AREA

PIOTREK PANSZCZYK’S BRAND AREA WAS NEW YORK FASHION’S BEST-KEPT SECRET. TEN YEARS IN, HE KEEPS PUSHING FORWARD ITS MISSION.

By Jayne O’Dwyer

Piotrek Panszczyk is not a very public person. As one half of AREA, which he co-founded with fellow Parsons grad Beckett Fogg in 2014, the designer has maintained a certain anonymity as part of the brains behind the glamorous brand. “When I started meeting people, they were like, ‘Oh my God, you’re AREA?’ That’s funny how you can create a certain image that’s not tied to one thing,” he muses. The clothing is decidedly cosmopolitan—Panszczyk hails from Poland and Fogg from Kentucky, while their inspiration is an ’80s Manhattan nightclub from which they take their name. Design and production are now based in Milan, a choice that Panszczyk attributes to the mounting financial pressures of staying stateside. When we speak over Zoom a week before AREA’s New York Fashion Week show, he has just put the finishing touches on their 10th Anniversary collection.

Despite its ever-evolving motifs, an AREA garment maintains a recognizable essence: epic proportions, eye-catching details, a playful, at-times dark sense of humor. Panszczyk has now dressed the likes of SZA, Martine Gutierrez, and Simone Biles. Even Taylor Swift wore the brand’s glittering jeans to the Super Bowl back in February, timed to a Spring/Summer runway that opened on a white shift dress affixed with giant googly eyes. After a decade in the business, Panszczyk’s crystal-embellished cover has been blown.

Jayne O’Dwyer: What has celebrating 10 years of AREA meant to you?

Piotrek Panszczyk: It’s hard to comprehend that we’ve made it for so long, especially when everyone is going out of business. We’re in a generation where we all worked so hard to get here and the economy is reflecting on our businesses, which is hardcore. But these 10 years are a testament to our intuition and willpower through very difficult times. Being an artist is one thing, but having a business that supports that is next level.

JO: What’s it felt like going from an in-the-know brand to an established player in the industry?

PP: It makes everything so much harder. When I look back now, I’m like, “Oh my God, the luxury of being indie.” We were not a “downtown darling” from the get-go. AREA was almost too glamorous. New York was very glamorous, but isn’t anymore. We had that old-school New York glamor through an international lens. People were like, “It’s too glossy, too glimmery, too skinny. Who’s gonna wear this shit?” But being niche exists anywhere. We were so bound to downtown New York, but then image is one thing, and image a lot of times is fabricated. The beauty of evolving is that we found—on a very global scale—people who truly related to what we were doing. Real people who work hard and want to express themselves through fashion. At first, AREA was eveningwear, night glamor. COVID started reframing that perception of glamor through denim, jersey, and t-shirts, but maintaining that same energy. While we were focusing on clothes that people could wear in their daily lives, we were also pushing boundaries and teaching ourselves to be craftsmen.

JO: How have you survived creatively?

PP: When I was doing my bachelors [at ArtEZ University of the Arts], I was more into living my life. But then I was like, “Oh my god, I do really love this.” When that happened, I immediately was in full go-mode. It was like, “You’re gonna go into something that you have to give your all for.” You make yourself believe in yourself. Fashion was always an outlet where I could build a certain personality and shape myself as a person. When we started our business, I thought, “We’re gonna have to create something that doesn’t exist, has longevity, and can truly evolve.” Business for me doesn’t exist if it doesn’t align with creativity: You need to be a business because you are creative. Creativity then flows into your product. That’s why the materials and themes we choose are about what makes you want to be your best. That desire consumers feel even when they don’t see it immediately. It’s also about storytelling through clothes, crafting and creating identity. Our references [are] culturally important eras and figures, so all these factors become part of the evolving creativity.

JO: In the past decade, was there a moment where you felt like you distilled this ethos into a specific collection?

PP: This first moment was this lookbook we did with Charlotte Wales. It had fur bras, embossed textures, glamorous lamés. That was where we learned glamor can inform design. Then Fall/Winter 2018, we started learning that crystal could become a building block, almost like how you start drawing or knitting. That was an aha moment. We looked at knit and crochet and recreated that into embellishment motifs. This idea of the ’60s, couture, pied-de-poule fabrics, was where we created our version of logomania. Every few years, we have a moment like that.

More and more, the real storytelling solidifies. The last three collections were much clearer. One was about pyramids and ancient civilizations, the following focused on the decay of life and fruits. We began playing with surrealist metaphors with humor. It’s a bit macabre, but that’s the time we live in. So much shit is burning up and going wrong around us, but we’re still feeding into it. We’re addicted to it. Last season was all about the eyes in a beautiful way, but also about how we’re addicted to being watched. That’s an important aspect of AREA: reflecting on what’s going on and digesting it in our own way.

JO: That googly eye motif opening SS24, it seemed to say, “You’ve been watching us, now we’re watching you.” What’s your relationship to the gaze?

PP: The gaze multiplies every second we’re alive. Fashion is at peak entertainment. We’re just obsessed with “more is more” attitudes. It’s very bittersweet, but AREA [is] also part of it. What is different is that we admit it. We try to use the gaze as subject matter. By making fun through an artistic lens, a lot of people start paying attention. You can have an output that is just “stuff,” or you can make garments that someone wants and makes them feel very special. That’s our antidote.

JO: This anniversary collection features a handprint motif applied cheekily to the chest and seat of the pants, then other times all over, recalling overexposure. Where did this motif come from?

PP: The starting point was this idea of creating yourself—is that good, is that bad? It’s not for me to decide, but it is a tool. Then we began exploring identity through different lenses and looking at a lot of Man Ray pictures—silver lithographs that had this obscure, far away beauty. Then we looked at hands, which started symbolizing craft. Karl Lagerfeld was always talking about the hands that created the clothes. We photocopied everyone's hands in the studio and made those into black-and-white prints. Then we printed the hands on double-faced nylon that we laser cut and started folding into origami textures. We even created textiles and shapes out of hands that, from far away, looked like ’60s couture shapes. We also examined hardware through an identity lens: nameplates, dog tags, office names, re-contextualizing what jewelry is. It’s taking this literal theme and giving it a 360 approach, creating a singular image but through various executions. Always going back to what we love.

JO: AREA recently relocated design, development, and production to Milan. That's part of a larger trend in the industry, where brands are moving those arms to continental Europe instead of the US or UK. What impact has this choice had on your design language?

PP: In New York, you’re so far away from where a lot of manufacturing happens. We were lacking the right people on the product side that could really evolve our business. Right now, people are not spending money on fashion at all—so how do you grow? You must become savvy and nimble. Though it’s not strange to us, we’ve been doing it for 10 years. We’re not Chanel, we’re not Versace. Our vision needs to be right, but we have no money: It’s a pain in the ass to work with us. But Italians have fashion in their blood. They are people’s people: They love working together, collaborating, chatting. There are real connections with factories and suppliers. There’s not this pressure, whereas in the US, You need to be the best in one season. You need to make enough money to live in Manhattan or Brooklyn. You need to get it right, because if not, you’re not able to exist here. Because of that pressure, you miss a lot of years of evolution in your career, like how to get from A to Z. In Italy, they’re like, “No, you’ll take your whole life to get from A to Z.” I forgot that lifestyle—I’m European myself, but I’ve been here for 12 years. It was going back and reframing the way you work. Now we function more consistently, and our product is really improving.

JO: What do you want people to feel upon seeing this anniversary collection?

PP: In our next stage, it’s like, “Fuck everything.” We all get so boxed in, and this is about wanting to not be boxed in and being proud of that. That’s what AREA is. One big theme of this show is the idea of a uniform. When you think about club culture, club kids, punks—what did they do with a uniform? They fucked it up and reshaped it into their identity. Uniformity should be repurposed to be you, really. I don’t want to have a different ethos for the next 10 years. It should always stay that way.