The usual coverage of Eckhaus Latta invariably mentions Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta’s skill with material experimentation. Unique knits, nontraditional fabrics, and loud patterns are the brand’s calling cards. The house’s target demographic has also become part and parcel to its wider reception: the modern-day hipsters of gentrified/cool NYC. Reviewers stop just short of calling the design duo kooky, praising their playfulness instead.

In this collection, however, a seriousness poked its way through. Thirteen years in, the brand reckoned with operating both as a business and artistic venture. Amid practical changes like an adjusted runway and market schedule, the show notes drilled into the dichotomy between reality and fantasy: “HOLDING THE DOOR FOR A GHOST/IN THE TECHNOCRACY/IT IS ALL SPINNING/THE HOLES ARE GOOD.”

On closer inspection, precise hemlines—like in one pink and black knitted set—revealed themselves to be roughly hewn. One jacket contained messes of pillowy, rough wool in neatly segmented sections, styled with structured, vertically quilted pants. The final look was an understated slip dress layered with a sheer, bunched fabric embroidered with organic shapes. Closing the runway in furry, heeled clogs, the model acted as a dialectic conclusion: the practical and the irreverent (the technocracy and the ghost) existed simultaneously, layered on top of one another.

Rather than a compromise, the show was an impressive (and successful) balancing act—asking how an uncompromising reality can remain, for lack of better words, fun. Document captures the behind-the-scenes choreography that went into executing this delicate dance.