The Eckhaus Latta spring 2025 show was a dinner, I mean a show, I mean a dinner. Walking into the Tribeca loft where it was held, no one was sure what was happening but everyone was excited. Guests were asked to wear Eckhaus Latta, some were dressed in pieces from the new season. Looking around before the dinner began, I would ask guests—“Are you wearing latest season?” There was the artist Chloe Wise in a double-layered cardigan made so that the buttons scrunched as if it was too small for her—from the back it was just a single layer of fabric. She called it a “mullet cardigan.” The editor of A Magazine Blake Abbie was in a cool khaki nylon tracksuit that was all Eckhaus Latta’d out; the pants were pleated, with an extra-wide leg that had an extra-high waistline, although I couldn’t tell because it was obscured by the elastic waist of the zip-up jacket. Underneath he wore a red open weave knitted cardigan that looked like crochet. I was able to examine the trousers better on Loren Kramar, the artist who performed during last season’s show—the waistband had an extra panel underneath that created a geometrical Nehru-collar shape but at the waist. The GQ editor Samuel Hine was wearing a black nylon suit; the back of the jacket had a curved seam with laces at the bottom so that you can gather the back of the jacket and scrunch it if you like.
“This season we were into taking really simple materials and playing with them,” Mike Eckhaus explained during a preview at their makeshift studio in an East Village hotel a few days before their presentation. “We call this ‘the Hugging Group’ where it’s the front of a shirt, and it’s the back of a shirt, and they loop into each other, and there’s a deconstruction to them.” Eckhaus was wearing this shirt at the dinner: it looks normal from the front, but from the back and the side it looks like two separate pieces of fabric. Another set they called the “flip group” made from cotton rib that was like two garments mirrored-flipped on each other, to be worn up or down. Last season the designers mentioned they were looking to figure out what an Eckhaus Latta basic might look like and this season it seemed like they had continued to push the boundary of how much you can explode a silhouette or a concept and have it retain its essence. “So often we think of basics as just a white T-shirt or a pair of blue jeans,” Eckhaus added. “How can we take these things and give them an edge, and a twist to them, and have them be this thing that when you see it you’re like ‘what exactly is going on?’ and then you realize, ‘oh, this is actually so everyday and simple.’”
The color palette was stripped back—white, tan, brown, black, a deep green, with little pops of orange, butter yellow, sky blue. The clothes indeed seemed complicated at first glance, and then there was that moment of recognition—“Oh it’s just a shirt with a loop hanging from it; oh it’s just a skirt with a circular cutout.” Then everything was familiar again. The knits remained a standout in the collection, as did a simple butter yellow dress with snap details at the front. The pieces invited you to wear them whatever way you want. “I think both of us are very drawn to that sample sale vibe of, ‘there’s something that looks like a pile of rope on a hanger,’” Latta explained. “We’re like, ‘What is it?’ Obviously we have to deal with the idea of hanger appeal, but I think for us, letting these things have a kind of mutability and playfulness, like the scrunches in all these different ways, feels inherent to our curiosity.”
So it was in fact playfulness that was the theme of the season. Back at the dinner, everything was going the way fashion dinners go. The designers stood up and thanked everyone for being there—an editor sitting next to me commented that it felt like we were at their wedding. As they were finishing up their speech, another voice came through the speakers. It was the actor and comedian Kate Berlant, who stood from her table and walked into the space in between the two long tables where the dinner guests. “Guess what, you thought you were having a little dinner? It’s a fashion show sweetie!,” she said. She asked Loren Kramar to do the music, and did her runway walk. Then she began calling on other guests—Camilla Deterre! Cole Mohr! Ella Emhoff! Blake Abbie! Steff Yotka! Susan Cianciolo! They all took their turn—some of them in the latest collection, some in archive pieces, others in their own clothes—doing their best walk while the audience cheered.
For the first time since Vogue started covering Eckhaus Latta’s collections, the images that accompany this review are not the actual images of “the happening.” Since last season they pivoted to doing market during men’s fashion week and thought since they’d already taken care of that, and shot a lookbook, why not do something new! On their Instagram account they had been posting short guerrilla-style videos taken of themselves and their friends doing a runway walk in mundane places—a bodega, around a pool, outside in front of a nondescript building—and tagging them #ELInternationalFashionWeek. Did that have something to do with it? “That’s something we’ve been doing for years as a joke when we re traveling, or at weird fabric conventions with friends,” added Latta. “It’s just something we do very spontaneously. And we thought, what if we did this as the show?” Walking out of the dinner with a group of editors everyone agreed that it was the most fun they d ever had at a fashion show. And more crucially something that could only happen in New York.
