David Lynch Is an Unexpected Fashion Week Influencer

Outside the Coach show on Monday, a woman was marching around topless on Park Avenue. Her semi-nudity was a little startling, given the snow still piled on the sidewalks, but it went with the animal rights sign she was holding while shouting: “Coach leather kills! Coach leather kills!” These days you have to be pretty extreme to get people’s attention.

Maybe that’s why Stuart Vevers, the creative director of Coach, and Catherine Holstein of Khaite said they were thinking about David Lynch, the master of the surreal and the extreme who died last month, when putting together their collections. Well, that and the fact that fashion loves a bit of cinematic inspiration. Retrospectives of Mr. Lynch’s most striking imagery have been ubiquitous. Technicolor normalcy taken to an absurd, terrifying length is apropos at the moment.

Not that the results of either collection were that obviously Lynchian. But the shows did offer the sense that there was something unsettling lurking just under the leather. And each of them had a lot of leather.

That the shows took place in the cavernous Park Avenue Armory was a coincidence, though Mr. Lynch might say there is no such thing.

Ms. Holstein went very literally dark, setting her collection in a black circle that looked like an alien landing site encompassed by a circular runway/yellow brick road. (In a preview, she said that “The Wizard of Oz” was Mr. Lynch’s favorite movie, and she threw in some other movie citations, including Merchant Ivory and the costume designer Edith Head, for good measure). Out paraded models in a lot of black with the occasional shot of blood red, though it was unclear where everything was leading. Not to the Emerald City. Maybe “Twin Peaks.” Or “Mulholland Drive.”