Magda Butrym’s spring-summer 2025 “Gossamer” collection marks the house’s first-ever presentation during Paris Fashion Week’s official schedule. The collection fully captures the designer’s sophisticated, distinct and authentic sense of style and aesthetic that she has formed throughout a decade of her oeuvre. It also encapsulates a certain sentiment that’s close to her heart: gossamer.

A fleeting moment, a notion deeply rooted in Slavic sensitivity, a feeling thin like spider’s web drifting in the warm air, an invisible season that softly wraps the senses and dazes the mind. A sun-drenched moment that’s sheerly feminine in its subtlety and changeability. Blink, and you miss it. But when you happen to perceive it, you feel like in a dreamworld.

The spring-summer 2025 collection captures a sense of contemporary urgency and uncontrived, lively chic. Body-hugging, artisanally-woven crotchet is instinctively layered with utilitarian minimalism in form of high-necked, cotton cargo jacket or suede, broad-shouldered coat with a just-right, over-sized fit. Silky jersey dresses that strike with flou lightness are put in unobvious contrast with pragmatic trench-coats and no-nonsense leather outerwear. Floating-in-the-air veils are complementing the unashamedly sexy eveningwear that is subtly flourishing with draped rosettes – and is not afraid of subversive cuts and slits. With new shapes and sizes of the house’s Brigitte it-bag and sling-back mesh pumps covered in intricate crotchet, the collection is a thoroughly considered blend of womanly mystery, daring attitude and Slavic Heritage preciousness.

Other than the idea of gossamer, the collection’s creative impulse are the enduring and singular depictions of Slavic women seen in paintings by Polish artists from the turn of 19^th and 20^th century: Stanisław Wyspiański, Jacek Malczewski and Józef Chełmoński. In their idiosyncratic, artistic perceptions, where reality blends with buoyant dreams and mystical beliefs, and the visual codes of Polishness are eternally preserved, women are reflected as both strong and sensual; assertive and mythical; refined and esoteric. These women are in-between the real world and the world of goddesses. Their heads are swathed in swirling shawls and draperies – a bold, exuberant vision that inspired SS25’s sculptural headscarves woven with metal threads. Their bodies are covered – and uncovered by gusts of wind – with layers of flimsy silks and precious lace, like literal gossamer. Yet these characters are in their element, in full control of their destiny. In those paintings, women emanate with commanding, perplexing and empowering energy that inspires – and intrigues – the designer. In her SS25 collection, Magda Butrym paints – with transparent jerseys, hand-made crotchets, lasting cottons, brisk suedes and smooth leathers – a portrait of a woman who encapsulates that kind of modern mysticism.

This woman is nobody’s muse – other than her own.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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