## The Fitting Room

The Fitting Room

Martyna Zuzwa is kneeling on a wooden floor in Warsaw's Praga district, pinning a sleeve that refuses to lie flat. The fabric is a heavyweight linen-wool blend, 340gsm, and it has ideas of its own. She tugs the cuff, resets the pitch, pins again. The model—a friend, not a professional—shifts her weight. "Stay still," Zuzwa says, not looking up.

This is how most of ZUZWA's collections begin: on the body, with cloth that fights back.

The studio occupies the second floor of a converted textile factory. There are no mood boards. The cutting table is oak, scarred from decades of industrial use before Zuzwa bought it in 2019. Bolts of linen and raw silk lean against the wall. A single rail holds samples from the upcoming autumn collection: wide-legged trousers with a dropped fork, a coat with sleeves that extend past the knuckles, a shirt with no visible closure. Everything is in shades of grey, rust, or undyed flax.

Zuzwa stands, steps back, narrows her eyes. She pulls the pins out and starts over.

The Apprenticeship

Martyna Zuzwa did not study fashion. She studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, working primarily in clay and plaster. For three years she made figurative work—torsos, hands, draped forms. She was technically proficient and bored. "I kept thinking about the surface," she said in a 2022 interview with Vestoj. "Not the form underneath. The skin, the fold, the place where the body ended and the world began."

In her final year she abandoned sculpture and began draping fabric over armatures. Her tutors were unimpressed. She graduated without distinction and moved to Antwerp.

The Royal Academy accepted her into the fashion programme in 2011. She lasted two years. The curriculum emphasised concept and presentation; Zuzwa wanted to learn how cloth moved. She left before completing her degree and took a job as a pattern cutter at a small atelier in the city's diamond district. The pay was poor. The work was repetitive. She stayed for four years.

"I learned more in that basement than I did in any studio," she told System in 2021. "You cut the same trouser block two hundred times, you start to see what changes when you shift the grain by two degrees. You see what happens when the client has uneven hips, or a forward shoulder. You learn that bodies are never symmetrical and cloth is never neutral."

She returned to Warsaw in 2017 with a set of pattern blocks, a list of fabric mills, and no plan beyond making a small collection for herself.

The Pivot

ZUZWA's first collection appeared in 2018. Six pieces, all made to order, sold through a single stockist in Warsaw's Śródmieście district. The palette was limited: grey, black, undyed linen. The cuts were wide, asymmetric, and unadorned. Trousers sat low on the hip and broke over the instep. Shirts had sleeves that extended to the thumb. A coat in heavyweight linen had no buttons, only a single tie at the back neck.

The work was not minimal. Minimal implies reduction, a paring away of ornament to reveal essence. Zuzwa's garments were structurally complex. Sleeves were cut on the bias and set into armholes that curved forward. Trousers had a dropped fork and a wide leg that tapered sharply at the ankle. Collars were oversized and stood away from the neck. The effect was sculptural, but the sculpture was in the engineering, not the silhouette.

By 2019 she had three stockists. By 2020, twelve. The pandemic should have stalled momentum. Instead, ZUZWA's aesthetic—clothes that worked at home, that required no occasion, that looked deliberate without trying—found an audience. Orders doubled.

She did not scale production. She hired two pattern cutters and a finisher. She kept the studio in Praga. She continued to make everything in Poland, working with a single factory in Łódź that had previously produced workwear for state enterprises. The factory understood heavy cloth and flat-felled seams. They did not understand fashion timelines. Zuzwa adjusted her schedule to theirs.

The Signature

If there is a through-line in ZUZWA's work, it is the refusal to let cloth behave. Linen is typically used for summer shirting, lightweight and crisp. Zuzwa uses it at 340gsm, a weight more common in upholstery, and cuts it into coats that hold their shape like tailoring. Silk, usually fluid and drapey, appears in a tightly woven twill that stands away from the body. Wool is felted, brushed, left raw at the edges.

The proportions are consistent: wide through the body, narrow at the extremities. Sleeves are long. Trousers pool at the ankle. Collars are oversized. The effect is not volume for its own sake—there is no gathering, no pleating, no exaggeration. The width is in the cut, not the construction.

Colour remains limited. Most pieces are grey, rust, or undyed. When Zuzwa uses black, it is a washed-out black, faded to charcoal. When she uses white, it is the white of unbleached linen, slightly yellow in certain light. The palette is not neutral. It is specific.

The garments do not photograph well. On a hanger they look shapeless. On a model standing still they look oversized. In motion—walking, sitting, reaching—they resolve. The sleeve that seemed too long reveals its purpose when the arm bends. The trouser that pooled at the ankle pulls taut when the leg lifts. The coat that hung loose from the shoulder settles into the body after an hour of wear.

This is not accidental. Zuzwa cuts for movement, not for the static image. She has refused to show at fashion week. She does not produce lookbooks. The only images on ZUZWA's website are detail shots: a sleeve head, a pocket construction, the fall of a back pleat.

The Next Chapter

The autumn 2025 collection introduces colour. Not pattern, not print—colour. A rust that leans toward terracotta. A grey with a green undertone. A deep, almost-black navy. The cuts remain the same. The cloth is heavier.

Zuzwa is also expanding production, cautiously. She has taken on a third pattern cutter and is in conversation with a second factory in Łódź. The goal is not growth for its own sake. She wants to reduce lead times without compromising construction. Currently, a made-to-order piece takes twelve weeks. She would like to bring that down to eight.

There are no plans for accessories, no plans for collaboration, no plans to show in Paris. ZUZWA remains a studio operation. The team is five people. The output is two collections per year, roughly sixty pieces total. The work is sold through twenty-three stockists, mostly in Europe and Japan.

In the Praga studio, the autumn samples hang on the rail. Zuzwa pulls down a coat in rust-coloured linen, holds it up to the light. The cloth is 360gsm, heavier than anything she has used before. She turns it inside out to check the seam allowances. They are clean, flat-felled, finished by hand.

She hangs it back on the rail and reaches for her pins.