What is it about Katie Holmes that has professional style watchers breathlessly documenting her every fashion choice?
Just in the past few days, Glamour, Harper’s BazaarAnd In style have praised the way the actress presented herself, with the latter calling one outfit – a low-key Banana Republic shirt dress worn over a tank top and wide-leg trousers – “a masterclass in elevated basics.” Vogue described a generic looking slip dress the actress wore “a lazy girl shortcut to cool” in May.
That reliably fawning chorus recently gained a new member at APC, the French fashion label founded in the late 1980s with the Gallic ideals of sustainability and youthfully unstudied chic (think Jane Birkin or Françoise Hardy).
This spring, the brand tapped Ms. Holmes to put her name and her celebrity stamp on a line of sweaters, T-shirts, miniskirts and jeans, some of which are reproductions of items APC originally sold in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Prices for the clothes range from about $145 to well over $1,000.
“We love how real she is, that her style appeals to everyone,” Judith Touitou, the label’s longtime creative director, said of Ms. Holmes. “For a celebrity, she is very sophisticated, but also accessible.”
Many have seen Ms. Holmes as the ultimate cool girl since she captivated TV viewers in the late ’90s and early 2000s as Joey on “Dawson’s Creek,” before her six-year-old wedding to Tom Cruise catapulted her into another stratosphere of fame.
Over the years she has worked with several brands including Miu Miu, Max Mara and Ann Taylor. But to hear her tell it, she’s a reluctant fashion icon.
“I never really expected this,” Ms. Holmes said in an interview while introducing her APC line at the company’s New York office last month. Her style, she added, is based on pure practicality.
Yet she has been a paparazzi magnet for decades, her slim 6-foot frame hard to miss as she strolls through the downtown Manhattan neighborhood. In many images, she projects much the same contradictory mix of confidence and vulnerability as Joey does on screen.
Ms. Holmes, who these days is sprinting between appointments and rehearsals for a Broadway revival of “Our Town” that opens in September, said it was “very difficult for me to dress down for routine errands.” She prefers to hide in sweatshirts and jeans, preferring to reserve the glare for red carpet appearances or other formal moments.
“The dinners and parties are work,” she said, adding that amping up the glamor factor in everyday life “just doesn’t feel right to me.”
Ms. Holmes has willfully and perhaps cleverly adopted the Everywoman mantle, more often than not opting for the generic cover of a blazer, a mid-calf dress, a white T-shirt or a trusty pair of jeans – the fashion equivalent of meatloaf and beans.
But it served, as APC’s Ms. Touitou put it, “with a touch of sex appeal for French girls.” She added that Ms. Holmes had managed to combine her understated sensibility with a muted eroticism and was the ideal bridge between the style of French girls – lovers of that eternal trend, rejoice! – and an adult version of Joey.
Katharine Zarrella, a freelance fashion critic and former fashion director at The Wall Street Journal, said Ms. Holmes’ daily wardrobe consisted of “accessible clothes that make people feel good about what’s in their closets, that give them the confidence that she can making sure those clothes work.
It’s no surprise, then, that the rampant coverage of Ms. Holmes’ style shows no signs of abating. Some media columnists have done their best to make a virtue out of even the star’s more egregious blunders.
“Katie Holmes isn’t afraid to put a little mess in her step,” said Vogue article published on Wednesday, referring to a bulky camel coat and an awkwardly truncated midi dress worn by the actress. “This is a woman who understands that sometimes it takes a real fashion brain to make a bulky silhouette look like a confident life choice.”
Ms. Zarrella was also forgiving. “There’s something comforting about her appearance,” she said. “And not much in life is comforting right now.”
