When unaffected honesty meets effortless style, as it does in the aura of Marcelina, it’s as enchanting as her icon, Audrey Hepburn, only her allure is in the way she wears a t-shirt dress instead of a shift. A white sweater and black cardigan look refreshingly hip on Marcelina, and she makes me wish I could paint my nails and lips red and look as down to earth as she does. Marcelina’s views on the complexes created by modern-day advertising’s emphasis on perfection, come from firsthand experience in the modeling industry, where she felt uncomfortable in someone else’s clothes and saying someone else’s words. Her ideas are also born from a certain unusual integrity derived from her native Poland, where Western media isn’t that influential. She’s able to recognize that the media creates celebrities and unrealistic ideals of beauty and wields its power over us. Having grown up around art and antiquity, Marcelina loves a vintage floral cardigan for its resemblance to Baroque motifs and the faces of people with wrinkles, big noses and round bodies seen in paintings or the underground in London, where she’s currently living. Imagining and exploring what’s behind something or someone – the way Marcelina does when she looks at Grace Coddington’s fashion shoots for their depth and complexity – is exactly why we chased Marcelina down for an interview when we first saw her on Brick Lane. It’s not everyone that can make a Levi’s jacket or black hair bow look at once so irresistable and au courant.

If you love Marcelina, you may also like Ruthie Friedlander, Marika Wilson and Christina Mannatt.