Michael Kors started his public life as a child actor—so it probably didn’t surprise those who knew him best when he magnified his fame as a designer by becoming a regular on Project Runway, the reality-TV show, in 2004. But Kors’s passion for fashion is anything but an act. Entertaining, articulate, and ever ready with a quip, he has spread the gospel of all-American jet-set glamour for decades. No, he’s not an avant-garde envelope-pusher, but his mastery of the clean-lined, sporty genre of luxury is beyond question. “With simplicity,” he told the Vogue columnist André Leon Talley in 2001, “you can’t fake it.”
Kors came early to his vocation. As a mop-topped, towheaded teen he converted his parents’ Long Island basement into the Iron Butterfly, a mini-boutique where he sold clothes he’d zipped up himself. He spent some time at the Fashion Institute of Technology, in Manhattan, but dropped out to design an in-house line for a West Fifty-seventh Street store called Lothar’s (which he would later describe as “the Gap for the Guinnesses,” a characterization that could well be applied to all Kors’s best work).
Years later, he told the story of his big break to New Yorkmagazine: Dawn Mello—who would go on to become one of the world’s foremost luxury retailers, but who was then working across the street at Bergdorf Goodman—noticed him working on a display in the windows of Lothar’s one day, he told the reporter, and tapped on the glass to ask who had made the clothes. Her interest sparked him to start work, pronto, on his own collection. Within a year, he had launched his new label, and Bergdorf’s had bought it.
In 1999, Anna Wintour, Vogue’s editor, had summed up the Kors ethos by writing that he inherited the mantle of the grand-old born-in-the-USA sportswear tradition (pioneered by such greats as Norman Norell and Bill Blass). Generally, Kors continues to take inspiration from such thoroughbred American beauties as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Ali MacGraw.
Although he is occasionally described as a minimalist, he himself has rejected the term as being “a bit pretentious, like you’re talking about religion.” What his brand is really founded on are simply classic clothes cut from fabulous fabrics. “Ultimately,” Kors told Women’s Wear Daily in 1996, “clean lines have greater longevity, which women appreciate, and to which they can add their own personality. And if you’re busy, it kind of cleans the palate and lets you get on with your life.”
