Slap bang in the middle of autumn/winter 2026 New York Fashion Week, the latest Ryan Murphy vehicle Love Story premiered on FX and Hulu. The two events bear mention in the same sentence because Murphy’s latest turn dramatises the lives of John F Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessette, the former Calvin Klein publicist turned Camelot bride turned high-style martyr after her untimely death in 1999.
Forever frozen in the cool, clean New York sportswear of that period, American fashion can’t shake her influence. She was everywhere this season, a nostalgia fest of black cocktail dresses and skinny camel coats, bits of leopard, crisp cotton shirts and a whole bunch of Hitchcock blondes in sunglasses.
That isn’t a bad thing. Bessette’s innately personal style represents the best of a wider panorama of US aesthetics, namely a general denouncing of the frill — the antithesis, say, of literally gilding the Oval Office. Hers was a classical, don’t-scare-the-horses breed of modernism where a stark strapless dress, blunted at the bust like the tip of a New York skyscraper, may be worn with throwback trappings to old Hollywood, like opera gloves or an evening stole. East coast meets west, old world meets new.
A dab hand at that is Michael Kors, marking his 45th anniversary. “Which is crazy, because I’m only 32,” joked the designer at a preview. Kors, 66, is a quippy perma-tanned raconteur who could easily hold his own on a night-time talk show, but instead decided this season to make night-time clothes in celebration of said milestone.
They were shown at the Metropolitan Opera House and had enough chutzpah to fill that space — even wide wool trousers that puddled into a train, which seemed swell in pictures but didn’t exactly make sense in person. Grand capes and frothed feathers, and peacoats bottomed out with lightly ruffled dresses were slick, and 1990s supermodel Christy Turlington took a closing turn in a top with muckraking floor-length train and skirt of burnished sequins gleaming like damp asphalt. Both she and the collection looked great, relevant and real.
None of those words apply to Khaite, the brand helmed by the designer Catherine Holstein. Piling on to Holstein has become something of a blood sport for fashion critics. Perhaps because the line has ballooned in popularity over a decade in business and there’s some schadenfreude in taking a success story down. Especially when the clothes aren’t particularly original: Khaite’s ideas seem largely masticated from other designers, which always gets up people’s noses. As does the simple fact that Holstein is willing to spend (a lot) to get her vision across — she hired the Park Avenue Armory and erected a vast light installation for this latest show.
The clothes were rich too, overly fussy, with tucks and poufs of organza like 1980s Gianfranco Ferré (remember him?) and swaths of ersatz military frogging that invariably makes me think of General von Klinkerhoffen in ’Allo ’Allo! The pomp and ceremony felt out of kilter with the times.
Contrast that with Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta, who showed in a bare-bones space just off Canal Street, where luxury goods are usually counterfeited rather than presented to the press. Their clothes are quintessentially New York, in all the best ways: stripped back, messed up. Their ideal is Chloë Sevigny, not a Kennedy; they’ve never shown an opera glove.
What they did show was actor Louisa Jacobson, whose most famous turn is in The Gilded Age, unrecognisable in a thin-striped polo shirt and tweed skirt so abbreviated the lining was hanging free. This collection had reconfigured chopped-up T-shirts and jeans — American classics — with chunks taken out of the back, sliced out of hips or whittled under waistbands to show sexy strips of skin, doing the very most with the least. These are some of the most salient clothes in New York right now.
Sexy leads to Calvin Klein. At least, it should. Veronica Leoni, the designer of Klein’s latest iteration, approaches sex as a cerebral concern, a concept rather than a corporeal act. It lends her clothes a cold aloofness which, coupled with a legitimate business need to show a breadth of product, can leave you confused.
When you think Calvin, you think jeans and underwear. Where are they? After this show, Leoni talked about going “straight to the point”, but there was only one pair of jeans and one flash of that iconic Klein underwear elastic among 58 outfits. There is almost a perversity to that refusal to embrace what Klein stands for, especially when those two looks were the best in show.
Conversely, Ralph Lauren was entirely Ralph Lauren, for better or worse. That meant his show filtered English country style through Wasp sensibilities, and lots of tweed. When everyone else is cleaning up and thinking of the ’90s, he threw back to the ’80s. Think wide shoulders and Sloane Ranger hacking jackets and the kind of iffy murals that gussied up the nouveau riche apartments of that decade’s masters of the universe, printed on silk skirts and riding boots. It was a lot of a look, but had conviction, if perhaps not that much validity in the here and now, bar a duo of cleaned-up, razor-sharp velvet evening dresses that cut through the chaff.
You don’t think simple when you think Marc Jacobs, especially not of late. Jacobs’ past few seasons have been pure, unbridled creative exercises — hysterical Victoriana, hunchbacked velvet evening dresses, or blown-up paper doll looks in rubbery brocade embedded with gobstopper jewels. They drive fashion people like me crazy and are sold by exactly two retailers, while everyone else buys his branded tote bags and sweatshirts. LVMH brass Sidney Toledano and Michael Burke were in attendance, putting temporary paid to persistent rumours of a pending sell-off.
So imagine the shock when the first look of Jacobs’ show was not some fabric heffalump but a skinny knee-length tweed skirt and cut-out collar sweater. That was the silhouette throughout, expounded in narrow shirt-dresses or Chanel-ish suits in nubby tweeds lined in satin. But with excellent beauty was strangeness to the proportion, skirts jutting sharply away from the hips, awkwardly rising up at the shoulders, a Democratic blue coat flipped back to front to serve as dresses, delightfully twisting visions of normalcy.
Jacobs wrote about memory and loss in his show notes. There was no specific mention of Bessette. But the memory these clothes conjured was of the 1990s, and the fact that Jacobs’ fashion defined New York in that decade almost more than anyone else. He was right back in the game here, defining the fashion moment. It was great not only to remember that moment, but to relive it.
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