There was an installation that seemed to have emerged from an overly lucid dream, a Matrix-like hallucination filtered through the intelligence of an architect in love. Catherine Holstein’s husband had constructed a setting that said everything while revealing nothing: ambition, solitude, the quiet exhilaration of a designer now firmly seated in the unstable pantheon of New York fashion. One sensed that strange, almost guilty certainty of having succeeded.

Holstein viewed the world through Orson Welles’s mirrors. F for Fake, the 1973 film that had once shaken her like a revelation, had become her compass. She chose to embrace a theme dear to fashion journalist F.M.: counterfeiting, imposture, that essential little deceit without which humanity could hardly survive. After all, is it not by counterfeiting ourselves that we become who we are?

The fall collection was a dark romance, almost a confession rendered in fabric. A velvet bustier dress, tragic like a heroine who no longer dares to love, was paired with a grandiose silk gazar skirt, as if the 1980s had returned to reclaim their lost illusions. Victorian black lace blouses, worn over long, narrow trousers, lent rigor the sensuality of a morality quietly transgressed.

Provocation emerged where it was least expected: in the ingenuous whiteness of lingerie dresses, straight and almost candid, confronting sheer pieces and smooth leather opera gloves. Innocence disguised itself as vice, and vice assumed the airs of virtue. The entire human comedy resided in that contrast.

The monkeys embroidered on translucent blouses were not merely a nod to deception: they evoked the male dandies of Paris Fashion Week’s leadership, those men who considered themselves works of art, and who perhaps were not. Military-style band jackets with absurd proportions, floral velvet suits, oversized bow ties, shoulder-to-shoulder chains recalling Michael Jackson.

Catherine Holstein blended softness and brutality, insolent miniskirts and elongated silhouettes, with the assurance of a tightrope walker who knows that the void is part of the performance. It was said to be the most beautiful collection of New York Fashion Week. Perhaps. But what was certain is that it spoke about us, about our necessary lies and our indispensable disguises. Her clients may not perceive the collection’s subliminal message, but they will be sublime in it, and sometimes, that is already a philosophy.

FM