At first, she wasn’t interested in design at all, but she did like fashion sketches. Yet when she was accepted into two faculties – fashion illustration and fashion design – at the London College of Fashion, she chose the latter. She decided it would be much more interesting to get to know the whole process of creating clothes.
It became clear to Joanna Wawrzyńczak that she wanted to become a fashion designer after seeing Alexander McQueen’s collection Plato’s Atlantis. However, she was straight out of high school, it was her first time in London and she felt homesick. Therefore, when it turned out that the first fashion department was about to open in Poland, she immediately returned home.
As a student of the Fashion Department at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, she got an apprenticeship in McQueen’s studio – she worked in the print/textiles department and was involved with everything that pertains to fabric. Interestingly, in her first year at the Academy, textile design was her weakest subject and she barely passed it. Yet in her second year, she discovered crocheting and weaving at traditional craft workshops in the Suwałki Region and gained a passion for making fabric from scratch. However, her graduation collection was far from any ethnic inspirations. She was moved by the Suprematists, especially Kazimierz Malewicz. She operated within four geometrical designs (line, cross, square and circle) and a limited colour palette (black, navy blue, cerulean and white). Jewellery also played an important part, made of modular Lego pieces or integrated into the fabric in simple geometrical shapes from Plexiglas. Selected pieces of jewellery were presented at the international exhibition ENCOUNTERS 2 in Budapest and the whole collection was shown at the semi-finals of the MUUSE x Vogue Talents Young Vision Award Womenswear 2014 Competition. The collection created in Martina Spetlova and Damien Ravn’s studio was awarded a distinction during the Coming Out Best Diploma’s ASP 2014 at the Academy of Fine Arts.