The Park Avenue Armory was doing what it does best last night: going big, unapologetically so. Catherine Holstein and her husband, Griffin Frazen, leaned all the way in, staging an installation that felt less like a runway backdrop and more like a statement carved into the air. A towering LED display—60 feet high, even wider—flickered with letters, numbers, symbols, the occasional full word, pulsing seriousness and scale in equal measure. This was Khaite saying we’re here, to the most glamorous crowd New York Fashion Week could muster. Front row? Not just Post Malone, but the get of the season so far: Sarah Pidgeon, in a very Carolyn Bessette Kennedy-coded little black dress and pumps. Message received.

In the same way Bessette Kennedy became shorthand for the late ’90s, the Khaite woman now feels like the avatar of the mid-2020s. Arizona ankle boots. East-west Kye bag. A look that quietly telegraphs taste, access, and the ability to pay for both. Denim and knits may keep the brand humming financially, but on the runway Holstein stays obsessed with tailoring—mostly black, often leather—and dresses that drift in as a kind of soft counterpoint. Think barely-there straps, pale shades, organza and tulle floating like breath.

Backstage, Holstein said the collection started with a recent rewatch of F for Fake, Orson Welles’s brainy, baffling 1973 docudrama. The kind of art-school-required viewing that once felt essential and now feels borderline impossible with TikTok attention spans. She was struck by Welles’s fixation on value—how we decide what art is worth, who gets to decide what’s authentic, who sets taste in the first place—and by the dressed-up, performative elegance of that era.

Those ideas filtered straight into the clothes. Officer’s jackets with decorative braids draped across the chest. Bright flowers pinned to lace blouses. A croc tail coat that felt deliberately excessive. Skirts—some narrow, some full—printed with paintings by Milton Avery. Even the models’ talon-like fake nails felt intentional. “That goes back to the provocative nature of risk-taking,” Holstein said. “I’m pushing my own boundaries too.” You could feel that tension—control versus indulgence—running through everything.

Silhouette-wise, she hit the now-familiar fluid midi skirt that’s quietly defining the week, and played with lace slip dresses that hovered inches off the body, more suggestion than garment. But the real provocation might’ve been the shoes. Pointy pumps and boots designed not to fit smoothly, but to wrinkle, to slouch, to look almost witchy—slightly too big, slightly wrong. A gamble. A dare.

If Catherine Holstein manages to make that the next thing, then yes—mad genius might be the only explanation.