If you’re looking for the playbook on what to wear when you turn the delicious age of 45, Katie Holmes is giving it to you: cowboy boots and a sheer, patterned maxidress. Boom. Holmes’ birthday was yesterday, and was spotted in New York City in a rare appearance with her 17-year old (!) daughter Suri Cruise, whom she shares with ex-husband Tom Cruise. For the occasion, Holmes wore a sheer black velvet, feather-trimmed maxidress, layered with a white wool coat, and a pair of white pointed-toe cowboy boots by Partlow. (This marks the second time she’s worn the luxury boot brand in the past two weeks; the actress chose the “Abigail” style, a white leather boot with metallic cutouts.) A black leather bag and small gold hoop earrings rounded out the birthday attire.
By her mother’s side was Suri, sporting a gray mid-length coat, a maroon scarf, semi-sheer black tights, and black velvet ballet flats. Unbelievably (where does the time go?), Suri is expected to graduate from high school in June and head off to college next fall. Though both of her parents are actors, Suri is talented musically, and Holmes revealed that her daughter recorded a cover of “Blue Moon” for her film Alone Together, which Holmes wrote, directed, and starred in.
“She’s very, very talented,” Holmes told Yahoo! Entertainment of Suri. “She said she would do it and she recorded it and I let her do her thing. That’s the way I direct in general. It’s like, ‘This is what I think we all want—go do your thing.’” As to why she asked Suri to sing for the film, Holmes replied “I always want the highest level of talent, so I asked her.”
Suri also sang in Rare Objects, yet another project that Holmes wrote, directed, and starred in. “Both of those [movie] experiences came out of the same sense of what I love about our industry, which is, you have these projects and you become a family with people,” Holmes said, per OK. “And it’s this safe, beautiful, creative space. So it comes out of love for me to include someone who I love dearly.” She added “That’s how I like to work. I like to have that kind of feeling. It was very meaningful to me to have her there, because she’s my heart.”
Suri is now roughly the age Holmes was when she started her career on the beloved Dawson’s Creek: “I think it’s probably weird since she’s a teenager,” Holmes said of Suri watching her on the show. “I’m not like, ‘You need to watch mommy’s work.’ But during the pandemic, we had a good laugh about it. It’s wild to have a daughter who’s almost the same age as I was when I began all this.”
Holmes told Elle U.K. that being a young mom (she had Suri at 27) allowed her and her only child to grow up together, and told Town & Country that Suri is the most important person to her and that it’s paramount to her that she have “a stable, innocent childhood,” adding “I feel so blessed to do what I do, but there’s nothing in the world better than watching your child succeed.”
As to the level of privacy surrounding the teenager, “What has been really important for me with my daughter, because she was so visible at a young age, is I really like to protect her,” Holmes told Glamour. “I’m very grateful to be a parent, to be her parent. She’s an incredible person.”
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree—Holmes is pretty great, too. Now, at 45, she’ll continue to push herself, pursuing both more acting and directing roles; when asked by IndieWire if she wished she’d started directing earlier, Holmes succinctly said “No,” before adding “I feel like I came to it when it was right for me, and I’m excited to continue on the path. I’m always looking to see what stories inspire me, how to grow as a filmmaker and actor. I don’t feel like there’s an expiration date. So I’m happy with when I began.”
Right now, she is “working on different things that are very early on,” and when it comes to what dreams she has left to fulfill professionally in her next 45 years, she said “I would love to direct a musical. Putting that joy into the world.”
“I feel like what is wonderful about the creative process of making a film, it’s you’re kind of putting everything, every part of yourself into it, all the time,” she said. “Your whole source of ideas and creativity is completely turned on. Whether or not you’re jumping in to do a scene or you’re running to do a locations meeting or see photos from a fitting, you’re always sort of in it. I find it to be actually quite exhilarating.”
As for fashion, “I enjoy the craftsmanship,” she told Glamour, adding “I love vintage shopping. I love the art of design.” She specifically called out the fashion of her teens and early twenties in the 1990s as having very much returned, and that Suri is wearing clothes Holmes might have been in herself back in the decade. “I think the ‘90s style is exactly back,” she told the outlet. “Makes me feel old. We lived through that already! My mom says she should have saved things. I should have saved things.”
