## The Hands Behind the Coat

The Hands Behind the Coat

Elżbieta Kowalska has been cutting sleeves for thirty-two years. She learned the trade in Łódź, in a factory that made wool overcoats for the Soviet market, and she has worked at ZUZWA's Warsaw atelier since the maison opened in 2018. The coat on her table is halfway through its second fitting. The client, a gallerist from Berlin, is standing in front of a mirror in her bra and trousers while Kowalska pins the left armscye a quarter-inch higher than the right.

"She drops this shoulder," Kowalska says, not looking up. "Everyone does. But most people don't notice."

The coat is ZUZWA's Oversized Wool Coat, the piece that put the house on the map when it appeared in a Vogue Poland editorial in 2019. It is cut from a 16oz melton in charcoal, with a shawl collar that folds back on itself and sleeves that finish two inches past the wrist. The silhouette is large without being shapeless. It requires, Kowalska says, three fittings to get right.

She has made forty-seven of them.

A Factory Education

Kowalska is one of six full-time tailors at ZUZWA's studio on ulica Krucza, a narrow street in central Warsaw that runs parallel to the shopping district but feels a decade removed from it. The building is prewar, with high ceilings and radiators that clank. The ground floor houses the showroom. The atelier is upstairs, past a landing stacked with bolts of wool and a coat rack hung with half-finished prototypes.

The team is small by necessity. ZUZWA produces roughly two hundred pieces a year, all made to order. Most are variations on the Oversized Wool Coat, though the house also makes a shorter car coat, a trench in waxed cotton, and a double-breasted blazer that borrows its proportions from the coat's exaggerated shoulder line.

Kowalska learned her trade in the late eighties, when Łódź was still the textile capital of Poland and the state-run factories were beginning to collapse. She was sixteen. Her mother worked in quality control at a wool mill. Her aunt ran a small atelier that specialised in alterations. Kowalska spent two years as an apprentice, learning to set sleeves by hand and to press seams open without flattening the cloth. She moved to Warsaw in 1995, worked for a series of small tailoring houses, and was hired by ZUZWA's founder, Zuza Kołodziejczyk, after a single interview.

"She asked me to set a sleeve in front of her," Kowalska says. "I did. She hired me."

The Prototype

The Oversized Wool Coat began as a mistake. Kołodziejczyk, who studied at Central Saint Martins and worked briefly for Lemaire in Paris, had been developing a collection of tailored separates for her graduate show in 2017. The coat was meant to be a classic overcoat, single-breasted, with a notched lapel and a straight skirt. She cut the first prototype two sizes too large.

"I put it on and it looked ridiculous," Kołodziejczyk told Business of Fashion in 2020. "But then I belted it, and it looked like something."

The final version retains the oversized proportions but adds structure where it matters. The shoulder is built up with a layer of horsehair canvas and a pad that extends an inch past the natural shoulder line. The collar is cut from three pieces of cloth, each interfaced separately, so that it holds its shape without stiffening. The sleeves are set with a deep armscye, which allows the coat to move with the body despite its weight.

Kowalska was the one who figured out how to make it work in production. The first prototype took Kołodziejczyk three weeks to complete. Kowalska streamlined the process to five days, working with two other tailors, Agnieszka Nowak and Tomasz Lewandowski, to develop a system that allowed them to produce multiple coats simultaneously without sacrificing the hand-finishing that gives the piece its weight.

The Process

Each coat begins with a muslin fitting. The client comes to the studio, or submits measurements remotely, and Kowalska or one of her colleagues cuts a rough version in cotton. The first fitting establishes the basic proportions: sleeve length, shoulder width, the point where the hem should fall. Most clients want the coat to hit mid-calf. Some ask for it shorter.

"We don't argue," Kowalska says. "But we suggest."

The second fitting happens in the actual cloth, usually four weeks later. By this point the coat is half-finished. The body is basted together, the collar is attached, and the sleeves are pinned in place but not sewn. This is where Kowalska makes the adjustments that separate a good coat from one that fits. She marks the cloth with tailor's chalk, unpicks the basting, and re-cuts the pattern pieces by hand.

The final fitting is for approval. The coat is finished, pressed, and hung on a padded hanger. The client tries it on, walks around the studio, sits down, raises her arms. If everything is correct, the coat goes home. If not, Kowalska takes it back to the table.

"It's rare," she says. "But it happens."

The Others

Nowak, who works at the table opposite Kowalska's, specialises in buttonholes. She makes them by hand, using a buttonhole stitch that takes twenty minutes per hole. The Oversized Wool Coat has five buttons, which means each coat requires an hour and forty minutes of work that is invisible unless you look closely.

"People don't notice," Nowak says. "But they feel it when they button the coat. A machine buttonhole pulls. A hand buttonhole doesn't."

Lewandowski handles pressing. He uses a vintage Hoffman press that weighs two hundred kilos and requires ten minutes to heat up. The press applies steam and pressure simultaneously, which sets the shape of the cloth without flattening the fibres. Lewandowski presses each coat three times: once after the body is assembled, once after the sleeves are set, and once after the final fitting.

"If you press it wrong, you can't fix it," he says. "The cloth remembers."

The other three tailors—Marta Zielińska, Paweł Kamiński, and Joanna Król—rotate between cutting, basting, and finishing. Zielińska cuts most of the patterns. Kamiński handles linings. Król does the final hand-stitching, including the bar tacks at the pocket corners and the slip-stitching that attaches the lining to the hem.

What Comes Next

ZUZWA has expanded slowly. The house added a trench coat to the collection in 2021, a blazer in 2022, and a wool car coat in 2023. Kołodziejczyk has resisted the pressure to scale up. The atelier produces roughly four coats a week during the busy season, which runs from September to January. The rest of the year is quieter.

"We could make more," Kowalska says. "But we would need more people, and good tailors are hard to find."

She is training two apprentices, both in their early twenties, who come to the studio three days a week. One is learning to set sleeves. The other is learning to cut patterns. Neither will be ready to work unsupervised for at least two years.

"It takes time," Kowalska says. "You can't rush it."

The Oversized Wool Coat now starts at €2,400, depending on the cloth. The price has increased twice since 2019, but the waiting list has not shortened. Most clients wait twelve weeks for a finished coat. Some wait longer.

Kowalska is not worried about demand. She is worried about supply. The melton she prefers comes from a mill in Yorkshire that has been threatening to close for three years. The buttons are made by a small factory in France that only takes orders twice a year. The horsehair canvas comes from Germany, and the last shipment arrived six weeks late.

"Everything is harder now," she says. "But we manage."

She pins the last adjustment to the gallerist's coat, steps back, and looks at it for a long moment. Then she nods, removes the pins, and carries the coat back to her table. It will be finished by the end of the week.