Anna Osmekhina never planned to start a fashion brand. She spent years as a costume designer and stylist building other people’s creative visions, until in 2013 she decided to make something for herself. It started as a small capsule she put together for colleagues on set in Kyiv. The collection ended up at Colette, the legendary Paris concept store, and sold out in a week. After that, there was no going back.
Colette was the kind of place that could make or break a brand overnight. The three-floor store on Rue Saint Honoré was fashion’s most demanding filter for two decades, giving early shelf space to designers like Raf Simons and Proenza Schouler before anyone else knew their names. It closed in December 2017.
“I didn’t think of the clothing as a brand,” Anna says. “It was more an art project, a personal language.” That art project has since landed on the bodies of Grimes, Nicki Minaj, Anya Taylor-Joy, and Kourtney Kardashian, and survived a war.
The concept behind TTSWTRS—pronounced “tattoosweaters,”—is simple to explain and hard to replicate. Tattoo imagery, made in collaboration with real tattoo artists, is printed on second-skin fabrics so the garment feels like a continuation of the body beneath it. The seams don’t interrupt the image, and the print doesn’t sit on top of the clothing so much as it becomes part of it.
“It was never about using tattoos as a print,” Anna says. “We approached it more like a collaboration with tattoo culture itself, working with artists, preserving their line, their color, and their way of placing work on the body. We try to keep the feeling of how a tattoo actually appears on skin—without seams, without breaking into something decorative.”
Her years in costume design and styling also shaped the label. Working on set teaches you how bodies move and proportions shift.
“You stop thinking in categories like ‘top’ or ‘dress,’” she says. “You start thinking in the full picture: how it looks, how it feels, and how it behaves on the body.” Collections at TTSWTRS are still built this way, as complete visual systems rather than individual pieces. Each article is produced in a three-story manufacturing hub in Kyiv with its own printing facilities and exploratory workshop.
Finding tattoo artists to collaborate with a matter of instinct. “We don’t really brief them, and we don’t interfere with their work,” Anna says. “It’s more about finding the right artist whose language we connect with.” Sometimes she has a specific image in mind and looks for the right person to realize it. More often the tattoos already exist on someone’s skin, and TTSWTRS is just the next place they land.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine stopped everything in 2022. “We were asking ourselves if there is any sense to continue at all,” Anna says. “When you experience war, your perception of time and life changes. They become very sharp, very valuable. You start moving closer to what you really want to do.”
What followed she describes not as recovery but as clarity. For Anna, what she actually wanted was couture, more experimental shows, and more honesty in the work.
TTSWTRS staged two shows in the middle of the conflict. Cathy Horyn came to the first one. “The support we received was more than we expected,” she says. “I’m very gratful to her and CFDA for that.”
“When you experience war, your perception of time and life changes. They become very sharp, very valuable.”
-Anna Osmekhina
Kyiv is still where the brand lives, and Anna is clear about why. The city has its own energy, one that pushes you to grow rather than settle.
“It’s a very creative, living organism, with strong and talented people,” she says. “It’s a place that doesn’t let you stay the same. I really love Kyiv. It’s a big part of our brand, and it’s a subculture and very specific environment.”
TTSWTRS got into digital fashion, VR, NFTs, and AI early. In 2020 the brand released a VR show imagining a future where technology becomes inescapable. In 2021 it released a fashion film as an NFT, with proceeds going to ocean conservation organization Parley for the Oceans. In 2022 it became the first Ukrainian brand to release a virtual capsule with digital retailer DRESSX. For Anna, none of it was about being ahead of the curve.
“It gives you a possibility to go beyond the physical body, to create new forms, new identities, new spaces,” she says. “It’s another way of storytelling. At the same time, I don’t think physical clothing will disappear completely. The body is still central to everything we do—but I do believe the way we consume and experience fashion will change. We are already in that transition.”
The brand has also gone fully sustainable, switching to eco fabrics and biodegradable packaging since 2020, a shift that costs roughly 25% to 30% more. Anna doesn’t treat it as a burden.
“It will stop being one when it becomes the standard for everyone,” she says. “Not a choice, but the only way to work.”
The question TTSWTRS is sitting with right now has nothing to do with clothes.
“How is it possible to have such a beautiful, complex, almost perfect planet and still want war?” Anna says. “In a world where there is still so much pain, where people and animals need care, I don’t understand the need to destroy, especially life.” It’s a big thing to carry into a collection, though it explains why the collections keep coming.
“We choose to create,” she says. “I believe there is strength in that.”
Hair & makeup by Celena San Juan, LAB. Model: Avery Piepenburg, Ford Models. Riggs coffee table and Mara sofa and chair from ARHAUS
