What clothes still move you when you are a fashion designer and you imagine hundreds of them every year? The American Catherine Holstein is not citing one of these long wool coats or one of these straight leather skirts that she designs for her brand Khaite, but a pair of suspenders with little car prints, a far cry from her beloved minimalism. “I must have been 3 or 4 years oldshe says, her voice high and her delivery dazzling. When my brother gave me these braces, I felt a joy so powerful that it seemed almost frightening. Since then, it’s this electroshock that I’ve been chasing while doing fashion. Which, in a way, is in vain: nothing will ever be as strong. »
Catherine Holstein, 40 years old, is a clothing enthusiast, who will tell you an anecdote about each piece like a biography. Levi’s jeans with the perfect fit; the Loro Piana turtleneck sweater stolen from her sister; the Balenciaga jacket forgotten in a taxi in Mexico, and for which she had gone out of her way throughout the stay to be found… which was done. “It’s pathetic to admit this, but I was truly devastated. It was like losing an arm. »
Since 2016, her label, Khaite (a derivative of her nickname, “Cate”), enjoying solid growth with annual turnover increasing by 30% in 2023, has formed a purveyor of ready-to-wear made mainly in Italy, black, sand, white or gray. Jackets with angular or rounded shoulders, flowing dresses marked with a belt, nighties with thin straps, pleated pants, suede jackets or demure cardigans prove to be as wearable and flattering as the scenography of the fashion shows where they are presented is intended to be dark and poisonous. His last show, organized on February 10 at New York fashion week, black box and mirrored podium, was a new and applauded illustration of this.
“I need immediate gratification”
At Khaite, we discover above all reminiscences of the 1990s: echoes of Nirvana, which Catherine Holstein has always revered, or fragments of films by Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch or Martin Scorsese, married to a refined and New York silhouette, à la Donna Karan or Calvin Klein. In a lackluster New York fashion week facing European locomotives, the recipe proved its worth. Khaite, with its seventy-five employees, two hundred and seventy points of sale and two own stores with brutalist decoration, on Mercer Street in Soho and in Seoul, has reached 100 million dollars in turnover (approximately 94 million euros) from 2022, only six years after its debut. The sign, perhaps, that “the American dream still exists”, she wants to believe. Before qualifying: “The truth is that I struggled for twenty years to succeed in taking absolute pleasure in this profession today and overcoming the frustration. »
You have 62.51% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.