Khaite Fall 2026 Campaign by David Sims

Controlled Burn

Review of (designer/brand) Pre-Fall 2026 Ad Campaign by Khaite Creative Director Catherine Holstein with Creative Directors Ezra Petronio & Lana Petrusevych of Petronio Associates with Photographer David Sims with model Raquel Zimmermann

Khaite’s Fall 2026 campaign does not so much enter a room as raise its temperature. Photographed by David Sims under the creative direction of Catherine Holstein, with art direction by Ezra Petronio and Lana Petrusevych of Petronio Associates, the campaign places its solitary protagonist inside a dark, compressed interior where glamour appears to be undergoing some kind of controlled combustion. Hair flies, leather gleams, lace reveals and conceals, and the walls seem to be closing in. Yet nothing here feels accidental. That is the trick: the burn may look spontaneous, but someone very clearly has their hand on the thermostat.

Sims photographs the campaign with the confrontational intimacy that has long made his fashion imagery feel less like portraiture than psychological observation. Color images arrive hot and slightly scorched, with copper hair and red lips cutting through near-black surroundings, while the black-and-white photographs push contrast until skin approaches white light and leather becomes almost liquid darkness. There is little conventional environment beyond those upholstered walls, which turns the room into both studio and stage. Without a recognizable location to anchor her, the woman becomes the narrative.

And what a narrative Raquel Zimmermann gives it. She is alternately composed, exhausted, confrontational, sensual, almost overcome. In one frame she stands rigidly in sculpted black tailoring; in another she seems to collapse into a gold dress. Elsewhere, hands reach toward her neck, hair obscures her face, or her body sinks into folds of black satin. The campaign avoids the static perfection that can make luxury imagery feel embalmed. Instead, Zimmermann appears caught between poses, as though Sims is photographing the instant before control is regained or immediately after it has been lost.

That tension feels particularly suited to Holstein’s Khaite. The House has built much of its visual identity around contradictions: New York polish with something darker underneath, femininity sharpened by severity, sensuality interrupted by masculine structure. Vanessa Traina’s styling amplifies those oppositions beautifully. A sheer lace blouse becomes almost Victorian in its high-necked restraint while revealing the body beneath it; glossy leather tailoring borrows the authority of a uniform but is disrupted by a single red gladiolus; a black-and-white coat turns the body into a graphic exclamation point. Even the gold dress has something faintly anatomical about its construction, as though glamour has been reduced to a beautiful skeleton.

The strongest images are those in which that friction becomes psychological rather than merely aesthetic. The flying hair is important because it repeatedly interrupts the immaculate surface of the photograph. So are the hands, the closed eyes, the tilted necks and moments of apparent surrender. They introduce instability into a campaign whose clothes themselves are extraordinarily controlled. Paul Hanlon’s hair becomes almost another character, while Yadim’s makeup uses the red mouth as punctuation rather than decoration. The woman never looks messy, exactly; she looks as though maintaining composure has become an active occupation.

There is also a welcome refusal to overbuild the concept. No elaborate location, cinematic plot, celebrity cameo or surreal prop is required. The campaign trusts the chemistry among Holstein, Sims, Zimmermann and the clothes. That economy is a strength, though it creates its one vulnerability as well: across a larger rollout, the dark room and repeated windblown intensity could begin to feel like variations on a single very persuasive note. A little more modulation in distance or spatial composition might have pushed the psychological story further. But repetition here also works as pressure. Each photograph returns us to the same room, the same woman and the increasingly uncertain question of whether she controls the atmosphere or the atmosphere controls her.

For a brand whose appeal has always contained an undercurrent of danger beneath its refinement, this is Khaite operating comfortably in its own shadows. Sims does not soften Holstein’s woman or attempt to explain her; he gives her enough darkness to become unknowable. And that may be the campaign’s smartest seduction. Luxury imagery often promises the fantasy of having everything under control. Khaite suggests that losing it, just slightly, can be considerably more interesting. Controlled burn, indeed.