Eckhaus Latta Reinvents The NYFW Show With… A Fashion Show

My journey to attend Eckhaus Latta’s spring 2025 presentation – which was billed as a dinner in a privately owned Tribeca space – started a few days before the event. That’s when I arrived at a private suite in the East Village’s Standard Hotel for an appointment with founders Zoe Latta and Mike Eckhaus. “We’ve done a lot of runway shows and wanted to do something different this season,” Eckhaus says moments after I enter the suite. Latta adds with a grin: “It’ll be a beautiful dinner but with about seven minutes of interlude.”

The duo brings me into a room with the season’s lookbook papered up on the wall. There are also hanging racks filled with those very designs, and Latta has pulled aside a selection of the brand’s spring offerings, explaining that the uniform for the evening is the spring collection. Am I being styled by the designers for their event? I’m instantly nervous. “We’re asking everybody to style the pieces however they want,” Latta says. After a few rounds of dress up – a cream and grey pinstripe open-back dress, a soft olive knit mini with an octopus-like black edge creeping out from underneath – we settle upon the Twyla dress, a reversible knit number in chocolate brown and lilac. Eckhaus snaps a photo of me in the ‘fit. This should have been a hint at what was coming next.

Inside the party, fashion’s coolest – second daughter Ella Elmhoff, stylist and newly-Lichtenstein yellow Dara Allen, singer King Princess, comedian Kate Berlant – mix and mingle until we are ushered upstairs to the main event. The verdant tablescape has cold noodles from Momofuku waiting, and we’re encouraged to dig in. And after a word of thanks from our hosts, suddenly Berlant, almost in a guerilla-style coup (which she later tells me was a “performance interruption”), grabs the mic. “I can’t help but notice how this area between the tables looks like a runway…” she teases. Oh shit. “This is an improvised toast turned runway show!” Berlant declares, then gives us a walk, fluffing her Julia Roberts curls as she goes.

Immediately, the crowd starts to clap and scream. Real models, musicians, and more all take a spin at walking while a single lit cigarette – both modelling prop and mignardise – is passed hand to hand. Jemima Kirke takes a puff while going chair-to-chair asking “do you have a pair of sunglasses?” It was 9:30 pm, so I hadn’t packed a pair, but the sartorially prepared Julia Hobbs shares hers. Shirts are coming off, the crowd is screaming, Berlant is begging for more models – and I’m glued to my seat. As singer Loren Kramer freestyles R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion,” all I can think is I’m going to lose my dinner if I have to get up there.