The fitting room at ZUZWA's Paris atelier smells faintly of steam and wool

The fitting room at ZUZWA's Paris atelier smells faintly of steam and wool. On the dress form, a coat in charcoal melton sits half-pinned, its sleeves still unset. Founder Zuzanna Wasilewska circles it twice, tugs the shoulder seam forward an inch, and steps back. "She would have hated this," she says, meaning the coat's original iteration—too stiff, too formal. The she in question is her grandmother, Krystyna, who died in 2019 and never saw the label bear fruit. But the principle holds. ZUZWA's silhouettes answer to three women, none of them clients, none of them famous. They are the designer's grandmother, her mother, and her eldest sister. The house exists because they did.

Wasilewska grew up in Kraków, trained at Central Saint Martins, and spent four years as a pattern cutter at The Row before launching ZUZWA in 2021. The brand's aesthetic—austere tailoring, minimal fastenings, an almost monastic palette—reads as cerebral until you learn its origins. Krystyna was a dressmaker in Soviet-era Poland, working from a single-room flat with a treadle Singer and fabric smuggled in from East Germany. She made wedding dresses, school uniforms, coats for neighbours who paid in eggs or flour. Wasilewska remembers her grandmother's hands, always moving, and the way she could eyeball a shoulder slope without measuring. "She never used patterns," Wasilewska told System in 2022. "She would hold the fabric up to you, mark it with tailor's chalk, and cut. I thought everyone's grandmother could do that."

Krystyna's influence is structural. ZUZWA's signature coat—the Krystyna, launched in the debut collection—is cut from a single piece of cloth, no centre-back seam, with raglan sleeves that allow full arm rotation. It weighs 16oz, hangs to mid-calf, and comes in charcoal, navy, or black. The design borrows from Polish military greatcoats, but the construction is Krystyna's: minimal waste, maximum durability, nothing decorative. Wasilewska still owns one of her grandmother's coats, a wool-linen blend from the 1970s, and wears it most autumns. The hem is frayed, the lining patched twice, the buttons replaced. It has never been to a dry cleaner.

Her mother, Marta, is the house's pragmatist. She worked as a translator in Warsaw through the 1990s and 2000s, raising three daughters on a civil-service salary. Wasilewska describes her wardrobe as "ten pieces, all black or grey, worn in rotation for twenty years." Marta bought quality when she could afford it and repaired everything else. She had two pairs of trousers, both high-waisted and wide-legged, both tailored by Krystyna. She wore them with men's shirts from a military surplus store and a single cashmere sweater she saved for. The look was unintentional—born of necessity, not minimalism—but it planted something in her daughter. "She looked elegant without trying," Wasilewska said in a 2023 interview with Vestoj. "Not because she had taste, but because she had discipline."

Marta's influence shows up in ZUZWA's trousers. The house makes four styles, all variations on a high-waisted, flat-front silhouette with a side zip and no belt loops. The fabric is 10oz wool-mohair in winter, linen-cotton in summer. They are expensive—€620 as of this season—but they are also structurally sound in a way most ready-to-wear is not. The waistband is double-layered and boned at the sides. The inseam is felled by hand. The hem is left raw, intended to fray slightly with wear. Wasilewska has said she wants her trousers to last fifteen years, the way her mother's did, and the construction suggests she means it.

The third muse is her sister, Zofia, an architect in Berlin. Zofia is six years older, angular, and famously unsentimental. She wears ZUZWA occasionally but prefers vintage Jil Sander and Lemaire. She has no interest in fashion as a cultural object and once told her sister that most clothing was "solutions looking for problems." Wasilewska took it as a compliment. Zofia's wardrobe is small, deliberate, and built around layering—a principle that has become central to ZUZWA's seasonal collections. The autumn 2024 lineup includes a sleeveless wool tunic designed to sit over a long-sleeved cotton shirt, a cropped jacket meant to layer under the Krystyna coat, and a series of lightweight knits that work as mid-layers or standalone pieces. Nothing is ornamental. Everything assumes you already own the basics.

Zofia also pushed her sister toward architecture as a framework for design. ZUZWA's garments are rarely draped; they are engineered. Wasilewska works with a structural pattern cutter in Paris, and most pieces begin with a technical drawing rather than a sketch. The Zofia jacket, introduced last year, has no darts—its shape comes entirely from the cut and the weight of the cloth, a 14oz wool-cashmere that holds its line without stiffness. The sleeves are set slightly forward, anticipating the body's natural posture, and the armholes are cut high and narrow. It is a jacket that works best in motion, which is the point. Zofia, according to her sister, does not sit still.

The risk in building a house around three women is that it can collapse into sentimentality. ZUZWA avoids this by staying cold. The clothes are not romantic. They do not flatter in the conventional sense. The trousers require a certain frame or confidence; the coats overwhelm smaller bodies; the palette—charcoal, black, navy, occasional grey—offers no relief. Wasilewska has been criticised for this, particularly by buyers who want colour or softness or something that photographs well on a hanger. She has not adjusted. "I am not making clothes for everyone," she told Business of Fashion in 2023. "I am making clothes for my mother, my sister, my grandmother. If other women want them, good. If not, I will keep making them."

The next chapter is uncertain. ZUZWA remains small—two collections a year, no runway shows, stockists in six cities. Wasilewska has resisted expansion, turned down investment offers, and kept production in Poland, where labour costs are higher and lead times longer. The brand is profitable but not scalable, which may be intentional. Krystyna made dresses for neighbours. Marta wore ten pieces for twenty years. Zofia builds structures that last. ZUZWA, in that sense, is not a fashion house. It is a family trade, formalised.