Story by Editor-at-Large Carolina Ogliaro
At New York Fashion Week this season, Khaite’s Fall/Winter 2026/27 collection made its statement in one of Manhattan’s most dramatic spaces, the Park Avenue Armory, a setting that feels both reverent and raw, architectural and unresolved. For Catherine Holstein, the venue was an ally in a collection that explored the intersection of art and artifice, where the sculptural quality of garment construction met the expressive potential of gesture and material,and where fashion began to feel closer to spatial practice than seasonal dressing.
Khaite’s show was a synthesis of exquisite materials, artisan techniques, and decisive flourishes that never settled for surface novelty but insisted on structural rigor. Coats and outer layers, sharply cut yet bearing the gravity of tactile weight, opened the runway, establishing a vertical discipline that threaded through the entire lineup. Beneath them, trousers and dresses oscillated between fluidity and control; there was a sense that every silhouette had been considered not as a statement but as a proposition, measured against volume, tension, and the body in motion.
The collection’s palette was its own argument for thoughtful restraint. Deep, resonant neutrals, onyx black, slate gray, pewter, were tempered with warmer accents in rich cocoa and muted rust, evoking an autumnal New York that is less about drama than experience. This was a season of material depth rather than flash, where knit and leather conversed with wool and satin in ways that felt intuitive rather than engineered. The result was clothes that could be worn, lived in, and yet read as calibrated works of design.
Khaite’s distinction is this balance: a fluency in American urban grammar paired with a sculptural sensibility that feels almost architectural. There was nothing gratuitous here, no excess for its own sake, and yet no austerity either. Embellishments, where they appeared, were subtle and deliberate: trims that punctuated, textures that gestured toward tension without losing tactility.
In choosing the Armory, a space more often associated with lineage and institutional gravity, Holstein underscored the very idea that fashion can be both art and utility, presence and proposition. Khaite’s Fall/Winter 2026/27 was an invitation to consider how clothes shape us as much as we shape them. The collection felt rooted in a coherent, contemporary American language, poised, focused, and purposefully open.
