Holstein's Khaite is organized around a set of formal tensions that she has pursued with remarkable consistency across ten seasons. Leather that reads hard until it moves. Cashmere that reads soft until it's structured into a bra. Silk gowns worn with motorcycle jackets. Sheer organza pants beneath a double-breasted blazer. The New York woman — her enduring subject — is never performing ease. She is navigating complexity, and her clothes are the armor that makes her navigable. Holstein's runway shows reflect this: the Park Avenue Armory's drill hall plunged into darkness, models tracked by dramatic spot lighting designed by her husband, the set designer Griffin Frazen. Belt buckles and cuffs molded in the shape of clasped hands — a commentary on the social norms that hold women back and the elegance with which women resist them anyway. The soundtrack: Massive Attack, Leonard Cohen, Primal Scream. Songs that really make you feel something, and clothes that do, too.

No material is more definitively Khaite than leather — and specifically the leather jacket, which Holstein has refined season after season into something approaching a house code. The glossy black bomber with dropped shoulders, dropped collar, oversize pockets, and long epaulet details. The short leather trench with wide belt and darting shoulders in deep navy. The sculptural leather coat with bold rounded shoulders in super-cropped and swingy or elongated silhouettes with bubbled hems. Each season, Holstein produces what reviewers have consistently called "a streak of winning leather jackets" — the same material, the same formal intelligence, applied to a new proportion, a new detail, a new degree of softness or structure. The leather is never simply leather. It is the outer register of an inner negotiation between protection and vulnerability — which is, for Holstein, what all New York dressing is ultimately about.

Holstein's collections are consistently organized around a cinematic or cultural reference that is rarely announced explicitly but always felt in the clothes. She once built a full collection around David Lynch's 1990 film Wild at Heart. For Fall 2025, she paid tribute to Lynch — who died in January 2025 — through a circular runway glowing with yellow-orange light above a dark abyss, the yellow brick road as the organizing metaphor, drawing from Lynch's own statement that "there's not a day that goes by that I don't think about The Wizard of Oz." The film noir reference that season was the 1947 Humphrey Bogart/Barbara Stanwyck film The Two Mrs. Carrolls — a choice entirely in keeping with Holstein's sensibility. Her shows are events that feel less like fashion presentations and more like short films: atmospheric, precise, emotionally specific. The clothes make sense precisely because the world they inhabit has been made visible.

Khaite's Spring 2025 collection marked a visible shift — the first time Holstein publicly allowed warmth and joy into a collection that had been organized, until then, almost entirely around darkness and edge. She spoke backstage about motherhood rounding out her hard edges: "It has made such an impact on me." The show's soundtrack — Guns N' Roses "November Rain," Wilco, Leonard Cohen, Primal Scream — was deliberately soulful rather than confrontational. The collection itself opened up: sheer organza pants layered under blazers, crochet pompom skirts with hand-knit sweaters, butter yellow satin trenches over black organza columns. The darkness didn't disappear. It became more complicated — which is always the sign of a designer who has grown.

Khaite's business trajectory is one of the most discussed in American fashion. Sales passed nine figures in 2022. Stripes, the US growth equity firm, invested over $150 million. Former Tory Burch president Brigitte Kleine joined as CEO, with Holstein retaining the creative direction. Holstein has won the CFDA Women's Designer of the Year award twice. Khaite's 33,000-square-foot headquarters on Crosby Street — which gave its name to a new work bag, the Crosby — is the operational center of a brand that now includes Madison Avenue and Mercer Street boutiques in New York, stores in Dallas and South Coast Plaza in California, with Los Angeles on the way. The valuation has been reported at around $400 million. It began with a cashmere bralette in "barley" that Holstein had to fight to produce, and a woman trying to hail a cab who had "no idea" what she was doing to the industry.

Khaite's accessories have been as central to the brand's commercial success as its ready-to-wear — producing, season after season, pieces that sell through completely and define the season's visual language. The Crosby work bag, named for the Soho headquarters. New exotic leather handbags available at the Madison Avenue boutique. Flat distressed Western boots that arrived in Pre-Fall 2025 as the brand's most immediately wearable footwear statement. T-strap pumps in the collection's formal register. Metal belt buckles molded into the shape of clasped hands. Opera gloves worn over cashmere T-shirts and under deconstructed corsets. Chunky knit dressing pieces and salt-and-pepper woven sets. The Khaite accessory is never simply an accessory. It is an argument — about what the body needs at a specific moment in a specific city, delivered with the same formal conviction as the leather jacket it is worn beneath.