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.
I arrive Sunday evening in my self-styled dress. It takes more than an hour to figure out how I want to wear it (I’m a beauty editor, I’m used to being a backstage wallflower!), but I settle on keeping it simple: all I need are Chloé leather boots and a vintage bouclé jacket.
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.
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Thankfully, I don’t have to find out, as our show closers – Eckhaus and Latta, of course – take their turn on the dinnertime runway. “That was my worst nightmare,” I whisper to my seat-mate, who also chose to stay firmly rooted. “I really didn’t know how this was going to go!” Berlant tells me moments later. I’m crouched on the floor next to her, subconsciously still hiding in case somebody realises I’m one of the handful of people who did not promenade. “I wondered if the crowd would be into it, or would it be too scary?”
But in a month of seated shows, it seems that this reinvention is just what people craved – the crowd is still buzzing an hour later as the night draws to an end. And that’s as strong a metric of success as anything.
