Katie Holmes is not afraid of putting a little frump in her stride. See: the baggy slip dresses, the outsized camel coats, the Taylor Swift merch that could double as a pajama top and ankle-skimming denim skirts. Few readers will need to be reminded of when the actress once layered a minidress over a pair of jeans at the iHeartRadio Jingle Ball–a look that precipitated even EmRata and Kendall Jenner’s fashion choices two years on.
This is a woman who understands that it sometimes takes a real fashion brain to make a cumbersome silhouette look like a confident life choice. To that point: Holmes was yesterday afternoon photographed strolling through Manhattan in a pair of patent flats—plucked from her recent collaboration with APC–and a knitted dress that cut across the most “awkward” point of her shins.
The official editorial line coming from this magazine is that this unflattering-to-some silhouette should now be considered a good thing. At the tail end of 2023, British Vogue’s shopping editor Joy Montgomery christened the “awkward skirt length” a style on the rise, arguing that bookish kilts had begun to overtake the ubiquitous and libidinous mini. She cast Andy Sachs as this movement’s poster girl but could just as feasibly chosen Katie Holmes.