The Obsession With Khaite's Success
Plus, fashion people contend with snow, Anna for Biden, and more highlights from fashion week and beyond.
In this issue of Back Row:
A look back at the brand Catherine Holstein ran before Khaite.
Why her success may not be as crazy as people think.
Highlights from New York Fashion Week and beyond, including Beyoncé’s appearance, Miuccia Prada on Vogue, Anna for Biden, and more.
Photos of Katie Holmes wearing Khaite’s $520 cashmere bra and matching cardigan went viral in 2019. The bra sold out within an hour, the Daily Mail wrote about it, and Khaite firmed up its status as an upscale Instagram brand. Ever since, the brand has been killing it, and the fashion world has been scratching its head about why.
It’s a good question for any New York luxury brand that attains Khaite’s success, since so few American luxury brands ever have. Catherine Holstein started the line in 2016 and, according to Business of Fashion, its sales surpassed $100 million in 2022. Khaite has two stores with plans to open more, after doubling the sales projection of its first in Soho to $6 million. The brand has received outside investment from incubator Assembled Brands, venture capital firm G9, and growth equity firm Stripes, and recently appointed former Tory Burch president Brigitte Kleine as CEO.
For comparison’s sake, Proenza Schouler, a quintessential New York brand with a similar vibe that’s more than 20 years old, reportedly hadn’t surpassed $70 million in annual sales by the time BoF took a close look at their business in 2022. Khaite is tracking to become another The Row, which the Financial Times reported late last year had estimated sales of between $250 and $300 million, if not even bigger.
The why Khaite? stories tend to cast two things as surprising. First, the brand’s high prices. Jeans are a Khaite bargain at under $500, but most other stuff retails for more than $1,000 (though if you still want the Katie Holmes bra, it’s on sale for $312). Second, the brand’s middling to poor critical reviews. “What she doesn’t seem to have is originality,” wrote the New York Times’s Vanessa Friedman of Khaite’s latest New York Fashion Week show. The industry seems puzzled over how a brand that is so expensive but not a critical success can sell so well. Which is weird, because it’s not like fashion reviews, which few people even read, drive sales.
Any business that survives and thrives is certainly an outlier. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, around 20 percent of businesses fail within the first year, 30 percent by the end of the second, half by the end of the fifth, and 70 percent by the end of a decade. Fashion is a notoriously difficult sector, and the failure rate of apparel brands may even be higher.
Holstein surely had a lot on her side when she launched Khaite and clearly has a sense of how women want to look, but maybe the best thing that happened to her was that her first brand failed.
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