What is it about Katie Holmes that has professional style watchers breathlessly documenting her every fashion choice?
In the past several days alone, Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, and InStyle have praised the ways the actress presented herself, with the latter calling one outfit — a nondescript Banana Republic shirtdress worn over a tank top and wide-leg pants — “a master class in elevated basics.” Vogue described a generic-looking slip dress the actress wore in May as “a lazy girl’s shortcut to cool.”
That reliably fawning chorus recently gained another member in A.P.C., the French fashion label founded in the late 1980s on the Gallic ideals of durability and youthfully unstudied chic (think Jane Birkin or Françoise Hardy).
This spring the brand enlisted Ms. Holmes to place her name and her celebrity stamp on a line of sweaters, T-shirts, miniskirts and jeans, some of which are reproductions of items A.P.C. originally sold in the late 1990s and the early 2000s. Prices for the clothes range from about $145 to well over $1,000.
“We like how real she is, that her style is appealing 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 the early 2000s as Joey on “Dawson’s Creek,” before her six-year marriage to Tom Cruise catapulted her to another stratosphere of fame.
Over the years, she has worked with various brands, Miu Miu, Max Mara and Ann Taylor among them. But to hear her tell it, she is a reluctant fashion icon.
“I never really anticipated this,” Ms. Holmes said in an interview while introducing her A.P.C. line at the company’s New York office last month. Her style, she added, is grounded in pure practicality.
Even so, she has for decades been a paparazzi magnet, her slender, 5-foot-9-inch frame hard to miss as she strolls her downtown Manhattan neighborhood. In many images, she projects much the same contradictory blend of self-assurance and doelike vulnerability she did onscreen as Joey.
Ms. Holmes, who these days is sprinting between appointments and rehearsals for a Broadway revival of “Our Town” that is scheduled to open in September, said dressing to the nines for routine errands was “really hard for me to understand.” She would rather take refuge in sweatshirts and jeans, and prefers to reserve the dazzle for red carpet appearances or other formal moments.
“The dinners and parties are work,” she said, adding that amping up the glam factor in daily life “just doesn’t feel right to me.”
Ms. Holmes has willfully and, perhaps shrewdly, taken on the Everywoman mantle, opting more often than not for the generic cover of a blazer, a midcalf dress, a white T-shirt or trusty jeans — the fashion equivalent of meatloaf and beans.
But served, as Ms. Touitou of A.P.C. put it, “with a touch of French girl sex appeal.” She added that Ms. Holmes had managed to fuse her low-key sensibility with a muted eroticism and was the ideal bridge between French-girl style — devotees of that undying trend, rejoice! — and a grown-up version of Joey.
Katharine Zarrella, a freelance fashion critic and a former fashion director at The Wall Street Journal, said Ms. Holmes’s day-to-day wardrobe consisted of “approachable clothes that make people feel good about what’s in their closets, that make them confident that they can make those clothes work.”
No surprise then that the rapturously proliferating coverage of Ms. Holmes’s style shows no sign of abating. Some media chroniclers have strained to make a virtue of even the star’s more glaring gaffes.
“Katie Holmes is not afraid of putting a little frump in her stride,” read a Vogue article published on Wednesday, referring to an ungainly camel coat and an awkwardly truncated midi dress worn by the actress. “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.”
Ms. Zarrella was similarly forgiving. “There is something comforting about her look,” she said. “And not much in life is comforting right now.”
