Marios Schwab

Marios Schwab is a Greek-Austrian fashion designer born in Athens and raised partly in Austria. He studied in Austria and at Esmod in Berlin before completing postgraduate womenswear study at Central Saint Martins in London. After early studio experience including Maison Martin Margiela, he established his own label in London in the mid-2000s and became associated with a technically exact form of body-conscious womenswear. He received the British Fashion Award for New Designer of the Year in 2006 and the Swiss Textile Award in 2007.

Halston appointed Schwab creative director of the luxury mainline in May 2009. His remit remained separate from the newly created Halston Heritage business, and his first mainline collection was Fall 2010, followed by Spring 2011 and Fall 2011. The appointment ended in July 2011 during a wider restructuring that also removed the Weinstein and Sarah Jessica Parker phase of the company.

Schwab later worked as a consultant and returned to Athens, becoming creative director of Zeus+Dione in 2021. There he has built collections around Greek textile traditions, local craft networks, historical dress and a modern wardrobe of clear lines and fluid construction. He remained in the role in 2026, giving his career a long second chapter rooted in the place where he was born.

Schwab’s work is strongly informed by anatomy and construction. His early collections mapped seams, panels and graphic structures onto the body, using corsetry knowledge, stretch, tailoring and engineered surfaces to make the garment’s architecture visible. Sensuality comes from the precision of that relationship to the body and from the tension created when structure and fluid material occupy the same silhouette.

At Halston he worked with a house known for drape, ease and long lines while retaining his own interest in control and technical construction. The collections used jersey, elongated silhouettes and eveningwear as house signals while introducing a more engineered treatment of the body. The short tenure remains one component of a wider practice formed in London and later redirected toward Greek craft.

At Zeus+Dione, Schwab has turned that technical discipline toward handwoven silk, embroidery, pleating, regional craft and historical references from Greece and the eastern Mediterranean. Clean tailoring and fluid dresses give those materials contemporary scale, allowing artisanal techniques to function inside a modern luxury wardrobe.