posing. There is nothing natural about it. I think Demarchelier’s adjusted reflection of Fabien Baron’s campaign is a welcome contribution to the fashion discourse.

To me, this is a perfect example of fashion's hot-house idea-sharing — how an idea as old as the sun (black and white) is made to seem new again in an ad with weird styling and solid photography, inspires an old hand to take up the idea and add something new to it outside the realm of advertising, all while other brands move to piggyback and do so with less skill than the original. That's the fashion cycle, right there.