The Story of a Designer and Her Craft

The Beginning

Jana Kosheva was born in 1975 in Sofia, Bulgaria - into a world of colour, texture, and hands that knew how to make things. Her grandmother was a master tailor. As a child, Jana would sit for hours watching the sewing machine tick, playing with buttons, running her fingers across fabric. She didn't know then that she was learning. She was just happy.

Her father fell ill when she was in the eighth grade and passed away not long after. Her mother - quietly strong, steady, never asking for sympathy - kept the family together. She also made a decision that would shape Jana's entire life: she let her daughter follow the path that made her feel most alive.

Jana stitched her first skirt in primary school. It was too tight to walk in. She wore it anyway - too proud of herself to care.

The School Years

She studied at the Textile and Clothing technical school in Sofia, then went on to the University, graduating with a degree in Fashion Design. Her diploma collection was a series of evening gowns - structured, feminine, uncompromising.

The First Stage

In the mid-1990s, Jana became part of Aries Unikat - a collective of independent designers, each presenting their own vision. It was Bulgaria's first platform for experimental fashion, and it gave Jana her first audience.

 
During her university years she participated in fashion festivals and fashion weeks in Bulgaria - some of her earliest work on the runway, sharp and already recognisably hers.

She also worked as a designer for Apollo - a brand known for hunting apparel and bespoke luxury garments - where she learned the discipline of made-to-measure and the craft of dressing a specific body for a specific life. Apollo participated in international exhibitions, and Jana's work travelled with them.

On Her Own

When she went out on her own, she started where many designers do: with brides and debutantes. Gowns for the most important evenings of a woman's life. Each one made to fit, made to last, made by hand.

The brand grew. She built a studio, an atelier, a team. The press began to notice her. She appeared in Bliasak and other Bulgarian magazines. She dressed some of Bulgaria's best-known singers, for their albums and stage performances. The collaboration put Jana in front of a new, wider audience.

In March 2011, Jana appeared on the cover of Женски свят (Women's world) - one of Bulgaria's most widely read women's publications. The headline read: "I am living the life I always dreamed of."

The Thread That Never Broke

Through all of it - the evening gowns, the stage costumes, the press - Jana kept returning to one thing: natural materials. Not as a trend. As a memory.

She remembers watching, as a child, the wool blankets and traditional weavings being washed at the old fulling mills - валявици - in Bulgarian towns and villages, then laid out to dry in the sun. The colours were vivid and warm. Ochre, terracotta, deep red. She didn't have words for what she felt looking at them. She does now: it was the beginning of everything.

When she discovered Italian fabric importers offering stock linen and wool at exceptional quality, she knew exactly what to do with them. The craft her grandmother had shown her. The colours she had seen drying in the sun. The bodies she had spent decades learning to dress.

Jana Coshè

The company was registered in 2004. The international brand - Jana Coshè - came later, born from a decision to stop making fashion for the local market and start making it for the world.

Today, every piece in the Jana Coshè collection is cut and sewn by hand in a small atelier in Sofia - one maker, one garment, from start to finish. The fabrics come from Italy. The designs come from thirty years of watching how women move, what they need, and what makes them feel like themselves.

Sofia, Bulgaria - Est. 2004