LONG LOVED BY WOMEN FOR HIS EASY TAILORING AND ELEGANT WORKWEAR, MICHAEL KORS HAS BEEN A FASHION POWERHOUSE FOR MORE THAN 40 YEARS. HE TALKS TO ALISON COHNABOUT REAL STREET STYLE AND STAYING POWER
THERE’S A CERTAIN KIND OF MAGIC THAT surrounds Michael Kors. Maybe it’s the pragmatic spirit that infuses the American designer’s wearable, sumptuous sportswear.
Or, perhaps, it’s his work as a World Food Programme Goodwill Ambassador and the infectious sense of optimism he expresses when he talks about ending world hunger.
Even the weather cooperates for him. New York Fashion Week this past September was punctuated by frequent cloud bursts, yet on the morning of the Michael Kors Collection SS24 show, attended by Halle Berry, Blake Lively and Hayley Atwell, the sun shone brightly on the parade of lace dresses and easy tailoring he sent down a picture-perfect, bougainvillea-lined catwalk on the waterfront in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, as the 1960s pop hit ‘What the World Needs Now Is Love’ played.
The song, and the parting clouds, were poignant not least because Kors’ latest collection, modelled by Emily Ratajkowski and Ashley Graham, among others, was dedicated to the memory of his beloved late mother, Joan. A model who later worked in the family textile business and then as a West Coast ambassador for her son’s fashion brand, she passed away just a month before the show, at the age of 84.
Kors, who founded his label in 1981 after dropping out of New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology, has often spoken about how his childhood nurtured his creativity. His parents split up shortly after he was born and, at age five, when his mother remarried, he consulted on her wedding dress. (He thought there were too many bows, so she instructed her tailor to remove them.) At 14, Kors knew that he wanted to be a fashion designer and, somewhat atypically for a family that had been in the States for only a couple of generations after emigrating (Kors’ mother’s family is of Austrian Jewish heritage and his father’s is Swedish and Ukrainian), no one ever suggested he might consider a more traditional profession. ‘Never,’ says Kors emphatically. ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I was always told, “You are very lucky that you know what you want to do.”’
The women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s also informed Kors’ aesthetic vision, teaching him that style and substance can and should coexist. ‘At my bar mitzvah, one aunt was wearing a bikini top with hip huggers and my mother was in a transparent shirt dress,’ recalls Kors with a smile when I meet him the morning af
