At 10:30 on a recent Sunday morning, Catherine Holstein was presiding over a pre-fall lookbook shoot. Her two young children were at home with her husband, but as with most new mothers, they weren’t far from Holstein’s mind. “My body’s gone through so many changes over the last three years with two babies,” she started. “As things weren’t fitting anymore, but I still wanted to wear them, it led to this kind of questioning: What’s the right way to wear something? The right way for things to fit? I’ve kind of been embracing ‘bad fits.’” She continued: “When I see something now, if it’s really sleek and standard, I kind of start messing with it, to break these boundaries I’ve put on myself for so many years.”
Take a look at this Khaite pre-fall collection and you’ll notice that when fastened, a double-breasted jacket ripples and twists, rather than lays flat, the buttons and their accompanying buttonholes just off enough to create the pulling and tugging effect Holstein was going for. Similarly, a sheer organza blouse was assembled to drape asymmetrically, with the hem dipping lower on one hip than the other. And a knitted chiffon skirt was left unfinished with bits of chiffon peeking out like “a little girl’s pigtails.”
Call it a quest for imperfection—it also shaped Khaite’s new-season shoes. “Typically pumps are super-hard,” Holstein said, “but I wanted to make them really soft, so I took all the lining out.” The shoes feel as supple as gloves and indeed scrunch up almost like gloves would thanks to thin metal rods inserted on either side of the soles. “What makes you pick up a shoe when you’re in the store?” she asked rhetorically, then answered her own question: “I’d pick these up because they’re a little bit weird. Still,” she went on, “at the end of the day we are a business. I created this brand to serve women. The comfort, the functionality—those things are really important to me, but I want to challenge the aesthetic norms.”
The season’s ruched pink dresses, one in vintage washed silk charmeuse, the other in something called “light veil silk,” don’t so much challenge aesthetic norms as resurrect old ones. These were designed with “Girl With the Most Cake”-era Courtney Love in mind. As a child of the ’90s, Holstein still prefers grunge over all other genres of music, and she’s banking on emotional resonance. “We find that our customers are really attracted to the emotional pieces.” So why not have some irreverent, playful, even weird fun?