When we sit down in Paris hotel Maison Cassandre on a hot spring day, PR agency founder David Siwicki is exhausted from lugging boxes. He’s just moved into a new, bigger office in the city’s 17th arrondissement, with his team of 14 PR managers, assistants and interns. The week prior, he’d made a cameo in Charli XCX’s “SS26” music video, invited by her stylist Chris Horan to sit alongside his clients, designers Ben Barron and August Bror Vestbø of August Barron. Siwicki is also about to venture into menswear, with his roster of newly signed men’s clients Edward Cuming, Ernest W. Baker, and Post Archive Faction.
The Charli XCX video cameo is a testament to Siwicki’s role in the Paris fashion scene. From Ellen Hodakova Larsson, who took home the 2024 LVMH Prize, to Meryll Rogge, who became creative director of Marni this year, alongside her namesake label, the founder has a knack for discovering young names just before they get buzzy.
Siwicki is not used to giving interviews; his job is to loom over designer interviews, in-person or camera-off on a Zoom call, to listen and observe. But on this occasion, he agreed to sit down and chart how he built his agency. “I spend so much time thinking about these things, but I never usually say them out loud, so it’s a bit cringe for me to do it,” he says, “I did bring notes.”
We start from the beginning. Siwicki, who hails from Northern Virginia, moved to New York in 2008 to study at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) after high school. Upon graduating, he interned at Altuzarra, Louis Vuitton and Tom Ford, before landing in Balenciaga’s New York office at the end of the Nicolas Ghesquière era. Siwicki was the only one in the office who spoke French apart from the CEO. Suddenly, he found himself “babysitting” the design team and the merchandising team when they were in town. Then, Alexander Wang took over the house, and New York became Balenciaga’s epicenter.
“I started fashion with this really integrated perspective on branding, it wasn’t just PR; it was what’s actually relevant to the store, what’s relevant to wholesale,” he says. “I got to know all the teams as a young employee.”
David Siwicki recently moved his office to the 17th arrondissement in Paris, with his team of 14 PR managers, assistants and interns.
After, Siwicki tried agency life at major New York firm KCD, in 2014. But quickly, he grew tired of the New York hustle. He left for Paris in 2015 without a job, but with the conviction that the city was where he needed to be. It was there he met Robin Meason, founder of Paris agency Ritual Projects, and she hired him off the bat. “Robin had such an interesting stable of designers back then, Demna at Vetements, Glenn Martens at Y/Project, and they were really starting to break through,” Siwicki says. His first task was working on Vetements’s third show, Fall/Winter 2015, in the basement of gay sex club Le Dépôt.
