## The Fitting Room

The Fitting Room

Łukasz Nowak stands in a first-floor atelier off Rue de Turenne, pinning the sleeve head of a coat that refuses to sit flat. The fabric is a double-faced cashmere from Loro Piana, cream on one side, tobacco brown on the other, and the construction requires the two layers to move independently while appearing fused. He pulls the pin, resets the pitch, steps back. The model, a Polish architecture student named Kasia, has been standing with one arm raised for eleven minutes.

"Almost," Nowak says, in Polish, then switches to French for the benefit of the two assistants flanking the cutting table. "We need another quarter-inch at the back armscye."

This is ZUZWA in its ninth year: a Paris-based house built on reversible tailoring, ambiguous silhouettes, and the structural logic Nowak learned as a civil engineering student in Kraków before he dropped out to work in a costume atelier. The name, he has said in multiple interviews, is a childhood nickname. The aesthetic is harder to summarise. Vogue Runway called it "soft brutalism." Another critic wrote "Céline via Warsaw," which Nowak found reductive but didn't dispute.

The Pivot

Nowak did not train at Central Saint Martins or the Antwerp Royal Academy. He spent three years at the Kraków University of Technology studying load-bearing structures, then left in 2009 to apprentice under a theatrical costumier named Zofia Baran, who had dressed opera productions across Eastern Europe since the 1970s. Baran's atelier operated out of a Soviet-era block in Nowa Huta. The work was historical reconstruction: boned bodices, period tailcoats, garments that had to survive eight shows a week and quick changes in unlit wings.

"She taught me that construction is not decoration," Nowak told System magazine in 2021. "A bone channel that shows is a failure. The engineering should be invisible."

He moved to Paris in 2012, worked as a pattern cutter for Véronique Leroy, then spent two years at Lemaire during the label's early independent phase. Christophe Lemaire's approach to volume and ease left a mark. So did the discipline: every piece had to justify its existence in terms of function and form. Nowak has said he learned more in those two years than in the previous five.

ZUZWA began in 2015 with a twelve-look presentation in a rented Marais apartment. The collection featured reversible trench coats, double-faced wool trousers that could be worn either way, and a single blazer with hidden snaps that allowed the lapels to be reconfigured into a shawl collar. The idea was not novelty. It was flexibility. The pieces were expensive—entry point around €800 for a shirt—but they worked. Buyers from L'Eclaireur and Dover Street Market placed small orders. By the third season, Nowak had a studio and a staff of four.

The Signature

What distinguishes ZUZWA from the broader Paris contemporary market is not reversibility alone, though that remains a signature. It is the combination of architectural volume and wearable restraint. Nowak's patterns often start with menswear blocks—straight-shouldered blazers, wide-legged trousers with a flat front—then introduce subtle asymmetries. A coat might have one peaked lapel and one notched. A shirt might close left-over-right at the top, right-over-left at the waist. The effect is not costume. It is, instead, a kind of optical recalibration. You notice the garment, then you stop noticing it, then you notice it again from a different angle.

The fabrics skew natural: wool gabardine, linen twill, cotton canvas, cashmere jersey. Nowak works with mills in Italy and Portugal, occasionally Japan. He avoids prints and rarely uses colour outside a narrow range—cream, grey, charcoal, navy, rust, olive. The palette is monastic, but the construction is complex. A ZUZWA trench coat has, on average, forty-two pattern pieces. A standard Burberry trench has thirty-one.

The house showed on-calendar at Paris Fashion Week for the first time in October 2019. The collection, staged in a disused printworks in the 13th arrondissement, featured models walking in pairs, each wearing the same coat reversed to show the opposite face. Nowak called it "a conversation between two versions of the same idea." The reviews were positive but not euphoric. The Business of Fashion noted the "cerebral elegance." Wallpaper praised the "quiet rigour." No one called it a breakout.

Then the pandemic hit. ZUZWA, like most independent labels, contracted. Nowak furloughed half his staff and spent six months working alone in the studio, draping on a dress form and sewing samples by hand. The September 2020 collection, presented digitally, was his smallest: eight looks, all in undyed linen and raw wool. It was also his most focused. By the time physical shows resumed in 2021, the waiting list for ZUZWA's reversible trench had grown to four hundred names.

What Comes Next

Nowak is not interested in expansion for its own sake. ZUZWA produces roughly two hundred pieces per season, sold through a dozen stockists and the brand's own e-commerce platform. There are no plans for a flagship store. There is no diffusion line. When asked about growth, Nowak tends to redirect the question toward process. He wants to work with a mill in Scotland that produces double-cloth tweeds. He wants to develop a tailored trouser that can be altered at home without a tailor. He wants, he said in a recent interview with Monocle, "to make fewer things that last longer."

The Autumn/Winter 2024 collection, shown in February, included a collaboration with a Portuguese shoemaker on a reversible leather boot—smooth calfskin on one side, suede on the other, with a hidden zip that allowed the shaft to be turned inside out. It was technically ambitious and, at €1,200, commercially marginal. Nowak made sixty pairs. They sold out in three weeks.

He is back in the atelier now, adjusting the same coat. The sleeve head has finally settled. Kasia lowers her arm. Nowak steps back, examines the drape, nods. He does not smile, but the tension in his shoulders drops. The coat will go into the next collection. It will be reversible, naturally. One side cream, the other tobacco. The customer will choose which face to show. Nowak has already moved on to the next problem: a pair of trousers that need to work both as suiting and as separates, with a waistband that can be worn high or dropped to the hip depending on preference. The engineering, as always, will be invisible.