Review: ‘Khaite FW21’ — Sean Baker’s Fashion Week Faux Pas

He accidentally exposes COVID-era class differences.

Sean Baker, the NYU-trained writer-director celebrated for indie films about people on the margins of American society (Tangerine, The Florida Project), has shifted to a new far-left political move. His latest film, Khaite FW21, showcases the Fall/Winter 2021 Collection of designer Catherine Holstein’s Kaihte fashion brand. Livelier and even more facetious than Baker’s feature-length films, this short celebrates the COVID social transformation that’s made America entirely marginal.

Jokingly publicized as Baker’s “all new epic film,” Khaite FW21 is a series of cinematic scraps — a continuous montage of models strutting the streets, swanning through “subterranean corridors . . . collapsing past and present to evoke a city defined by extremes — perilous yet alluring, raw yet resilient.” Baker and a gang of models reenact New York’s bad-old-days — the crime and graffiti-ridden 1970s — that look just like the city’s COVID present. Baker’s brief credit sequence imitates Walter Hill’s 1979 street-gang classic The Warriors: fake nostalgia, fake news.

The fashion industry often depends on perception and prescience. Khaite FW21 cunningly (accidentally?) depicts national urban suffering and self-loathing that the mainstream corporate media, always promoting political mandates, gussies up as “news.” The models’ tough-gal, aggressive postures, meant to be chic and entertaining, seem bizarre considering that contemporary New Yorkers have knuckled under arbitrary tyrannical mandates.

With The Warriors title font, Baker invokes Walter Hill’s colorful, kinetic analogy that connected modern, downwardly-mobile urban youth to the desperate societal objectives of  Xenophon’s Anabasis, written in 370 b.c. Baker then switches to “New York Groove,” a ’70s hit by KISS, to serenade…