At last season’s Khaite show in Brooklyn in, a setting with trees and gold leaves, the designer Catherine Holstein cemented her status as the new success of an independent fashion brand that managed to gain business footings among the major retailers like Bergdorf Goodman and e-commerce site like Ssense, Matches Fashion and My Theresa as well as earnings accolades among the fashion crowd for her pared-down and no-nonsense but luxurious clothes.
Khaite should be on the list as one of the strongest New York shows this September, but unfortunately, Holstein, a firm believer in live fashion shows, has to settle for a short film instead of what could have been, for her, another blockbuster which is rare since her designs aren’t considered as trendy or avant-garde or any of those kinds of classifications.
The short film is a hybrid between a mock-up showroom buyers appointment setting where models wore different clothes by request from a particular store and a photoshoot session with a camera close up of the garments. Irina Shayk opened the sequence wearing a long white dress with a curved boat neckline and a brown leather bag. This was followed by closeup shots of Alex Wek in a black corset strappy long dress and white sandals as she posed against the corner of a concrete wall. Then, it was Abby Champion’s turn in an oversized white jacket with a shorty puffy skirt. These and all the other garments are shown like the long double-breasted tailored jacket and coat in black and white, the white ruched square neck long dress with side slit, or the black boat neck long flare dresses belted at the neck are quintessentially Khaite – the kind of clothes women can slip into effortlessly and with little fuss.
The video is sleek but product-oriented, which is the norm for Khaite, not an anomaly. Even with live shows, Holstein never strayed from her mission that focused on the clothes and also recently, shoes and bags. This strategy works well for Khaite.