Ana Kraš

Ana Kraš is a designer, photographer and artist from Belgrade. She studied interior architecture and furniture design there, showed a plywood chair from her final-year project at the Salone del Mobile in Milan, and became known in New York for her Bonbon lamps, lampshades made of colored thread, which were shown at the Museum of Arts and Design’s NYC Makers biennial and later made in a collaboration with the homeware company Hay. Alongside furniture and objects, she photographs fashion campaigns and designed the set for a runway show in Copenhagen. After about ten years in New York she moved to Paris.

Magazines have called her an “it girl” more than once. Her clothes are part of why. This study is about what she has said, in published interviews, about how she dresses, and what a reader trying to buy less can take from it.

How she describes her own style

The first thing to say is that Kraš does not present herself as a minimalist with a fixed uniform. In a 2015 interview with Metal Magazine, she said she is not married to one style and is open to many. Two years later she told British Vogue, “My style is very free.” She described moving between simple and elegant on some days and colorful and busy on others.

What stays constant is a filter, not a look. In the same interview she said, “I always have to stay comfortable.” And in a 2025 conversation for the French label Rouje, she called her way of dressing contemporary, with “simplicity and functionality that works with contemporary life.”

That matters for anyone who has tried to copy a famous person’s wardrobe. Kraš’s consistency is not a list of items. It is a set of reasons for choosing them.

A seamstress, an old dress and a color from home

The most telling details in her interviews are about where her clothes come from.

Clothes made, not only bought. In the 2017 Vogue interview she said most of her clothes are made in Belgrade by a seamstress who is an old family friend, and named a black suit made for her as a favorite. Clothes made by someone you know, to your measurements, tend to be kept, altered and worn for years. They also do not arrive with a rack of matching pieces beside them.

An old dress in heavy rotation. In the same interview she mentioned a 70-year-old Serbian cotton shirt dress she had been wearing all summer. A garment that age, worn constantly, is the opposite of a purchase that loses its shine in a few weeks.

A palette inherited, not bought. In the Rouje interview she explained that teget, the name of the company of objects she started in 2024, is Serbian for navy blue, a color her parents wore and often dressed her in as a child. She credited her father with a love of simplicity in design and her mother with an eye for textures and fabrics. Years earlier, she had described her mother to Into The Gloss as “very elegant, but very simple.”

None of this is minimalism as a style. It is something more useful: a wardrobe with roots.

What a reader takes from it

Make comfort the first filter. A piece that is uncomfortable will not be worn, and an unworn piece has the worst cost per wear in your closet. If it pinches, scratches or needs adjusting all day, leave it in the shop.

Keep old clothes at the center. The Diderot effect runs on newness: one new thing makes the old things around it look tired. A decades-old dress worn all summer turns that around. When the old pieces are the ones you love most, new things have to live up to them, not the other way round.

Have things made and mended. Few people have a family seamstress. Most towns have a tailor who can shorten, take in and repair. Altering what you own to fit you well is often the cheapest way to make it feel new.

Find your color at home. Look at the colors you grew up with, or the ones you already wear most. A palette you already own is free, and it does not change with the season’s trend reports.

Variety without volume. Kraš moves between simple and busy looks without needing a uniform. Our guide to dressing in repeats shows how a small wardrobe can do the same through proportion and texture.

A note on “it girls”

Profiles of admired people often end in a list of things to buy. The 2017 Vogue piece did too, with the products she said she wanted that summer. Following an admired person’s purchases is how the bandwagon effect works, and seeing the same pieces again and again in features and feeds is the mere exposure effect doing its part.

The parts of Kraš’s wardrobe that make it hers, the seamstress, the old dress and the navy of her childhood, are exactly the parts no list can sell you. Copy the habits. Leave the shopping list.