It’s Khaite’s New York Moment — How the Brand Is Defining American Luxury
Designer Cate Holstein on how the city has shaped her, from Woody Allen to "Sex and the City"; her crazy experience being in labor at the Met, and her husband Griffin joining the family business.
Through the decades, New York fashion has had many defining designers: Bill Blass, Halston, Geoffrey Beene, Oscar de la Renta, Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Donna Karan, and Marc Jacobs among them. This moment belongs to Cate Holstein. It’s her time.
The winner of two consecutive CFDA Women’s Designer of the Year awards has become a marquee name at New York Fashion Week, where she will show Sept. 7. With a recent investment from private equity firm Stripes, she is opening stores in Dallas’ Highland Park Village, on Madison Avenue in New York and at Costa Mesa, Calif.’s South Coast Plaza, and has crossed the $100 million revenue mark with her American luxury brand.
At the core of it is her vision of the New York woman. Not the working girls and office bosses of Diane Von Furstenberg’s and Donna Karan’s heydays, nor the society mavens and WASPs of Carolina Herrera’s and Tory Burch’s playbooks, Holstein’s New York woman is a rebel, at least in her mind.
For this issue, WWD Weekend spoke to Holstein about how the city has shaped her; what makes New York fashion so vital; the choice to make Khaite‘s Instagram inactive, and how the business is growing with the help of her husband, Griffin Frazen, who is now designing the retail stores and runway productions.
But first, a very New York story: Last May, Holstein was in labor with her child, Calder James Frazen, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This came up when she was asked about her favorite New York walk — Central Park, a solid choice.
She and Frazen decided to take the storied stroll — in the rain — after she’d gone into labor but wasn’t far along enough to check into the hospital. They headed to the museum’s Egyptian wing where he took “a really funny picture of me,” she says, laughing about it now. Then the pair ended up checking into the Mark Hotel, not wanting to fight traffic back downtown to their apartment and uptown again to Lenox Hill to the hospital when it was really, really time. “So I got through the throes of labor at the Mark and they were really lovely about it.”
Not even Woody Allen could have scripted that.
The youngest of five children, Holstein jokes that her parents gave up by the time she came around. “They were just like, here’s a toothbrush, don’t die. We had no rules,” she says. She grew up in New Canaan, Connecticut (and later London, England) with cable TV in her bedroom, and four movie channels, and can’t remember if her love of New York or her love of New York movies came first.
“I mean, I still love Woody Allen, sorry, I do. It’s the romance that he portrays of New York,” she says of holding on to the director despite his transgressions. She was also drawn to spicier movies. “I remember when I was 12 or 13, I brought ‘Christiane F.’ over to a sleepover. I got sent home,” she says of the 1981 cult German film that follows a 13-year-old’s descent into heroin addiction, and features David Bowie as the composer and as himself. “I was always attracted to darkness… I also looked like I was 25 at the age of 11. I kind of adulted too fast.”
Her earliest memories of the city were driving to the doctor’s office, coming in from Connecticut under a bridge or someplace equally gritty, and then getting to Park Avenue, she says. “As soon as I saw the Met Life building, I found it so exhilarating. It truly was the concrete jungle and I felt wide-eyed….I was so scared of New York and I was so seduced by it,” she says.
Before her high school senior year, she spent the summer in a Parsons pre-college program and was smitten. It was 2002, and the city was still coming off the ’90s. “That is the aesthetic of New York I really homed in on. You could still smoke in restaurants and bars, we didn’t really have any issues getting carded, and I’m not gonna lie, it was prime ‘Sex and the City,’ and that had a big impression on me,” she says, clarifying that she’s an ex-smoker now. “Downtown was just really buzzing…I knew I wanted to go to Parsons before but I knew I had to be there after that program.”
Her first fashion show was Proenza Schouler’s first show in 2003, held at the National Arts Club. Holstein was a guest of Victoria Traina, a muse to designers Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez then and now. (Her sister Vanessa Traina is a brand consultant and stylist for Khaite.)
Out of school and straight into Barneys New York, Proenza Schouler’s trajectory was a fairy tale to Holstein, who was a freshman at Parsons at the time. “They were so talented and they represented this fresh perspective.”
Marc Jacobs was another influence (she also went to one of his shows as a guest of Victoria Traina’s). “Not only for his creativity, but the New York storytelling and the artist connections he made. I remember the Juergen Teller ads with Sofia Coppola in Central Park..John Currin and Rachel Feinstein…he really created a world so well.”
In her early 20s, she was shopping at the SoHo boutique Kirna Zabête, captivated by the clothing of the crop of young independent women designers who had their own labels at the time, including Alice Roi, Behnaz Sarafpour and particularly Katyone Adeli. “I think she captured how women wanted to look at that moment,” Holstein says. “And then Earl Jeans. I mean, that was the new wave of denim.”
In 2006, she launched a line of sailor dresses under her own name that Julie Gilhart picked up at Barneys. She quit Parsons to focus on the business, which had 40 retail accounts, except she didn’t focus enough and it shuttered two years later. She followed that with a succession of corporate design jobs at Evisu, Vera Wang and Gap, giving her experience in luxury and commercial product design, denim and knitwear.
The time she was most down and out in New York was just before she launched Khaite in 2016.
“I was getting out of a bad relationship. I was lost in terms of what I felt like I wanted to do. I didn’t have good experiences working with other people. I was put down and told that I was hard to work with but really, honestly, it was because I always had so many ideas. People in corporate environments do not like that person,” she says. “And I could have an attitude that came with that because I am very confident. I actually really loved the companies I worked for and they were amazing cultures, amazing environments, but it just wasn’t for me. I felt very much like I was caged.”
In 2015-2016, Alexander Wang, Marc Jacobs, Michael Kors, and Tory Burch were driving the American sportswear conversation. Wang had just come off designing Balenciaga and Jacobs off of designing Louis Vuitton, while Rodarte and Altuzarra were decamping to show in Paris. Meanwhile, Adeli and another hero, Daryl Kerrigan, had shuttered their brands, a rude awakening for Holstein about how hard it is to make it in this industry.
At the same time, she really believed “there was a need for fresh perspective on New York. I was 30 and all the woman I knew were coming into their own and becoming independent, and there wasn’t anyone serving them. It felt like it had become stagnant in terms of the storytelling..and I was very put off by, I’m just going to say it, by designers that were moving from New York to Europe. I felt like people were really down on New York and New York Fashion Week, so there was a lot of opportunity.”
But she also had a lot of self doubt, even though at every place she had worked, sales went up, she says.
Her friend Charlie de Viel Castel, the French investor married to Victoria Traina, sat her down and gave her some advice. “He said he thought I could really do this. I went home and thought about it, and it was a fork in the road….I knew that at that point, it was going to take a lot of work. I was going to need to raise a lot of money. And I was gonna have to change my mindset to be more business-oriented in terms of how to finance the company because I had to close a brand before. I’m actually kind of amazed with how brave I was. I don’t know if I’d be that brave today.”
The woman she envisioned as her muse was “fiercely independent, stealth strong and confident in her insecurities — understanding that she maybe isn’t totally comfortable in her own skin, but she’s trying to get there,” she says. “And discerning.”
The brand grew from must-have sweaters and denim to ready-to-wear, with much-copied bodysuits and sculpted bustier tops, hit bags and boots in its first few years, including the Aimee clutch, and the Dallas Western boots.
“People are attracted to familiarity and classic always works,” Holstein says. “That was part of my business idea from the start. I felt underserved. And I couldn’t find the things that I wanted to buy. And those things were very simple items. The brand has evolved since then, but in the beginning, it was about what you wear five days in a row and nobody notices.”
Historically, New York designers helped change the mindset that fashion had to swing every season, focusing instead on classic sportswear sold through powerful brand imagery and marketing.
“Calvin and Ralph really inventing global sexy marketing. And I think that’s lost on people sometimes, how impactful that has been and how it truly changed the industry forever,” Holstein says. “They thought that way first, and it’s like Warhol, there’s no coming back from that. Since then, there’s been a great shift in terms of building conglomerates and financial growth, but as far as how to get there with marketing, how to attract people, there hasn’t been such a huge shift from what they did,” she says.
To wit, Holstein will be amping up paid advertising both in media and on Instagram, but recently turned the Khaite Instagram account inactive, wiping the grid almost entirely.
“Social media, I want to be off of it so badly and this brand is such a message of how I’m feeling and what I’m sensing,” she says. “I felt like maybe true luxury is just giving people their time back. So I felt like we could just quiet it down.”
Holstein clearly spends a lot of time tuning into her emotions, which feed her creatively. Through the years, her collections have spun a dark glamour so potent it’s become an attitude. Her references are New York tried and true — noir films like “Taxi Driver,” “After Hours” and “Desperately Seeking Susan”; glamorous hangouts Studio 54, Max’s Kansas City, Bungalow 8 and The Grill. And she doesn’t create by concept, but by piece, choosing to design and redesign the jean, leather jacket and boot with just the right proportion season after season, which has led to some criticism that she has not developed a signature silhouette or look.
“People can say whatever they want…but it’s funny because what I hear from the outside is you can recognize a Khaite piece right away,” she says. And indeed, her designs do drive trends and dupes, whether it’s the Marcy mesh flats or the Benny studded belts.
But unlike many designers, she doesn’t personify her brand, and has been known to dress herself like a ’90s Gap ad, she joked backstage one season.
“I don’t want to ruin the mystique, but, um, no, she’s not a dark person,” says Frazen. “She has a dark sense of humor.”
Recently, Holstein has brought more vulnerability into her designs, playing with whisper-thin organza, second-skin ribbed knits and barely there sandals (with razor sharp pointed toes, natch). Holstein chalks it up to becoming a mother, wanting to explore more softness in her work.
And it’s up to Frazen, an architect who has created sets and spaces for Grimes, Oneohtrix Point Never and Thom Yorke, and designed Khaite’s Mercer Street store, to translate her feelings into a visual brand language that carries through retail and runway. So far, recurring themes have been the contrast between light and dark, austerity and lushness, industrial materials and nature.
“She’ll throw out an idea, it can be an image or thought…sometimes very abstract. I take it and interpret it and apply my more rigorous technical thinking to it, and bring it back to her,” he says. “And sometimes I hit the mark right away, and other times…we don’t always have the exact same opinions, but it’s a really fun kind of exquisite corpse game.”
“To have this creative partnership has really lifted the brand and I’m really grateful to him. I feel very much in good hands,” Holstein says. “It definitely feels like a family business now.”
The infusion of capital last year from Stripes has created new opportunities. And even that has felt like family, she says. “It’s a partnership and I could not speak higher of the level of humanity and understanding there. Yes, it’s private equity but it’s a very different kind of private equity in it for the long term and creatively led…not working solely for the bottom line.”
In the journey to really scale a brand, fragrance and beauty are key, and while Holstein knows what hers would look like, she says she hasn’t had a serious conversations about it yet.
“Right now, shoes, accessories and handbags are a large part of our focus because it represents 50 percent of our business, and we only launched those categories in 2019. I think we have a lot of work to do there,” she says.
Belts have been a growth engine recently. “This past year, some of the more aspirational pieces like denim and Benny belts we saw really take off. We saw belts grow 400 percent. Right now they’re 12 percent of our business. We are doing very well with leather and handbags, and have a lot of exciting things coming with shoes in the next few months.”
Would she like to make a sneaker one day? “I would,” she says.
Although she has yet to be asked to step up as a leader in the industry, Holstein is willing. She does have advice for young designers: “Get to work,” she says. “If somebody told me 20 years ago that it was going to take this long, I would have been so pissed. I would have wanted it all now…But it’s a lot of trial and error, even understanding clothes through the cycle of fabrics to wearing them is so much education, and then you put the politics and culture into it, which is so much education, and the financials which are tricky, very tricky, and very hard to get right.”
She reflects on a lesson from Ralph Lauren. “You always have to accept that you are going to fail, and that failure is extremely important to your story and probably more important than success in order to be successful down the road,” she says. “That is a very hard pill to swallow.”
Despite the economic headwinds, Holstein is optimistic. “We’re still opening up opportunity, so we’re not experiencing what everybody else is experiencing….We’re experiencing double-digit growth.”
And while there are a few open jobs at the top of European luxury brands right now, she’s staying put in New York. “I’m not looking,” she says. Has she had any interesting calls? “Dot, dot, dot…” she smiles.
“I very much recognize that right now we are in our major growth stage with amazing partners, with my new baby and my wonderful husband who works on the brand with me. I am happy. I hope this lasts forever.”
