Growing up near Gdańsk in Poland, Max Barczak found his way to his local modeling agency about a year and a half ago through his younger sister. “She wanted to be a model and when she was signing a contract, she told them that she had a brother and the agents wanted to see a picture and then they wanted to see me,” he says. “I went because it was interesting and I had nothing to lose. I didn’t expect it, but it was something new, so why not try it?”
He worked sporadically during his first few months after signing, intent on finishing up school before graduating last summer and finding himself suddenly in the coveted opening slot at Prada. “It was my first show abroad, and it was really, really surprising for me because I didn’t know that I would open until just a few minutes before. Everyone was getting in the queue and they showed me the place in the beginning,” he recalls. Still, he says he was thankful for the last-minute notice, as it gave him little time to think about the magnitude of what he was about to do. “I didn’t have enough time to be really stressed,” he laughs. “If I knew about that the day before, it would probably have been more complicated for me. It’s hard to say what I was feeling because it was all going so fast.”
Success came quickly after that. Barczak went on to walk for Louis Vuitton, Dior Homme, Valentino, and Raf Simons in Paris the following week, as well as in Anthony Vaccarello’s Versus show in London in September before appearing in the Winter 2015 Topman campaign shot by Thomas Cooksey. He says what he likes most about modeling is the opportunity for travel, which is he currently putting to good use on a long stay in Tokyo. “It’s a lot of new experiences and I meet a lot of people and I can travel around the world,” he says about the perks of his new career. “I’m still young and, for people my age, traveling is really amazing and I can see so many cultures.”
This year has found Barczak on the runway at Prada again, Louis Vuitton, Jil Sander, Berluti, JW Anderson, and at Burberry’s shows during both men’s and women’s fashion week. In his rare time off, he stays active by cycling and swimming, and he likes to relax by listening to music from the Fifties and Sixties, with the swinging rhythms of Dean Martin a particular favorite. Barczak’s plan is eventually to return to school to study economics, but until then he is more than content to go wherever the job takes him. “I hope I will see a lot of different things,” he says of his plans for the near future. “I suppose I will always have a lot of memories from this chapter of my life.”
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