Half the fun of any new collection from The Lake & Stars is trying to make sense of the puzzling, and often witty, campaign imagery that goes along with it.

A few months back, the hip New York label left a few jaws hanging with its F/W 2010 campaign, which featured a threesome of models exploring their sexual boundaries — provoked, apparently, by those wicked tights with the cut-out bottoms!

This time around, The Lake & Stars is taking its adoring fans back to philosophy class with a strange, elliptical photo campaign titled Ritualized: The Art of Communal Living to promote the upcoming TLS Spring 2011 lingerie collection.

Filled with disorienting staged scenes, indecipherable symbols and aphoristic captions, Ritualized contains enough mini-puzzles to keep a roomful of Phil101 students churning out term papers for the next year.

Models hunt for pyramids on a beach, conduct a watery baptism, gaze into a fountain, and conduct a variety of strange, cult-like group rituals. To help you navigate this strange terrain, photographer Tom Hines has thoughfully included a number of cue cards and photo captions containing mundane affirmations like “opening ourselves to a deeper sensory awareness gives us new life.”

You can have a lot of fun studying the artfully conceived sets in Ritualized and debating their iconography, but don’t go diving too deep in your search for meaning. Taken as a whole, the new TLS campaign promotes a rather commonplace manifesto of girlpower, self-belief and non-conformity.

And the “community” which encompasses all this is one you’re already familiar with: it’s all those smart, sexy urban girls who love fashion-forward lingerie styles like those from The Lake & Stars.

See? It does all make sense.

We’ll have more to say about the new The Lake & Stars spring collection later on. First, here’s the Ritualized campaign, in order, below

NOTE: For space reasons, some of the images below omit the caption that was meant to accompany them. To see a smaller version of the entire series, complete with all captions, visit our friends over at Refinery 29 here.