The Park Avenue Armory is made for massive installations and Catherine Holstein and her husband Griffin Frazen orchestrated one last night. A sweeping 60-feet tall and many more feet wide LED display of letters, numbers, symbols, and the occasional full word, it flashed the seriousness of brand Khaite’s intent and the scale of its success to the most glamorous crowd of New York fashion week. In the front row: not only Post Malone but the get of the season so far, Love Story’s Sarah Pidgeon, in a very Carolyn Bessette Kennedy little black dress and pumps.
In the way that Bessette Kennedy became an avatar for her late 1990s moment, so the Khaite woman is one for the mid-2020s, her Arizona ankle boots and east-west Kye bag flashing an in-the-know status and the ability to pay for it to all who can read the signs. Denim and knitwear are the other engines of the Khaite brand. On the runway though, Holstein prefers to focus on tailoring, mostly in black and often in leather, and dresses, which tend to provide a soft, ethereal foil to her jackets and pants. She likes a cloud of organza or tulle, barely there colors, and delicate straps.
This collection, she said backstage, was inspired by a recent watching of F for Fake, a 1973 docudrama written, directed, and starring the mad genius that was Orson Welles. It’s a film that was required viewing for art school kids of a certain generation, one that’s so densely constructed and yet about next to nothing that it’s almost unwatchable today with our TikTok attention spans. Holstein was impressed by Welles’s ideas—“how we value art, how we value authenticity, who are the arbiters of taste”—and by the dressed-up styles of the day.
She took them as a cue for officer’s jackets with decorative braids swagged across the chest, for the colorful flowers pinned to a lace blouse and a croc tail coat among other pieces, for skirts both narrow and full featuring Milton Avery paintings, and even for the models’ talon-like fake nails. “That goes back to the provocative nature of risk taking,” she said, “I’m pushing my own boundaries too.”
Silhouette-wise, she had the fluid midi skirt that has become one of the defining looks of the week. She also played with lace slip dresses that seemed to float several inches off the body. But her most provocative idea may have been her footwear; this season’s pointy pumps and boots were built not for a conventional snug, smooth fit but to be wrinkly, almost witchily big. If Holstein can make those trend, that really would be some kind of mad genius.
