Catherine Holstein and her husband Griffin Frazen turned the Park Avenue Armory into something appropriately monumental for Khaite’s fall 2026 show — a sweeping LED display, sixty feet tall and many more wide, flashing letters, numbers, symbols and occasional full words across the space. The most glamorous crowd of New York Fashion Week settled in, Post Malone among them, alongside the get of the season: Love Story actress Sarah Pidgeon, in a little black dress and pumps that read unmistakably as Carolyn Bessette Kennedy.

That reference was not accidental. Bessette Kennedy has become the cultural touchstone of the moment, and the Khaite woman exists in a direct line from her — an avatar for the mid-2020s in the same way that Bessette Kennedy crystallised something essential about the late nineties. The Arizona ankle boots and east-west Kye bag have become fluent in the language of in-the-know status and the means to afford it.

The collection’s conceptual anchor was Orson Welles’s 1973 docudrama F for Fake — required viewing for a certain generation of art school students, a film so densely constructed and yet about almost nothing that it’s nearly unwatchable with a contemporary attention span. Holstein was taken with Welles’s preoccupations — “how we value art, how we value authenticity, who are the arbiters of taste” — and by the dressed-up styles of the period. Officer’s jackets arrived with decorative braids swagged across the chest. Colourful flowers were pinned to a lace blouse. A croc tail coat made an appearance. Skirts both narrow and full featured Milton Avery paintings. Even the models’ talon-like fake nails were part of the conversation. “That goes back to the provocative nature of risk taking,” Holstein said. “I’m pushing my own boundaries too.”

On the silhouette front, the fluid midi skirt that has become one of the defining looks of the week was well represented. Lace slip dresses seemed to float slightly off the body, barely touching. But the most genuinely provocative idea in the collection may have been the footwear — pointy pumps and boots built not for a conventional smooth fit but to be wrinkly, almost witchily oversized. If Holstein can make those trend, that really would qualify as some kind of mad genius.