Khaite FW26 Melds Artifice and Modern Stealth Wealth at Armory

The Park Avenue Armory felt less like a runway and more like a proposition: a 60-foot curved LED wall, built from 2,000 handmade panels, pulsed letters, numbers, symbols and the projected line “Now you are here. Here you are now.” Catherine Holstein revealed Khaite Fall/Winter 2026 at that monumentally staged show on February 14, 2026, and for once the house’s quiet confidence showed up with literal megawatt theatrics.

Holstein’s creative team was a tight unit. The installation was credited to Griffin Frazen, identified in press notes as Holstein’s husband, and original music came from composer Jennifer Rouse. The official runway film posted February 16 credited Holstein and Khaite and listed Jennifer Rouse for original music; at the time of capture that video had 694 views and 17 likes on the uploader’s channel, which the notes show at about 10,200 subscribers.

Concept drove the set. Khaite’s site copy framed the season as “a synthesis of art and artifice, truth and illusion,” and the show leaned on Orson Welles’ 1973 film as its touchstone. Vogue reported Holstein backstage and quoted her as saying she “was impressed by Welles’s ideas—‘how we value art, how we value authenticity, who are the arbiters of taste’—and by the dressed-up styles of the day.” The show’s rhetoric extended into the seating: place cards read “The crushing weight of words,” language that made the Armory feel like a lecture hall for couture theater.

The staging was literal and deliberate. WWD described the LED wall as 60-foot high and “Matrix”-y, a curved display that could swallow a room, and Vogue observed that “The Park Avenue Armory is made for massive installations and Catherine Holstein and her husband Griffin Frazen orchestrated one last night.” The production was cinematic, and the physical scale underlined Khaite’s business trajectory as noted in trade dispatches.

Clothes landed between authority and undoing. Khaite’s signature language of sculptural tailoring and tactile luxury was on display in velvet bustier gowns with big 1980s gazar bustles, precision-cut coats, and a new tuxedo the brand billed as “a new tuxedo emerges, its longer lines inviting undone ease with commanding authority.” Lace featured in Victorian-collared black blouses paired with long skinny trousers, straight white lace lingerie dresses, and lace slip dresses that Vogue said “seemed to float several inches off the body.” Vogue singled out a fluid midi skirt as “one of the defining looks of the week.”

Styling pushed the contrast narrative. WWD flagged “dark-romance” moments and the pairing of hyperfeminine dresses with ghoulish ultra-long dark nails and slick leather opera gloves. Footwear followed Holstein’s trick: pumps and boots were built “not for a conventional snug, smooth fit but to be wrinkly, almost witchily big,” a potentially trend-setting distortion of classic pointy shapes.

The front row was the most glamorous crowd at NYFW, with Vogue noting Post Malone and Sarah Pidgeon, the latter in “a very Carolyn Bessette Kennedy little black dress and pumps.” Industry coverage underscored Holstein’s rising commercial heft; WWD called her “one of New York fashion’s most compelling designers, with a fast-growing big business to match.” Khaite’s site copy even retained the practical detail that the brand offers “Complimentary shipping on all orders worldwide.”

Khaite’s FW26 left the questions it posed front and center. Between staging, music, and clothes the collection staged an interrogation of authorship and authenticity while doubling as an evolution of what some will read as the “stealth wealth” wardrobe. As the house itself put it, “A layered approach allows questions to intersect and linger: What is real? What is constructed? What is fit?”