The wardrobe built for women who don't stop moving
Fashion has gotten loud. New drops every week, trends that expire before you've worn them once, closets that grow faster than anyone can actually use them. For women who travel for work, train before meetings, and land somewhere new every few weeks, clothes have started asking for more effort than they give back.
INA KESS solves that: pieces that move from training to travel to work, without changing outfits in between.
Founded in Zurich by Katharina Staub, the brand has spent over a decade answering one question: why does technical performance and everyday elegance have to live in separate wardrobes? Katharina grew up on a farm outside Zurich, outdoors most of the day, and that physicality never left her. In 2015, at 27, she left a career in economics and IT to build the answer herself, starting with a single Zurich boutique.
By 2019 INA KESS had expanded across Europe. New York, Dubai and the Maldives followed. In October 2025, the brand opened its Asia flagship inside Takashimaya on Orchard Road, Singapore.
Singapore wasn't chosen at random. The climate does half the arguing on its own: humidity that punishes anything precious, a wardrobe that has to survive a commute, a client meeting and a workout in the same afternoon. The woman INA KESS is built for lives exactly that schedule, here more than almost anywhere. She's cosmopolitan, well travelled, and cares about precision and performance the same way she cares about how a piece looks. What she's tired of is excess: closets full of things bought on impulse, clothes that need more effort than they're worth.
Not athleisure. Something more deliberate
Katharina is careful to draw a line between her work and the athleisure label that surrounds it. Leggings on the street were never the goal. The goal was taking the engineering behind technical fabric and putting it into clothes sharp enough for a boardroom and easy enough for a flight.
Her first piece, a pair of black trousers, took months to get right. It's still a bestseller today, over ten years later, now known as the LUXE LÉGER Track Pants. The pair she wears most often was made eight years ago and still holds its shape, thanks Italian LYRIX, the in-house fabric behind it: four-way stretch, resistant to creasing and knee marks through an eight-hour flight, and still black after 100 washes. It breathes, dries quickly, smooths against body heat rather than clinging, and carries built-in sun protection. A tone-in-tone cord at the waist tucks away, and a hidden pocket holds a phone without showing its outline. Made in Portugal, in a regular 70cm inseam or an extra-long 75cm. That's the point: pieces designed to stay in a closet for five, ten, fifteen years, not one season.
Details you feel before you notice them
Spend time with an INA KESS piece and the thinking shows up in small places. Dresses shift silhouette depending on how they're worn. Pockets sit where a hand actually reaches for one. Shirt sleeves hide inner stretch bands that keep them pushed up without slipping down through the day. Trousers adjust in length, useful for a sudden change in weather or a change in plans.
Some details are almost invisible. Collars flip to reveal a reflective strip for visibility after dark. The same reflective detail hides along the zip at the hem of leggings, unnoticed until it's unzipped.
The fabrics do their own quiet work. Blouses that read as silk are built from technical textiles closer to outdoor performance gear: quick-drying, resistant to creasing, built to hold up through a full day of humidity or a full day of meetings. The palette stays neutral by design, so a piece from this season sits easily next to one from three seasons ago.
Made to last, on purpose
Every garment is produced across twelve specialised factories in Portugal, with Katharina involved down to stitch count and finish. The brand's signature gold buttons carry a Venetian starburst detail, understated enough to notice only up close.
Katharina describes the brand's identity as Swiss precision paired with Italian warmth: exacting construction alongside a sense of ease and connection in how the clothes are meant to be worn. Collections stay small and tightly edited, built to integrate with what came before rather than replace it each season.
That restraint is deliberate too. No trend colours, no seasonal reset for the sake of it. Each capsule is small and built to sit next to what a customer already owns, so the wardrobe grows instead of turning over. It's a version of luxury that lines up with where a lot of shoppers already are: buying less, but choosing with more care.
The result is a wardrobe made for a woman who is always moving between roles, cities and climates, and who wants one set of clothes to keep up with all of it.
As Katharina puts it: "Luxury today is the freedom to move beautifully, powerfully, and without compromise."
