Photo Credits: Khaite/Reproduction
At New York Fashion Week, Khaite’s Spring/Summer 2026 collection unfolded with a quiet radicalism, where the language of luxury became inseparable from the pulse of human imperfection. Catherine Holstein, a designer known for infusing strength into softness and intellect into minimalism, turned her gaze inward this season. The collection’s essence was not found in overt theatrics, but in a tension she herself described — the curiosity about insecurity, risk, and the architecture of self-assurance forged in their wake.
Photo Credits: Hanna Tveite
What emerged on the runway was not merely clothing but a study in contrasts: the rigidity of structure against the spontaneity of form, the audacity of volume tempered by moments of fragility, silhouettes that carried the discipline of precision while deliberately allowing space for asymmetry, even hesitation. This was confidence rendered not as perfection but as evolution — as the kind of beauty that reveals itself only when control loosens its grip.
Video: Khaite/ Reproduction
Khaite’s SS26 palette of restrained elegance — the whites and blacks fractured by earthy tonalities, the leather juxtaposed with whisper-thin silks — felt cinematic in its restraint, a refusal of excess in favor of resonance. Yet beneath the tailoring’s severity lived something intimate: vulnerability transformed into a visual vocabulary, luxury reimagined not as distance but as closeness, as texture, as humanity.
Photo Credits: Hanna Tveite
In an era where fashion often shouts to be heard, Holstein’s collection spoke with measured clarity. It reminded us that the future of luxury may not lie in louder statements or faster cycles, but in this delicate geometry between risk and refinement, between strength and surrender. SS26 positioned Khaite not only as a brand of contemporary relevance but as a voice shaping what sophistication can mean in the twenty-first century: intellectually precise, emotionally resonant, and defiantly human.
Photo Credits: Hanna Tveite
