“The Third World of Women” collection by designer Martyna Agnieszka, approaches beauty as a constructed condition rather than an aesthetic outcome. The designer treats fashion as a language of assembly, where garments reorganize the body instead of revealing it. Wrapping replaces exposure, and shaping takes precedence over display. In doing so, the collection resists familiar readings of femininity, proposing instead a framework defined by tension between care and control, intimacy and discipline.
This logic is articulated through material. Raw edges remain unresolved, refusing refinement, while virgin human hair is introduced as a sculptural extension of the body, at once intimate and distancing. Closures disrupt expectation, with right-side male buttons subtly shifting the codes of dress. These gestures operate less as stylistic choices than as structural ones, reinforcing a vision of beauty that resists ease and the expectation to please.
Each of the eight silhouettes is tied to a specific figure, including mother, grandmother, teacher, or more distant influence, yet these references are condensed rather than narrated. The collection does not recount biography but extracts defining traits and translates them into form. A maternal presence establishes both origin and authority, structuring the collection’s narrative. A grandmother’s unrealized creative life is carried forward as latent continuity, while a teacher introduces a space of intellectual permission, where curiosity and dissent are sustained rather than corrected. Other figures, encountered through lineage, affinity, or memory, are reduced to gestures, their impact registered through construction rather than description.
The title draws from Susan Sontag, whose writing on the “The Third World of Women” (1973) examined the conditions shaping femininity. Here, that framework is not illustrated but translated. The garments function as a material counterpart, where theory is embedded in structure and expressed through imbalance, restraint, and controlled tension.
What emerges is a collection that positions fashion as a process of reconstruction. Memory is edited and reassembled, while beauty is neither immediate nor passive, but structured, something to be read rather than simply seen.
Photos: Courtesy of Martyna Agnieszka
Photography: Ewa @zgnilykwas
Makeup: Katarzyna @kgorkamakeup
Hair: Oleg @oleg_filipenko_
Models: Agnieszka @nightttlilies, Wiktoria @hypnoticanalgesia, Julietta @aettilju, Martyna @martyna_bac_
Collection
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