If Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta were less authentic designers, they’d probably have an empire by now and be on a plane today for a beach in the Caribbean. But they are who they are, and their sensible but street-savvy fashion is informed by their character. They have a sharp eye for what looks false, and their experience during the past dozen years can be found in their new collection, which might be their best.
One reason people keep following a designer — or a band or a film director or a chef — is that they recognize something they know, a sensibility. From the outset, in 2011, Eckhaus and Latta made clothes that were militantly ordinary in deadstock fabrics. Their knitwear appeared almost vintage — and not — because their sweaters looked fresh and a little bit quirky. But season after season, their style came through. With Latta based in Los Angeles and Eckhaus in New York, the pair gradually built up a reputation for novelty denim. When I look back at their shows of the past few years, I see far less focus on eye-catching fabrics — sheer materials, for example — and more attention on fit and quality. It makes their style that much stronger and clearer.
For fall 2025, they showed in a beautiful art gallery in an old building off Walker Street in lower Manhattan, where the floors were wood (instead of the usual concrete) and the plaster walls marked with age. That was an improvement, too, for the pair: a warmer feeling than some of their previously cold warehouse or gutted office spaces. They showed just 27 looks, and for the first time in a decade of looking at their clothes, I felt they had made their style clear and more welcoming to people who maybe aren’t familiar with it.
Among those appealing looks — and a first for Eckhaus Latta — were bomber jackets in black or red leather. They’re a hybrid of a hoodie and a bomber, and they were cut generously, with a flattering drop shoulder. They looked amazing from every angle, and with trousers or a dark box-pleated A-line skirt worn with high-heel boots. The striking boots and jackets were made in collaboration with Ecco Kollective.
The knits and the jeans were also particularly good this season, notably a simplified fisherman style of sweater in a cardigan, a loose pullover in cream or turf brown, and a striped asymmetrical wrap skirt that suggests a spiral on the body. The wide-leg jeans often had a bold, painterly stripe, a hard-to-identify shadow pattern, or, in the case of a black-and-tan-speckled pair, an abstract cheetah print. Latta and Eckhaus repeated the broken-stripe effect on leather pants and a midi skirt.
The collection has something of the jaunty glamour of the ’80s. But that’s not how the designers planned it. Eckhaus said, “We thought a lot about reduction at the beginning of the season. Like, let’s not make too much stuff. Let’s make things that make sense to us.” But, as he noted, the result “was more dynamic than we anticipated.” And Latta said designing bags for the first time, which sold out quickly, “really put stride in our step.”
So, you can start with practically nothing, with deadstock, but as long as you have a style, a point of view about dress, you can keep building on it, creating a richer story. (And by rich, I don’t mean money, of course.)
Joseph Altuzarra understands that, too, although his taste is a mix of American sportswear and French chic. A year ago, he decided to abandon themed collections and instead offer looks based on individual identities — that is, characters within his brand’s scope. There’s no punk Altuzarra. Prada did something similar last season, and the approach feels more modern in its randomness.
Still, there was no mistaking Altuzarra’s style. Among the standout looks were plain dark wool coats with extravagant caped collars or scarves for when you want to feel solitary or romantic; a cinnamon-brown poncho in a rustically knit shag worn with wide-leg trousers in tan corduroy; and an easy, minimalist navy skirt suit in a pebbly knit. Altuzarra kept shifting from day to simple evening (a long two-piece purple charmeuse dress, a beautiful straight-line gown in layered pale-pink organza) and from casual (an oversize shearling jacket) to kooky. “Kooky” in Altuzarra’s book, was a pair of trim suits in either charcoal or rust-brown tweed with an exploded hem of tweed. But, like almost everything else in this fine show, the fat woolly hems had a sense of integrity.
That was not true of Prabal Gurung’s wildly uneven show on Saturday in the ornamental Surrogate’s Court building. He started with poetic shirts and full-cut trousers, including suits with side-draped pants, and ended with clothes lavishly embellished with silk flowers. Very little made sense.
Last night, in the bar of the Soho Grand Hotel with a jazz trumpeter opening the Monse show, you could detect the style of Laura Kim and Fernando Garcia in their offhand use of a men’s silk dressing gown (in maroon with polka dots on the lapels) as a wrap minidress with an asymmetrical hem. Also in Monse’s vein were pajamas in a traditional Chinese print or weave, a terrific charcoal pin-striped suit spliced with a few zips, and an asymmetrical spiral miniskirt with a chunky, open-work cream sweater. But a lot of the collection felt disconnected.
So much of contemporary fashion distorts or deforms people. Think of some of the oversize shapes we’ve seen lately or Marc Jacobs’s foam-padded sweaters, which, in a way, question what’s normal and abnormal, real and absurd. But Elena Velez put distance to all of that.
Her clothes are powerfully about the female body, and from a feminist perspective that people often mistake as merely provocative. There’s anger in a lot of what Velez does. And as my colleague at the Cut, Sasha Mutchnik, said last night as we got up from Velez’s wonderful show, “She really knows how to make a dress look great on the body.”
There are several ways to make your mark in fashion — by creating an original silhouette, by being a great storyteller, by confronting the body (traditionally, the female body). John Galliano is probably the best example of a living designer who can do all three. But I’d include the late Azzedine Alaïa as well.
Is Elena Velez of Milwaukee and lately of Brooklyn in that company? Not exactly, or maybe not yet, because she lacks resources and, I suspect, the total discipline to make her ideas come to life. She’s made some funky choices, like last season’s muddled attempt at commercial clothes. “Last season was a flop,” she admitted last night. But, in my view, any designer who can deal with the body as well as Velez obviously can, and can tell a story — this one involved sailors and sirens, good and evil — deserves our attention and, more, our patience.
Some of Velez’s clothes were quite fantastic, including a stringy off-white pullover knit made of a crackled material and worn with coated brown trousers, an oily-looking black gown made of molded silicone (and light as a feather), and a faded black bustier adorned with braided strands of hair (or nylon) and keys and shown with a half-maxi skirt in khaki. You could trace a connection to Velez’s earlier ideas — to those in her fabulous mud show a few years back — but the work is now more developed. Also noteworthy were rough square-toed boots with lacing.
“It’s the purest process I’ve ever gotten to experience,” Velez said of the collection, which she titled “Leech.” She went on to say that she’s “playing a really, really long game” in fashion, and that she’s also started to attract some theatrical commissions. She mentioned a project with the National Ballet of Canada, and said that she’s been in talks about something with Warner Bros. Who knows?
