Paulina Katewicz
Founder, OSTOYA
Sheffield, United Kingdom
I have always been pulled toward making things. I write poetry and essays, I read constantly, I plan buildings I will never build and rearrange rooms that are not mine. I like retro next to modern, and I like old money restraint interrupted by one colour nobody expected.
My mind runs in two directions at once. One side is creative, sensitive and unreasonably empathetic. The other is logical, stubborn and very hard to move. OSTOYA needs both, which is probably why it exists.
Fashion came first, long before any of this. My mother had her own seamstress when she was young, a woman who cut clothes for her that made her look extraordinary. I grew up knowing what that does to a person: not the clothes themselves, but the feeling of being dressed in something made for you and nobody else.
What I want to make is the opposite of what the industry now sells. Fast fashion has taken originality out of getting dressed and replaced it with a season. Clothes arrive already halfway to the bin. I want to make things from natural materials, made to last years, with a soul in them.
The plan is knitted haute couture. A knitted suit, of a kind that does not exist on the market today. The most beautiful suit imaginable, one that moves with the body instead of holding it in place, sits like a second skin and still keeps its shape. Wearing it should be an experience, and then that experience should move into ordinary days: morning coffee with your wife, dinner with someone close, a date ten years into a marriage.
Long term the brand has no gender. Haute couture is made for one body at a time, so the label does not need to say who that body belongs to. You give your measurements and the cut you want. We do the rest.
But I decided to start at the foundations rather than the finish. So OSTOYA began with words, and it began with men.
Men’s mental health has been skipped over for years. It is still half a taboo, and there is very little built for that side of the world. Most men are raised to carry whatever arrives and almost nobody asks them how they are managing, or whether they need anything at all. I thought that was worth stopping for, so I made something for them first.
They are the beginning of this brand. What I want is for them to feel at home here. The way you feel with someone who loves you: appreciated, understood, and finally released from having to perform.
That is what ostoja means. Sanctuary. The thing that holds you when everything else is shaking. I named the brand after it because it is the only thing I am actually trying to build. Out of words for now, and one day out of cut, cloth, and everything that makes a garment an art rather than a product.