Khaite SS27: Romance Gets Under the Skin

Khaite SS27 opened in near-darkness with Kaia Gerber walking beneath a hard spotlight in a sculptural white bra and a high-waisted black leather skirt. Corsetry climbed openly across the back. PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me filled the Brooklyn Storehouse. The hair looked half-undone, half-historical. It was recognizably Khaite, yet something inside the house had shifted.

New York Fashion Week SS27 marks Khaite’s tenth anniversary, and Catherine Holstein used the season to explore romance through color, texture, proportion, and movement.

Khaite SS27 Started With a Martini in Venice

Part of the collection can apparently be blamed on a very good martini.

Holstein and her husband, architect Griffin Frazen, spend time in Venice and often stay at the Gritti Palace. While drinking at the hotel, she looked up at the ornamental ceiling moldings. Their elaborate shapes eventually appeared across Khaite SS27 as cameo-like cutouts, embroidered surfaces, and delicate decorative work.

Venice also supplied the atmosphere. Its shifting light and accumulated layers of history fed a palette of brass, cream, and celadon, softened by sheer fabrics and pale lingerie tones. Black leather stayed present as an anchor, carrying the New York severity Khaite has spent a decade perfecting.

Historical periods drifted through the collection without turning it into costume. Drop waists carried Art Deco spirit. The 1940s appeared in controlled shapes. Full skirts picked up 1950s volume. Antique corsetry and Victorian-tinged styling moved through the same room as contemporary leather.

Khaite had entered a slightly haunted wardrobe.

Catherine Holstein Built the Clothes From the Inside Out

Backstage, Holstein explained that Khaite SS27 was developed “from inside-out.” Construction came first. Shape grew from what was happening underneath.

That philosophy explains why corsetry keeps appearing in unexpected places. It sits exposed across the back of Gerber’s opening leather skirt. It peeks from garments through undone fastenings. Crinoline migrates from historical understructure into visible peplum belts, mini proportions, and sculptural volume.

The crinoline became such an obsession that Holstein joked her team probably never wanted to hear the word again.

Then came the handwork.

Flowers were knitted individually and sewn together by hand. Lace was custom-developed. Basting stitches stayed visible as deliberate finishing. One pale dress inspired by the Gritti ceiling carried hand-tatted lace with tiny creatures woven into the pattern, the kind of obsessive detail that disappears from several rows away and rewards anyone who eventually touches the garment.

The Khaite Woman Changed Her Proportions

Holstein has spent years making volume feel like power. Spring 2027 pulls that volume closer to the body and relocates it.

Leather jackets become cropped and sharply concentrated through the shoulders. Waists move into clearer focus. The torso feels compact. Fullness drifts toward hips and hems through crinolines, peplums, robe-de-style shapes and large skirts.

Holstein has linked some of that shift to rediscovering her own style after pregnancy and motherhood. Khaite SS27 became personal because her relationship with her body had changed, and the proportions developed with that experience in mind.

That personal adjustment gives the collection an unusual intimacy.

On the runway, those ideas became physical. Horsehair-trimmed evening pieces bobbed around the body. Mousseline blurred the figure under the spotlights. Flower embroidery gave surfaces a hand-touched density. Pale fabrics carried the softness of antique lingerie. Leather kept returning with weight and polish.

Some of the strongest looks seem almost designed around the friction between touch and structure.

For a designer with such a recognizable visual identity, addition carries a particular kind of confidence. Khaite already knows what a Khaite jacket, boot, or bag can look like. SS27 gives Holstein space to complicate that vocabulary.

Even the beauty direction followed the mood. Gibson Girl-style shapes appeared alongside messier punk-inflected hair, creating a period blur somewhere between an antique portrait and a girl who has just left a downtown club.

The past got messy. It suited Khaite.

Ten Years In, Khaite Is Becoming a Serious Business

Khaite launched in 2016. By 2023, the company had surpassed $100 million in revenue with triple-digit year-on-year growth around the time growth-equity firm Stripes invested in the company. Stripes later took a majority stake, and experienced executive Brigitte Kleine stepped in as CEO.

Kleine’s arrival also clarified the operating structure. Holstein has openly acknowledged that areas such as warehousing, logistics, taxation and structural scaling sit outside her creative expertise, making experienced executive leadership essential as the company grows.

Earlier in 2026, Holstein said the business was “way up” and meeting its ambitious stretch projections. If its current trajectory continues, Khaite could eventually reach $500 million in sales.

The company is also building the machinery around the clothes: owned retail, international expansion, direct relationships with customers and a substantial accessories strategy. That business expansion gives the tenth anniversary a very specific energy.

And Khaite SS27 shows that scale does not have to flatten the imagination.

The brand has spent years being understood as one of fashion’s great commercial safe bets: the perfect wardrobe piece that slips easily into a customer’s life. Spring 2027 widens that identity. Khaite can be poetic. It can be whimsical. It can get messy. It can reach backward into history, expose its corsetry, obsess over lace creatures and let a crinoline bounce through Brooklyn to PJ Harvey.

That evolution feels important because safety itself can have levels. Khaite SS27 offers one for the customer ready to level hers up: familiar enough to enter the wardrobe, strange enough to change its entire mood.