Malgosia Bela to Present Her Book "Winter Girl" at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week TBILISI

This May, Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week TBILISI moves beyond the runway to host an intimate book presentation by Małgosia Bela. On May 10th, during the prestigious Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week TBILISI, fashion model Malgosia Bela will unveil her book, Winter Girl, at the Telegraph Hotel.

While the fashion world is no stranger to glossy coffee table books, Winter Girl is a different breed of retrospective. It's a gallery of a twenty-year career and a witty, grounded, and deeply personal narrative anchored by Bela’s own prose. The title of the book stems from a moment of professional anxiety turned into a defining realization. After a string of summer cancellations, Bela’s agent, José, gave her some blunt but liberating advice: “Listen, Malgo, just relax... You’re just more of a winter girl.”

Bela embraces this identity with the self-deprecating humor that defines her writing.

I get it, no crop tops or miniskirts for me... Winter girl means that one looks better wrapped up than unpeeled. Oh well...

Her "assets" – an angular face and athletic frame are made for the drama of long coats, heavy knits, and the architectural silhouettes of cold-weather couture. Though Bela never kept a traditional diary, the book’s soul is built on a lifelong conversation with her best friend and the book’s publisher, Filip Niedenthal. Together, they unearthed two decades of stories that Bela describes as a "tribute to artists."

The book is structured around 10 essays covering a surreal spectrum of experiences, including the raw beginnings of a modeling career and the nuanced reality of relationships in a high-pressure industry. 

Malgosia for Jil Sander’s spring 1999 campaign. Photographed by David Sims.

Rather than a standard chronological timeline, the 100 memorable images in the book act like branches on a tree, extending from the themes of her essays. Captured by the greatest photographers of our time, these images are evidence of Bela’s profound "admiration and love of that whole process of creating images."

Bela is quick to clarify that this isn't a definitive biography. Instead, Winter Girl is a sophisticated, friendly, and precise look at a woman who has navigated more than twenty-five years of an evolving industry with her wit firmly intact.