When Marek's comp card first drifted across our desk what made him leap out from the piles of chiseled campaign hunks and editorial king-pins being offered for this cover booking was the emotion he represented.

In his face was an emotional depth that mixed aloofness with innocence, intelligence with ambition. You knew this was the kind of model who will work because he is, as they say, evocative. Marek is evocative of the super-jaded David Bowie on the cover of his legendary Low album in some pictures and in other pictures he is the essence of an angelic choir boy in some humble parish church in northern England.

It is this haunting quality that made fashion's coolest star-makers latch on to him before anybody else had a chance to mine his poetic presence. Promptly one of male modeling most powerful star-makers in the form of stylist Joe McKenna came calling, and the phones to V, Details, Dazed and Confused started ringing.

And at the MODELS.com shoot that ensued later that week, Marek is quiet, curious about the process but certain in way that he himself does not even realize. Though we belabour the poor thing's hair for hours, driving the hair-stylist to the brink of murderous exasperation. ("Nope. Too typical". "Too Versace". "Too Teddy Boy". Mohawks are the easy way out" Too...Too!) Marek sits through it all with aristocratic amusement.

So when we sit down a week later to talk, it is with pleasure and relief that we discover that there is indeed more than meets the ambiguous eye to his pictures.

As his surname suggests he is of Polish origin but was born in Singapore, when his father flew to that locale to serve as a city planner for the then expanding Asian metropolis (How Rem Koolhaas is that!) Olszewski senior was so enamoured with this new city with its new possibility that he decided to make it his home.