2023 Was Spectacular for Khaite and Founder Catherine Holstein. Here's Her New York Story
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Anne feels better now. Today I learned that besides skewering Pharrell Williams as lacking any design talent, Vanessa Friedman has also critiqued Khaite founder Catherine Holstein as checking all the luxury brand-building boxes except for one.
“What she doesn’t seem to have is originality,” Friedman wrote.
2023 Was Spectacular for Catherine Holstein
Original or not, 2023 was a banner year for Khaite with the brand opening a store in Soho, New York, and a second one in Seoul. Khaite popped into Water Mill, New York — at Holstein’s summer home — to show the pre-Fall collection. [See image above.]
In an amazing sequence Holstein sold another stake in her company to growth equity firm Stripes, after being launched in 2016 by brand incubator Assembled Brands. In 2023, as part of its Stripes presentation, Khaite announced plans to open 10 additional brick and mortar stores in the next five years.
Four days after the Stripes investment deal closed, Holstein had her first child, a baby son Calder with husband Griffen Frazen. The trio was found living out of a New York City hotel, while their SoHo loft was under renovation.
Tory Burch veteran Brigitte Kleine became Khaite’s first CEO in 2023 and the brand booked a 30 percent sales increase after breaking through $100 million in 2022.
As if these events didn’t represent enough excitement in one year, The Council of Fashion Designers of America honored Catherine Holstein as womenswear designer of the year for the second year in the row in November.
To Barneys and Step on It
Technically-speaking, Catherine Holstein is a college dropout from Parsons — a common event in the lives of highly-successful people like Steve Jobs.
In a well-written 2006 New York Times headline, ‘To Barneys, and Step on It’, Eric Wilson detailed the life-changing events for the 22-year-old Parson’s student, who had designed six sailor dresses.
Teen Vogue saw Holstein’s standout dresses at fashion shows, worn by Victoria Traina. A classmate at Parsons and daughter of the romance novelist Danielle Steel, Traina adored the sailor dresses.
Kimball Hastings, a senior editor at Teen Vogue, saw the dresses on Traina and began spreading word of Ms. Holstein to buyers at Barneys.
In one of those “this can’t be happening to me moments”, Hastings also asked the young designer if she wanted to “tag along to an appointment with Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte, another recent instant success story.” She had come to his office to show her sailor blouses and now she was headed to meet hot young designers called Rodarte.
"I was so intimidated," Holstein told writer Wilson. "Their clothes are so great, I didn't have the nerve to say, 'I'm a designer, too.' We talked for three hours before one of them asked who designed the blouse I was wearing."
Holstein confessed that she made it, prompting the Mulleavys to shortly pick up the phone and call stores around Los Angeles to praise the line.
In April Barneys placed an order for 60 dresses, and Ms. Holstein also took orders from Satine and Des Kohan in Los Angeles and the I {sheart} boutique on Mott Street in New York. The dresses cost $320 to $400.
Now Holstein had a new problem — manufacturing her orders. Factories had no interest in this untested college student. As we already know, the designer is steady under pressure, and she had one more ace up her sleeve.
Holstein hired a lawyer at the high-profile firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and the lawyer’s calls to factories were returned pronto, with appointments set up.
The lawyer was her sister. Holstein dropped out of Parsons. The rest is history. And it was not smooth sailing, Khaite’s founder reminds anyone who will listen.
In fact, she ended up at The Gap and Vera Wang, with consulting gigs at J. Crew and the Elder Statesman, before Khaite was born in 2016.
Hers is a great New York story! Some ‘privilege’? Yes.
But for a young designer with no originality, according to the influential Friedman, it was Holstein’s designs that caught everyone’s eye, catapulting her into the exciting and very challenging maelstrom of a business life in New York’s fashion industry. ~ Anne
Addendum: Danielle Steele has three socialite daughters: Samantha, Vanessa and Victoria Traina. It was Victoria who first fell in love with Holstein’s sailor dresses when they were at Parsons.
Vanessa Traina is a partner with Adam Pritzker, scion of the billionaire Hyatt hotel family in Assembled Brands. And Vanessa Traina is married to Charlie de Viel Castel, another investor, founder of CVC Stones diamond jewelry and a friend of Holstein’s.
It was Assembled Brands who launched Kaite with Catherine Holstein in 2016, 10 years after Holstein’s debut as a young designer and friend of Vanessa’s sister Victoria.
