They were craving some jean therapy.
This week, Walmart shoppers flipped when they discovered a pair of $30 jeans that appeared to be a dead ringer for a $620 pair adored by Kendall Jenner and Rihanna.
The original pants are from Khaite, a 10-year-old label by Soho art darling Catherine Holstein, who previously worked at Gap and Very Wang.
But Holstein’s clothes are notoriously teeny. According to Bergdorf Goodman, her largest cuts barely fit a size 12.
Enter Walmart designer Brandon Maxwell, a fashion buddy of Holstein’s who has moonlit as a Project Runway judge.
After taking over Walmart’s Scoop and Free Assembly lines in 2021, the designer — who has created couture for Jennifer Lawrence and Meghan Markle — duped Khaite’s fashion-famous jeans, right down to their signature black enamel buttons.
The big difference: These jeans are available in larger sizes.
Online, Maxwell’s denim for Walmart goes up to a women’s 28 — more than twice the size of Khaite’s thin-spiration. At $30, it also costs just 5% of Holstein’s premium pants.
Maxwell has always been an advocate for size diversity, regularly including larger models at his celeb-jammed fashion shows and telling Bustle that he’s been making plus-size clothes “from day one.”
He added, “Our job is to make women feel good. If you have a problem doing that, with any type of woman, then you should not be doing this job.”
The $30 dupe jeans have sparked a fashion frenzy, with sources inside the brand telling The Post that they “cannot restock them fast enough” online.
Stella Kittrell, a plus-size model and influencer, bought “every shade” of the Khaite dupes. “All my plus-sized luxury girlies are going to be so excited,” she said. “Walmart, you outdid yourselves.”
“A win is a win,” conceded luxury fashion consultant Casey Morrow Lewis, who runs the popular Substack newsletter After School, which tracks Gen Z spending habits. She noted on TikTok that the washes appear “almost completely identical” according to shoppers.
Still, some fashion insiders are raising eyebrows that the Walmart jeans are so close to Khaite’s original, black-buttoned version — especially because the two designers are friends.
“Fashion is such a small world,” a top publicist, who has worked with both Brandon Maxwell and Catherine Holstein, told The Post.
“They know each other. They’re friendly. They’ve been up for the same industry awards and go to the same dinners and parties. And now he goes and dupes her? It feels petty.”
“It’s almost like Brandon is saying, ‘Hey Cate, this is so easy, even Walmart can do it,’” said a top stylist, who asked for anonymity because she regularly works with the notoriously private Khaite brand.
She said the black enamel buttons on the jeans — known as a Khaite signature — are especially eyebrow-raising, at least if one views them pre-Botox. “He’s kind of trolling her.”
But Lewis insisted the move is actually good for both Maxwell and Holstein. “Khaite is very well known among fashion people but it is hardly a household name. Plenty of people are hearing about Khaite for the first time through the dupe… Walmart [is] helping establish Khaite as a brand to aspire to.”
Ironically, Walmart also sells Khaite handbags at a discount — this popular studded Elena bag is currently at the big-box paradise for $800 off.
