Woman from Deftones’ Around the Fur Album Art Looks Back on Iconic Cover 28 Years Later

By wazup on January 6, 2026 No Comments / 43 views

Deftones‘ seminal album Around the Fur features some of the most iconic artwork of the ’90s — a provocative image of a young woman in a jacuzzi, shot from a bizarre top-down, up-close perspective with a fisheye lens.

In a new video feature, Jenkem magazine set out to uncover the lore behind the sleeve image and its bikini-clad subject, Lisa Hughes, going as far as to track down the present-day Hughes, as well as catch up with the photographer behind the shot, Rick Kosick.

As Kosick recalls in the clip, he was invited to shoot photos during the recording of Around the Fur in Seattle. There was no pressure to produce an album cover shot, only “go there and have fun, hang out, shoot photos.”

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“They were kind of in their party phase stage of the band — as you probably should be — and so we went back to their their condo that they rented during the recording of this record, and there was this girl hanging out in the jacuzzi,” Kosick said (as transcribed by The PRP). “And I just went up and took a couple… two photos. That’s it. Walked away.”

He continued: “Few weeks later, I get a call from the label. ‘Hey, come by and check this out. We want to show you something.’ And the art director [Kevin Reagan], he was like, ‘Well, what do you think?’ I was like, ‘Wow.’ I was blown away. I was like, ‘This is so cool looking. This looks… I love it’ — of course, I’m going to say I love it. It’s my photo — but I was just really… looking back, I was just really excited because it felt right after all the mockups and everything, this one looks incredible.”

Hughes also said she had no intentions of cover art fame and cleared up any misconceptions surrounding the photo, i.e. that she was a groupie.

“I found those articles, you know, about like [me allegedly] being a groupie and this and that,” Hughes said. “And I was like, maybe I should just start a little page just about myself and so people know that I’m Lisa. I’m just this awesome chick from Auburn, and I like to have fun. And there’s no groupie action going on here. Just me having a kick-ass time, you know?”

Regarding Kosick’s iconic image, she added: “It’s a pretty cool looking shot, right? Like with the fisheye lens just looking down. You know, it’s kind of risqué a little bit with my breasts, and people have asked, ‘Oh, look, you got a pimple there.’ I’m like, ‘Who gives a sh*t?’ What does that really matter?’ I’m a human being. I’m not a model and I could care less really. That’s me. It’s just cool looking. And if you look at the whole shot and the legs going into the hot tub, it just looks pretty awesome.”