Khaite Went to Venice and Came Back With the Best Showin Brooklyn

Khaite showed Spring/Summer 2027 on September 12, 2026, at the Brooklyn Storehouse — the vast industrial venue inside the Brooklyn Navy Yard — during New York Fashion Week’s September 2026 (SS27) season, with Kaia Gerber opening the show in a rare runway appearance.

Every season one New York show becomes the one people describe by its guest list, and this season it was Khaite: Gerber on the runway, Alexa Chung, Nara Smith, Elsa Hosk and Pamela Anderson in the front row. Which would be trivia, except at Khaite the casting is the argument. Catherine Holstein dresses the people other designers study.

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Venice, by way of the Navy Yard

The Spring 2027 collection considered romance through the lens of Venice, and Holstein went further into softness than she ever has — a lineup rooted in lingerie-inspired silhouettes spanning the 1920s to the 1940s, built around what she framed as the ceremony of getting dressed. Bias slips, boudoir references, drama carried in the details rather than the volume.

The venue did its own work at set scale: 1920s lingerie inside a storehouse built for machine parts. Khaite has made a habit of staging delicacy in rooms designed for industry, and the contrast is not an accident — it is the brand’s whole sentence structure.

Romance versus armor

What kept the collection from dissolving into nostalgia was the counterweight that defines the house: Khaite’s stealthy signature leather, cut hard against all that chiffon-era softness. Romance versus armor is the Khaite formula, and this was its most legible execution yet — a bias slip answered by a leather coat with real shoulders, the boudoir reference corrected mid-sentence by something you could get mugged in and win.

A month past the shows, with SS27 editorials now landing, it is the Khaite looks turning up on covers and in styling pulls — the fastest available measure of which collections the industry actually intends to use.

What Khaite actually is now

It is worth saying plainly what Khaite now is, because “It brand” undersells it. Holstein founded the label in 2016; she won the CFDA’s American Womenswear Designer of the Year award in both 2022 and 2023, and built one of the few genuinely new American luxury businesses of her generation — no European house parentage, no archive to mine except the one she is writing in real time. The brands Khaite gets compared to are houses with fifty years of equity. Khaite has ten.

Watch the video for that, not the celebrity opener: how complete the world already is.

Show details

• Show: Khaite, Spring/Summer 2027
• Date: September 12, 2026
• Venue: Brooklyn Storehouse, Brooklyn Navy Yard
• Designer: Catherine Holstein (founder, 2016; CFDA American Womenswear Designer of the Year, 2022 & 2023)
• Opened by: Kaia Gerber
• Theme: Romance through the lens of Venice; 1920s–1940s lingerie silhouettes against signature leather
• Front row: Alexa Chung, Nara Smith, Elsa Hosk, Pamela Anderson

More from NYFW September 2026: The 5 Shows That Defined the Season · Ralph Lauren · Calvin Klein · Coach · Thom Browne