Sylwia Antoszkiewicz is a style therapeutist and psychostylist. She’s downright obsessed with style-building based on inner desires and genuine needs, as opposed to keeping up appearances, arbitrary trends, colour analyses and dividing female body types into colour- or shape-based categories. She has worked as a stylist and designer responsible for the participants of the following shows: Ninja Warior, Love Island, and Finding Prince Charming. She’s now the owner and creative director of the LOUS WARSAW brand, and the secondhand @goodbyehellostore concept. In her private life, she’s the mother of little Johnny and a believer in Zen philosophy. She also runs the RE:LOVE podcast series.

 

Love is our major beacon in a cycle of conversations with inspirational, creative, vigorous, passionate women who create our everyday reality. What is it for you? How do you find, recognise and care for it?

 

I really like this beacon and how we discuss love in the context of ourselves. We don’t focus on love in relationships because we already know that in order to forge a healthy relationship with a partner, we first have to establish healthy relations with ourselves. You know how it goes – love begins with a sense of awe. I try to find it every day in the scent of approaching spring, a sunray on the face of my son, increasingly bolder singing of birds outside – the way I see it, it all begins with these little moments of awe. And it turns out, a sense of awareness is the foundation of love. If you keep charging ahead with reckless abandon, you won’t notice anything around you, let alone who you are today. You won’t be able to notice or appreciate how much you’ve accomplished – there’s no love in haste, only stress, fear, comparisons and unreasonable standards. There’s love in stopping for a moment... that is, if we allow ourselves to recognise it. One of the tasks I assign to my clients from the outset is to appreciate superficially irrelevant, everyday moments. I encourage them to stimulate this sense of awe in a purposefully exaggerated manner – for example, instead of saying ‘cool’, ‘nice’ or ‘OK’, I want them to say ‘magnificent’, ‘brilliant’, ‘amazing’, ‘beautiful’, ‘awe-inspiring’, etc. We set our hearts on f ire, since there’s magic all around us, and our viewpoints depend entirely on the state of our hearts. Major changes are born from these small flashes of insight.

 

Based on everything you’ve said so far, I am getting this maverick vibe from you, i.e. you take it upon yourself to dismantle many myths and stereotypes about self-perception, body shape and style. What do the women you communicate with professionally find most opening and relaxing? What sort of realisation you help bring about makes them so relieved and joyful you can plainly see it?

 

We live in fascinating times of great upheaval, but regardless of what we are facing as a society we ultimately experience our lives and feelings individually. Our inherited traumas, fears and limiting beliefs instill many habitual behaviours across multiple areas of life. Our beliefs about the range of the permissible and prevailing social mores very often have only the most tenuous relationship with reality. When we realise that, we can finally disentangle the personal from all of those arbitrary impositions, thus regaining control over our bodies, our desires and our aesthetic aspirations. That’s when the magic happens :)

 

In these difficult times, love is particularly important, possibly even critical, especially when facing the deathly coldness of authoritarian regimes. If our world is undergoing such a fundamental reevaluation, is there any time and place left for thinking about fashion and style?

 

The way I see it, there’s always time for that. We begin to notice what we can affect and what is beyond our reach. We distinguish between collective movements and our individual needs. It’s tricky, as it requires honesty and bravery, but it happens all the same. Our style is directly related to the contents of our hearts. It speaks volumes about us before we even open our mouths. Fashion has always been a sort of proving ground for rebellion, beliefs and struggle against arbitrary impositions – this will never change, even if everything else does. My grandma didn’t always have enough to even cook a halfway decent lunch, but she always radiated elegance – I bet I’ve inherited this respect for clothing and appearance from her. Not everyone is going to agree with me, but I have long since abandoned illusions. I am not a bottle of coca cola, and my views aren’t going to resonate with everyone, but I am unashamedly honest in my work with other ladies. If I discover a way to make someone feel better through dressing up regardless of what they are facing in life, that’s good enough for me. Mission accomplished.

 

What do you find most exciting in terms of our meetings and the RE:LOVE podcast?

 

I find the sheer diversity among women exciting, ditto for our immense power which allows us not only to survive and help others, but also to create, organise, inspire others, lead our little tribes and grow in accordance with our personal missions, be they minor or truly grand. That’s what my guests are like – strong, independent, stubborn, and uncompromising, but at the same time wise, fulfilled, beautiful and all around inspirational. I can hardly wait to see the results of our meetings!

 

Same here. Let love speak out!