Magda Butrym x H&M: Best Pieces to Shop

Once upon a time I was an aspiring fashion editor who camped outside of the H&M store in downtown Brooklyn with a friend to be amongst the first to shop the Kenzo x H&M designer collaboration. Since 2004, the H&M designer collection has inspired equal amounts of intense devotion. Fashion fans line up outside H&M stores the night before launch, crash the H&M website on the morning of, and make their H&M wishlists weeks before. The first designer collaboration from over two decades ago was with Karl Lagerfeld, last year’s was with Glenn Martens, and this year is with Magda Butrym.

Magda Butrym is the kind of small, still relatively new, brand fashion editors try to gatekeep. But in recent years it’s become near impossible. Wearing one of Butrym’s pieces, with appliquéd signature rosette details made of fabric, will get you countless compliments and questions. Everyone who wears a Magda Butrym dress or skirt or top eventually gets asked who they are wearing. And so the Butrym gospel has quickly spread from Poland, where the designer started her brand back in 2014.

At the H&M designer collaboration press conference in early April, Butrym spoke of her upbringing in Poland and her parents’ initial dismay at her decision to pursue a career in fashion design. It isn’t common for someone from her background to set out to start their own brand but Butrym was determined. Eventually she proved everyone wrong by not only successfully breaking out on her own but quickly becoming a name in the industry.

As for this H&M collaboration, Butrym was excited to reach a new audience and provide younger fans pieces that they are more likely able to afford. And while the entire collection does feel like an edited down selection of her classics, with plenty of signature roses everywhere, she admitted the design process differed only in that she kept asking herself what a younger Magda Butrym client would want. There are plenty of mini dresses, many ruched around the hips, and tiny tops with roses on the chest. They are the kind of pieces ideal for a big night out or long awaited vacation. While an occasion isn’t necessary to wear any of them, they do feel special enough to warrant one.

When dressing the VIP guests, like Iris Law and Chloë Sevigny, who attended the launch party earlier this month in Brooklyn, Butrym told me she was surprised by a piece mostly everyone seemed drawn to. “So many of them chose this mini little skirt with flowers,” she said. “I thought oh it’s not that special, it felt like a random thing to happen! But I think that they love it because it’s easy, it’s pretty. There’s just something simple about it. That was surprising. But maybe people were drawn to it because it’s very me and my brand. It’s very Magda!”

As for her own personal favorite piece, it has to be the first Magda Butrym x H&M piece she envisioned: “It was the blooming shoes, which have the flower on the back of the heel. It’s such a fun and dreamy piece, especially in this time when fashion is so serious!”

While creating this collection over the last year, Butrym noticed a shift in how everyone was getting dressed. Subtlety was starting to feel like a thing of the past. “For a while we’ve been so minimalistic and so…quiet luxury,” she told me. “Two months ago I was watching Sex And The City, the first episode, and it was so much fun. And the shoes she wore were so fun! Everything was fun.”