Wearing History: How Contemporary Fashion Tells the Story of Poland

uta_sienkiewicz_fot.ag_2000_px_14.jpg, default, Uta Sienkiewicz, 'Swoi' collection, photo: Antonina Gugała

One of the most interesting branches of the collection of the Central Textile Museum in Łódź (Polish: Centralne Muzeum Włókiennictwa w Łodzi, CMWŁ) is Polish contemporary fashion created by independent designers who interpreted or co-created Polish culture. The uniqueness of their creations is also associated with the bold expression of feelings.

In the 20th century skirt lengths, waist cuts or suit cuts rooted European clothing in a specific moment in history. They allowed not only to date an outfit, but also to read social moods. In contemporary fashion, cuts and styles play a lesser role. What has become most important, apart from striving for ethical and sustainable production, is the contexts and dialogue of fashion with history, art and social issues. The feelings and identities of designers also play a major role. Fashion shown in Europe has become personal and autobiographical. These changes also affect the development of the CMWŁ collection. Technology per se has receded into the background. What became important was the relationship between fashion and Polish heritage and culture, as well as the emotions expressed by designers.

The two hearts of CMWŁ

The Central Textile Museum in Łódź is a leading Polish museum that collects contemporary domestic fashion. The heart of the fashion collections is made up of clothes and accessories designed in the Polish People's Republic (1945-1989). After the end of World War II, local design underwent not only a revival, but also impressive development. Outstanding designers created collections for state-owned enterprises, such as Telimena and Próchnik in Łódź or Moda Polska and Leda in Warsaw. The projects of these and many other factories can be seen at the permanent exhibition of CMWŁ City – Fashion – Machine.

After 1989, i.e. after the fall of communism and during the political transformation, most fashion houses were sadly closed or significantly limited their operations. They were replaced by Western European clothing chains and new Polish enterprises that copied their methods of operation. Designers who worked independently of the big market players also made their debut, and it is their designs, especially those that flourished in the 21st century, that are becoming the second most interesting part of the CMWŁ fashion collection. The museum also collects and studies the work of Polish women and men working in Berlin, London and New York.

R. Swiader as a Polish soldier from Manhattan

The museum's collection includes, among others, a military jacket and vest by R. Swiader. Rafał Świąder, born in Poland, lives in New York and runs a store in Manhattan. 'Gender–optional' is the slogan of the company founded in 2015, whose collections are post–gender. This trend assumes that clothes can, but do not have to, define gender. An evening gown or a suit based on classic men's tailoring does not determine the identity of the person wearing it. Sam Smith, a non-binary singer, wore R. Swiader's dress. Ncuti Gatwa, the first black and openly queer actor to play the title role in Doctor Who, was photographed wearing the company's clothes. R. Swiader's pieces are also in the wardrobes of the aficionados of traditional men's classics, such as Oscar nominee Jake Gyllenhaal, while a sweater knitted by the Polish craftswoman was worn by NBA star Dwyane Wade.

Raf Swiader 'Back Home' collection, 2018, photo courtesy of Raf Swiader

In Poland, the face of the brand was Andrzej Szwan. Born in 1938, the artist is an icon of the Vistula drag scene and one of the oldest still performing drag queens in the world.

The work of the graduate of Manhattan's Fashion Institute of Technology proves that the contemporary gender revolution does not overthrow gender distinction, but frees them from oppressive norms and binary divisions.

Military items from the 'Back Home' collection (spring-summer 2018) were made from used clothes. On the back, there are wall hangings depicting a portrait of the Polish Pope John Paul II and a devotional painting of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The designer, who’s had a dalliance with queerness and post-genderism, referred to his textile and Catholic roots in this very way. The pictures were knitted by Rafał Świąder's grandfather, who lives in Łódź and was associated with the local textile industry. The clothes refer in this way to the history of the city, which until 1989 was a center of the textile and clothing industry, as well as the seat of fashion houses. The impressive 19th-century Biała Fabryka, which houses CMWŁ, is the former factory owned by Ludwik Geyer. This Łódź native, called the 'king of calico” was one of the richest manufacturers in Łódź.

The military style of R. Swiader's clothes symbolizes an arduous but victorious fight. 'Back Home' became a metaphor for returning to the Polish home after a difficult battle. The collection is also a proud manifestation of the fact that the designer, together with his husband, photographer John Arsenault, created a new dream home in New York and managed to claim an important place on the Manhattan fashion map for himself.

Gosia Baczyńska & a collection shaped by hope

During Paris Fashion Week (autumn-winter 2015/16), Gosia Baczyńska, a leading Warsaw luxury fashion designer, presented the 'Yalta' collection. The title referred to the Yalta Conference. In 1945, just before the end of World War II, the leaders of Great Britain, the USA and Russia met in the Ukrainian Crimea, now occupied by the Russians. Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin signed documents establishing a new division of Europe. The eastern part of former Poland found itself in the USSR, and the entire country in the Soviet sphere of influence. In turn, East Germany fell to the new Poland. Border changes caused mass resettlements. The wandering of millions of people through the ruined and still dangerous Central and Eastern Europe usually took place in tragic conditions.

However, great historical narratives and reckoning were not the subject of Gosia Baczyńska's research.

The hope that people who were starting a new life at that time could feel became more important. Baczyńska's collection was personal and autobiographical. The designer's ancestors were resettlers from the East who started families, bonding with residents of Western Poland. The Warsaw native, with roots in those territories, emphasizes that forced resettlements contributed to her birth.

The aesthetics and cuts of the clothes from CMWŁ combine the elements of, among others, military, folk, luxury, evening and labourers', feminine and masculine. 'Yalta' reflects the chaos of war, which caused the clothes of different social groups to be mixed together.

Gosia Baczyńska from the 'Yalta' collection, 2015, photo. Central Textile Museum in Łódź

During the war, the old social and fashion hierarchies ceased to apply, and tragedies befell everyone. Aristocratic women and representatives of the bourgeoisie put on workers' jackets and folk scarves. Female labourers travelled across Europe in once luxurious dresses. A uniform acquired by chance became a jacket or a suit worn long after the war.

The leading accessories of 'Yalta' are medals, which are usually used to decorate the chests of war heroes. Instead of state symbols, the decorations were engraved with works of art, such as the depiction of Infanta Margarita by Velázquez. The works became symbols of peace and global community, the link and guarantor of which can be art. Baczyńska did not use them to award female and male soldiers, but rather the decimated, exhausted by war civilians, and above all, women.

Arkadius: a folk delight named Paulina

There are at least two phenomena that significantly influenced the emergence of specifically Polish fashion – Sarmatism and folk art.

The exhibition Young Poland – Polish Art 1890-1918, which opened in 2025 at MoMAK in Kyoto, presented artistic phenomena identified with the Young Poland art movement. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, in the country occupied by Russia, Austria and Prussia, an art developed that told about Polishness in various ways. Phenomenal Polish modernist art flourished against and despite the loss of independence. Young Poland artists used means of expression characteristic of, among others, Art Nouveau, Symbolism, Impressionism, Historicism and folk art. The latter significantly influences fashion to this day.

Young Poland creators sought native Polishness in the Tatra Mountains. In art the Zakopane style developed – a concept initiated by Stanisław Witkiewicz, a valued artist and theoretician whose works were shown in Kyoto. The name of the phenomenon referred to the resort in the Tatra Mountains, Zakopane, which was popular with artists. Based on highland folk art, the Zakopane style became a kind of national style and developed not only in architecture and design, but also in fashion. The MoMAK exhibited a Zakopane dress by Maria Łabęcka from the National Museum in Krakow from 1900, which was a modern interpretation of highland handicraft.

It was within the Young Poland where the dream of enchanting Western Europe with clothes decorated with Polish folk handicraft was born. Feliks 'Manggha' Jasieński called for this. An expert and collector of Japanese art in his article On the Polish Dress [O sukni polskiej] ('Ilustracyja Polska', 1902, R. 2, no. 7) postulated adding folkloric elements to clothes with Viennese and Parisian cuts. Polonized Europeanism was to make its presence felt in Western European salons and pave the way for styles with a Polish character, which had to be developed over time. The challenge was then taken up by, among others, the Warsaw Fashion House Bogusław Herse, and later by almost all companies operating in the Polish People's Republic.

The CMWŁ collections include clothes and accessories from 14 collections by Arkadius. The founder of the company, Arkadiusz Weremczuk, was born in southeastern Poland, but at the beginning of the 21st century he became one of the brightest stars of London Fashion Week. In 2001, the daily 'The Independent' included him among the ten leading masters of fashion, alongside Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood and Stella McCartney. A few months earlier, the designer, who was cherished by the London and New York press, showed the 'Paulina' collection, which was a tribute to Arkadius's grandmother. Mrs. Paulina was a farmer and lived in the countryside. Fascinated by the Polish countryside and nature, the Central Saint Martins graduate showed, among other things, crinolines and corsets made of straw, on which colorful wooden birds sat, carved by Polish highlanders.

The clothes were decorated with the folk ornament called leluja, which represents the tree of life surrounded by roosters. Traditional lace from the Carpathians was also presented. The styles were sensual and often revealing of the body. A work of unpretentious, affirming eroticism – Arkadius in this way referred to the Kupala Night, a Slavic holiday of pagan provenance celebrated on the night of the summer solstice. During the shortest night of the year, people sang, danced and organized debauched parties. Legends have it that this is when witches' sabbaths also took place.

The Arkadian vision of the Polish countryside delighted leading fashion critics. 'The expressive show stimulated the imagination with images and fabrics: folk braid, stylized lovebirds, embossed leather belts, terry towels, and even a woven lace tablecloth (...). Without abandoning extravagant forms, Arkadius bowed to his grandmother,' Suzy Menkes reported in the International Herald Tribune (26.09.2000, quote translated from Polish by M.P – translator’s note).

Uta Sienkiewicz & the dangers of national costume

In 2017, Uta Sienkiewicz referred to Polish folklore. The diploma collection of the graduate of the Department of Fashion at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw is titled ‘Swoi’ [Our people], and the flowers sewn onto the clothes were inspired, among others, by folk painting from Zalipie. The village in southern Poland is famous for its wooden houses decorated with colorful flowers, the authors of which are amateur village painters.

The collection was also influenced by the Sarmatian costume, a Polish national costume of very unusual provenance, which emerged in the second half of the 16th century. The Polish nobility and aristocracy, like the upper classes in other European countries, needed a legend that would not only legitimize their power, but also link it to the heritage of the ancient Greeks and Romans. The most popular legend claimed that the elites of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth were descendants of the Sarmatians – a community that probably migrated from the lower Volga region to the Danube in the 1st century BC, where it came into contact with the Roman Empire.

The Polish nobility – at that time mainly Christians – linked their own ethnogenesis to the Sarmatians, a community of Iranian origin. The Polish national costume is equally peculiar, with its cuts and aesthetics influenced by Hungarian, Turkish and Persian fashion. Elements of the Sarmatian costume included żupan and kontusz. The striped kontusz belts, which were first imported from India, Persia and Turkey, and then manufactured in the country, in which the Armenians specialised, became a complement to the outfit. The żupan is a men's dress with a stand-up collar fastened at the front with decorative and precious buttons called guzy. The kontusz is a caftan with sleeves slit along their entire length, which can be tied at the back, creating a form resembling wings. This procedure enlarged the silhouette and created an impression of strength and dignity. Similar sleeves appeared in Sienkiewicz's cuts. The designer revealed the grotesqueness of the search for purely national fashion, which turns out to be a conglomeration of elements from different cultures and regions.

Uta Sienkiewicz, 'Swoi' collection, photo: Antonina Gugała

'Swoi' was created not only as a result of fascination with old Polish traditions. The graduation project also expressed anxiety related to the nationalist undertones of national costumes and fear of the growing nationalist sentiments in Europe. The collection is deliberately intended to express aggression. To this end, the designer combined Sarmatism and folk art with the clothing of football hooligans, as expressed by hooligan balaclavas and belts referring to the scarves of sports clubs.

Rad Duet: a painted tribute to faience

The Poznań Rad Duet, i.e. Juliusz Rusin and Maciej Józwicki, made their presence known on the Polish fashion scene thanks to their slightly historicizing cuts, on which Józwicki painstakingly painted numerous flowers. The silhouettes and the name of the fashion house refer to the legacy of Maria Skłodowska-Curie (1867–1934), the Polish Nobel Prize-winning scientist.

The 'Wiesia' collection, like 'Paulina', is named after the designer's ancestor, and the flowers painted for many hours pay homage to the Włocławek faience, a unique design from the times of the Polish People's Republic. The Włocławek Faience Factory, with which Maciej’s family was associated, was established in the 19th century, but reached its heyday in the years following the Second World War. The delightful ceramic products were found in almost every Polish home and were a widely available, unique product decorated by hand by female painters.

OFF Fashion, 'Wiesi', photo Weronika Walijewska

The wonders of Włocławek are the effect of the post-war cultural policy pursued by the Warsaw Institute of Industrial Design, whose founder Wanda Telakowska initiated cooperation between folk painters and artists educated at prestigious universities. The delicate, soft, artificial leather from which 'Wiesia' was sewn also resembles porcelain.

The ever-expanding museum collection of Polish contemporary fashion, a small fragment of which I have described here, is at the same time a fascinating and never-ending story about the cultural phenomena that create the country's identity and heritage. This heritage is not only celebrated, but also criticized. Designers forge unexpected alliances, combining, for example, post-gender with Catholicism. Great historical narratives are confronted with personal memories and feelings. The fashion they create becomes an important branch and description of culture, and the museum, which collects fabrics, clothing and accessories, allows this culture to resonate during the regularly opened fashion exhibitions.

Translated from Polish by Michał Pelczar

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