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. Mathieu Renard stands behind a model wearing a coat that refuses to sit properly across the shoulders. He pulls the back seam taut, releases it, watches the cloth collapse again. "C'est la troisième fois," he mutters, reaching for scissors. The toile comes off. He'll start again.

Renard has been creative director of ZUZWA since 2019, a tenure marked less by Instagram moments than by a slow, deliberate rewiring of what the house makes and why. He is forty-one. He does not give many interviews. When he does, he talks about construction before he talks about inspiration, which makes him unusual in an industry that prefers the reverse.

The Antwerp Years

Renard trained at La Cambre in Brussels, not Antwerp, which he mentions because people assume otherwise. "Everyone thought I went to the Royal Academy because of the cut," he said in a 2021 Vestoj piece. "I didn't. I learned to cut at La Cambre, then I unlearned it at Dries."

He spent four years in the Dries Van Noten studio, starting in 2006 as a junior patternmaker. The job was technical, not conceptual. He drafted sleeves, adjusted armholes, translated Van Noten's draping into something a factory could reproduce. It was, by his own account, the best education he received. "Dries doesn't sketch," he has said. "He builds in cloth. You learn to see what fabric wants to do, not what you want it to do."

After Dries, he moved to Haider Ackermann's studio in Paris, where the work was more experimental and the schedules more punishing. He stayed two years. By 2012, he was freelancing — pattern consulting for smaller labels, the occasional costume job, nothing with his name on it. He was good at solving other people's problems. He was not sure he had a point of view.

The ZUZWA Offer

ZUZWA approached him in early 2019. The house, founded in 1987 by Polish-born designer Zofia Zuzwara, had spent three decades building a reputation for meticulous, cerebral womenswear that sold well in Japan and barely registered elsewhere. Zuzwara had stepped back the previous year; the board wanted a successor who understood the archive but could push it somewhere new.

Renard was not the obvious choice. He had no runway experience as a lead designer. He had never been photographed at a fashion week. But he had spent six months consulting for ZUZWA in 2018, reworking their coat patterns, and Zuzwara herself had recommended him. "She told them I was the only one who didn't try to make the coats softer," Renard said in a rare interview with System magazine. "I made them harder."

His first collection, Spring/Summer 2020, showed in a basement space in the Marais with thirty-six looks and no music. The clothes were architectural without being aggressive: tailored trousers with a dropped waistband, shirts cut on the bias so they twisted slightly at the hem, a series of coats in heavyweight linen that stood away from the body like sculpture. The palette was sand, ivory, slate, black. The press called it "monastic." Renard called it a starting point.

Signature and Resistance

What defines ZUZWA under Renard is tension — between weight and movement, between precision and ease. He uses stiff fabrics but cuts them to allow gesture. A jacket might be made from 14oz cotton drill, a cloth you'd expect in workwear, but the shoulder is set so the sleeve swings freely. A skirt in double-faced wool holds its shape when empty but moves like jersey when worn.

He is preoccupied with how clothes behave when no one is performing in them. "I don't care what it looks like on the hanger," he said in the System interview. "I care what it does when you sit down, when you reach for something, when you forget you're wearing it."

This shows up in details that fashion editors rarely mention: sleeve heads with no padding, waistbands that fasten with a single hook instead of a button, hems left raw because the cloth won't fray. He avoids lining unless the fabric demands it. He has never used interfacing in a lapel. These are not cost-saving measures — ZUZWA's price point has crept steadily upward since he arrived — but philosophical ones.

The collections have gotten quieter. Fall/Winter 2023 featured eighteen looks, all in variations of charcoal and navy, all built around a single coat pattern with the sleeves moved incrementally forward or back. It was the kind of show that could feel like a provocation or a retreat, depending on your tolerance for repetition. Sales, reportedly, were strong.

What He Refuses

Renard does not do collaborations. He does not do capsules. He has turned down approaches from three sportswear brands, a luxury conglomerate, and a museum retrospective. "I'm not interested in explaining the work to people who won't wear it," he said, though he did not specify where.

He also does not show in the main Paris calendar. ZUZWA presents off-schedule, usually mid-morning in the studio itself, with seating for sixty. Buyers come. Editors sometimes don't. This appears not to bother him.

What does bother him, based on the few interviews he's given, is the word "minimal." He has called it lazy shorthand for "expensive and beige." ZUZWA's clothes are neither minimal nor maximalist; they are specific. A sleeve is set at a particular angle because that angle makes the arm look longer and allows the shoulder to drop without the jacket slipping off. That is not minimalism. That is geometry.

The Next Chapter

Spring/Summer 2025 will introduce colour for the first time in three years: a series of rust-toned pieces dyed with actual iron oxide, a process Renard has been testing since 2023. The cloth oxidises further over time, darkening in some areas, lightening in others. It is the kind of detail that sounds like a gimmick until you see it.

He is also working on a men's line, though he refuses to call it that. "It's the same clothes, adjusted," he said in a brief exchange with Financial Times last year. The first pieces — trousers, a shirt, a coat — will appear in the Fall/Winter 2025 collection, modelled by both men and women.

Renard still spends most of his time in fittings. He still pulls seams apart when they don't sit right. He is not interested in becoming a name, which may be why ZUZWA remains a house for people who know, rather than people who follow. That seems to be the point.

The coat from the morning fitting eventually works. It takes two more toiles and a conversation with the factory about whether the cloth can handle the tension. It can. Renard adds it to the lineup. He moves on.