Michael Kors has FOMO. “Terrible FOMO,” he emphasizes, sitting in his office, which overlooks Bryant Park and the bustling center of Manhattan. This is why he went to the opening night of The Lion King yesterday, “even though it had been a craaaaaazy day at work,” and why, despite his having about a million things to do, he will go see Jennifer Lopez perform at Madison Square Garden tonight; wouldn't miss it for the world. “Not a chance,” he says. After that, he will hop out to Fire Island, even though he has to be back in the city for his perfume launch with Gigi Hadid on Monday. “If you're not out and about, and you don't have, you know, a little bit of FOMO, a little bit of this sort of like, ‘What's going on?’ thing, constantly, you're gonna get left in the dust.”
Moving, shaking, keeping a finger on the pulse, this is the oxygen that has kept Michael Kors—the person and the brand—alive for all of these years. It's what has allowed him to transition from his position of the designer BFF of Claudia, Christy, and Naomi into the BFF of Gigi, Bella, and Kendall without it seeming like 30 years has transpired. (It helps that Kors, now 60, looks deal-with-the-Devil or maybe-a-really-good-dermatologist identical to the way he did when he was 30: same all-black ensemble, same shock of boyish blond hair, same smiling face—round, firm, and tawny as a pumpkin and usually accessorized with aviator glasses.) His ability to appeal equally to fans of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy and those of Nicki Minaj has solidified his status as one of the quintessential American designers and has enabled him to grow the company he helped build, now called Capri Holdings, into an empire with a market cap of $4 billion. It's a giant that encompasses not only the three brands that bear variations on his name but also, more recently, Jimmy Choo and Versace. Those two acquisitions, insiders say, all but announce the company's ambition to become the next big luxury conglomerate, an American version of France's powerful LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton. Not that Michael Kors is buying the Champagne—or the cognac—just yet. “Right now, there's no plans for that,” says Kors, who demurs on questions of business, other than to allow that these are challenging times for the fashion industry: Department stores are closing faster than you can say “Amazon Prime,” and the promise of the internet has devolved into a bloody battle in which legacy brands compete with upstart designers for increasingly demanding consumers.
“What do they want?” Kors asks rhetorically. “They want everything. ‘How does it make me feel?’ ‘Can I wear it year-round?’ ‘Where was it made?’ ‘How was it made?’ ‘How will it look after 10 years?’ ‘Will I get bored with it?’ ‘My earbuds go here. Where does my phone go?’ It's a puzzle, and it's constantly changing.” Kors takes pride in always having been a consumer-focused designer; his bread and butter has been give-the-people-what-they-want basics, which, as his company has grown, he has endeavored to make available at a variety of price points. “We do it all,” he says proudly.
The question of whether that might be too much for a luxury brand broke out this past summer on Twitter, of all places, after a user named Hoodwolf posted a picture of what was ostensibly his own tattooed arm, draped with a Kors bag—the Manhattan Medium Contrast-Trim Leather Satchel, which retails for $358. “Treat your girl,” read the caption on the post.
“Ugh! As if!” responded one user in what became a pile-on. “Michael Kors cheapened their brand,” summed up a tweeter whose bio identified them as an Outspoken Canadian: “EVERYBODY wears it now! Girl working at McDonalds.…Girl working at the mall.…”
Up in his 20th-floor office, Kors waves this off. “Fashion people say crazy shit,” he tells me. “It'll be like, ‘How much are those shoes? Oh, they're $150? Oh, that's like for free,’ ” he says, pulling a face. “Or, ‘I would wear that on a boat to a party.’ Well, there aren't a lot of people that actually go to a lot of boat parties. So let's, like, slow it up here.”
Which isn't to say he doesn't see their point. Not too long ago, Kors and his husband, Lance LePere, were on a boat, gliding through the water off the coast of Bora Bora, listening to the sweet serenade of a ukulele player, when Kors noticed a familiar shape glinting on the musician's wrist. “Is that?” he asked. “That looks…”
“Yes,” the musician beamed, regarding his bracelet. “It's yours.”
Once upon a time, Kors might have scoffed at his own accessibility. “I think when I was really young, I thought, you know, We're only gonna be all the way on top of the price ladder, making pieces for, you know, Bianca Jagger and Jerry Hall,” he says.
An understandable point of view for someone whose bedtime reading as a child included Vogue and Women's Wear Daily. Kors grew up in Merrick, Long Island, in a family he describes as fashion-obsessed. His grandfather was in the textile business. “He would teach me, like, how to pack for a business trip,” Kors recalls. “He'd be like, Make sure your coat has a button-out lining. You never know. I was eight.”
His mother, a former model, took him shopping at Saks. “By the time I was seven, I knew every department,” says Kors, who as a teenager stayed on top of current trends. “I did it all,” he says: “Nehru jackets, love beads, peace medallions. Tie-dye, batik T-shirts, Gurkha pants, sandals with socks…” But he had, he is careful to point out, taste. At 16, he used his earnings from after-school jobs, like working at the local tennis club, to buy himself a Cartier Tank watch. “I learned about quality early on,” he says, and “instinctively” knew to stay away from some of the more vile '70s trends. “You know, like, you watch The Brady Bunch, and they're all in, like, mustard, rust, and, you know, cocoa brown, and you're like, ‘Ugh, it's hideous.’ ”
Earlier this year, Kors staged a fashion show inspired by Studio 54, which is where he went in lieu of attending his high school prom (wearing, he has said, “a piece of raw-silk jersey wrapped into a diaper pant”). “I was a freak,” he admits. “But I was a popular freak.” The show featured the surprisingly delightful sight of Gigi Hadid and Patti Hansen bopping around to Barry Manilow, in a bedazzled orange suit jacket, performing “Copacabana.”
For his fall collection, Kors has returned to the same period for inspiration, in part, he says, because the era reminds him of the current moment. “Everything was just a mess,” he tells me. “It's like now. We're living in trying times. Everyone's sad. Everyone's overwhelmed. Yet people looked more glamorous on the street than ever before.”
During a fitting one June day in Kors's office, the sight of a wide collar sparks an idea: “Maybe we should have the show at Leonard's,” he says, referring to Leonard's Palazzo, the storied bar mitzvah palace of his youth, whose grand ballrooms and cherub-bedecked fountain have earned it the title of the Event Capital of Long Island. “We could helicopter everything out,” he goes on, getting into it. “We could have the models come down the stairs with the chandelier. We could have a chopped-liver swan.”
Kors may see his Long Island childhood through heart-shaped, rose-tinted glasses now, but at the time there was no question he was getting out. “I was a very impatient young person,” he says. “And I knew what I wanted.” He enrolled at the Fashion Institute of Technology, in Manhattan, and in short order talked his way into a job at Lothar's, the New York outpost of a fashionable St. Tropez boutique, where he found himself helping Jackie Kennedy pull her boots off and showing Goldie Hawn how to tie the top on a jumpsuit. The store proved to be the better education. “Being in a retail store, especially with a very sophisticated clientele, was like college times a thousand,” he says.
When they offered him a full-time job, he dropped out of school to take it. The role was designing womenswear, but that had always been the plan. “At the time, men's fashion seemed so rigid,” Kors says. “I didn't want to just be a suit designer.”
But it was the clothes he made for himself that got him noticed. As he had in high school, Kors was spending most of his paycheck on his own outfits. “I was living in this teeny little apartment. I'd be eating, like, Cheez Doodles for dinner, but I'd be wearing a custom-tailored riding jacket I bought on Madison Avenue,” he recalls. Given the limitations, he often had to get creative: as when he couldn't find shoulder pads large enough for his liking, so he pinned cotton handkerchiefs into the lining of his jacket, which he paired with jeans and leg warmers. “Then, to finish my outfit off, I took a luggage strap and I wrapped it around my waist like three times. And then I wore an army hat, with vintage diamond brooches pinned to it, and these little round blue glasses,” he says.
Then he'd strut down Fifth Avenue, hoping that Bill Cunningham would take his picture for his column in the Styles section. Once, while he was doing so, a familiar face popped out of a Rolls-Royce. “I love your hat,” she said. It was Diane Keaton, at the height of her Annie Hall fame. Then, in Kors's telling, she said, “ ‘Woody, don't you love his hat?’ Woody Allen looked at me like I was a Martian.”
Lothar's was situated across from Bergdorf Goodman, and one day in 1981, Dawn Mello, the store's legendary fashion director, spotted Kors, resplendent in one such outfit, setting up a window display, at which point, by her own account, she barreled across the street to find out who the designer was. She ended up offering Kors a space in Bergdorf's to show his wares.
His first trunk show went well. “I knew all of these women who shopped at Lothar's, and I told all of them, you know, ‘I'm leaving, but I'm starting my own line,’ ” he says. “So all of these women came, and we basically sold everything that was in the store. Like, totally cleared the racks. It was like locusts.”
Soon came the write-up in New York magazine. “Michael Kors, 22, feels that fashion should be evolutionary, not revolutionary,” read the blurb written by none other than Anna Wintour. “He plans to keep his collections small and interchangeable, stressing pared-down luxury.” To celebrate his success, Kors walked over to Tiffany's and bought himself a Rolex. “My mother was like, ‘I remember when you bought that Cartier Tank watch,’ ” he recalls. “ ‘You said it would be, like, the only one you would want forever.’ And I'm like, ‘Well, nothing is forever.’ ”
Kors, perhaps fittingly for a fashion maven of his era, compares the industry's swings between extremes—from austerity to excess and back again—to a binge-and-purge cycle. “It's like, if you go out to dinner, and you eat the most fattening, richest, indulgent meal, and the next day you wake up and you're like, ‘Oh, God. I ate too much,’ ” he says in his office. “ Like, ‘Oh, my skin, my stomach, I feel ugh. I'm gonna have a salad.’ You're trying to kind of atone for your sins.”
So it was that not long after Kors said those things to Wintour about pared-down luxury, he was showing cowhide vests and gold leather jeans. The most regrettable item to come out of this period was bodysuits for men. “A lot of men tuck their shirt into their briefs,” he explains, so it seemed like a no-brainer. Until he tried one on. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, this is definitely not working with the male anatomy,’ ” he says.
The real jab in the nuts came not long after. Kors's Italian distributor went out of business, taking him down with it. Kors kept his game face on: “The most important thing for us is going forward,” he told the Times.
“He doesn't miss a beat,” says Inez van Lamsweerde, of the photography duo Inez and Vinoodh, who met the designer in 1994, around this period of transition. “He was always so enthusiastic and full of jokes and hilarious stories.”
Kors resurfaced at LVMH, in Paris, where he was charged with reinvigorating the French label Céline, at the time a fusty French brand popular mainly in Asia. Although he succeeded, Kors did not take to Paris, where his peers regarded him with disdain: “Ugh,” Karl Lagerfeld infamously sniffed, “with his big smile and gestures, he reminds me of a sales assistant in a Midwest department store.”
Kors later told WWD that he felt “neglected” by top brass at LMVH, whose attention was preoccupied with its enfants terribles. “If you're a nice kid,” he said, “no one pays attention to you.”
As it happened, the qualities that made Kors an outlier in Paris were precisely what made him a star back in the States, where Silas Chou and Lawrence Stroll, the two investors who had helped make Tommy Hilfiger into a household name, set about turning Michael Kors into a global brand, an endeavor in which Kors, who had soaked up information about the European and Asian markets during his time abroad, was happy to participate. As Lagerfeld had correctly intuited: Kors actually wanted to sell clothes. “I've always been pragmatic,” he tells me. “I think if someone doesn't wear it or use it, then I should have been a painter.” He wasn't an artiste, the type who was going to, say, get in fistfights with Axl Rose or launch into drunken anti-Semitic tirades in bars. He was a nice kid, whose major vices, so far as anyone could tell, were tanning beds and Broadway musicals. “His favorite words are Barbra, Bette, Liza, and Cher,” Inez van Lamsweerde tells me, and indeed most of them come up in the course of my conversations with Kors.
Not to mention: “Elizabeth!” Kors says, his eyes lighting up as he launches into a story about Elizabeth Taylor and the time Harper's Bazaar sent him to interview her in her Los Angeles home. “The art!” he exclaims. “She had the most insane art collection I had ever seen. Like, a Renoir next to a Pissarro next to a Degas, all jammed together. And then, in her powder room, there is the giant Elizabeth Taylor Warhol that took up the whole room. So you're washing your hands with the Warhol!”
Kors is an inveterate spinner of stories and by now has been around so long and seen so much, they simply spill out of him, like stuffing from a well-loved teddy bear. “There are certain people that enter a room and just have this light and energy, and Michael is one,” says his friend Kate Hudson, whose mother is former Lothar's customer Goldie Hawn. “He brings his own sunshine.”
Hudson has known Kors since practically before she was born, but it wasn't until he became a judge on Project Runway, in 2004, that the public at large got to know him. As Kors merchandise spread around the world, the designer's star-making turn on the show—“She literally looks like she got caught in a tornado of toilet paper” was a typical zinger—bolstered the brand in the U.S. Soon, Michelle Obama was wearing Michael Kors in her official portrait and Nicki Minaj was rhyming his name with “whores.”
“I heard about it from a 13-year-old,” Kors said. A son of a friend. “He sent me a text: ‘OMG, the new Nicki Minaj, Michael Kors song.’ So I called and said, ‘Tell me, what is it?’ And he's like, ‘I can't. My mom is staring at me.’ ” Kors got the kid's mother to leave the room so he could play the song. “It's hysterical” was his reaction. “But I don't think it'll get a lot of radio time.” See, he's pragmatic.
Across the years, very little has altered his outlook. According to Kors's friends, even becoming a billionaire didn't change him much. “He's been the same, the whole time we have known him,” says Inez van Lamsweerde. And he hasn't slowed a bit. “When I text him, I have to ask where in the world he is,” says Hudson. “He just doesn't stop.”
Even now, back at the fitting in his company's Midtown headquarters, the billionaire is futzing around like a regular old seamstress. “I feel like that collar could be more demonstrative,” he says. “And the snaps on these cuffs are icky-poo.” Someone hands him a seam ripper, and Kors digs into the fabric, keeping up a stream of chatter like a veteran surgeon removing an organ.
“So did we all notice at the presidential debates that none of the men's shirts fit?” he asks the room. “Too tight or too big!” He finishes. “Well, that's very fabulous,” he says, satisfied.
Kors is always noticing little details like this. How people roll their sleeves, or what they wear to the airport or when they are out to dinner, which reminds him of a woman he met at Rasputin, the notorious Russian cabaret in Brighton Beach. “There was a woman there, in a rubber evening gown, with major jewelry, and the hair and the whole thing,” he says. “And then the dancing girls came out. They were dressed as gold coins, and we were cheering.… It was the most fun night ever. Oh, Marcel,” he says to his senior VP of design menswear. “You and your wife have to go. It's better than Las Vegas. It's better than anything you've ever experienced.”
Alas, someone informs him, Rasputin has shut down. Kors takes the news in stride. If there's one thing he's learned in his six decades on earth, it's that you've got to roll with the times.
Lately, though, it feels like changes are coming faster and faster. All the rules he came up with are gone—including the formerly rigid strictures surrounding menswear. At the fitting, Kors turns around to see the model as he's changing outfits. “Don't put the pants on,” he commands jokingly. “I'll give you some lipstick and some fishnet stockings and a slingback, and you're ready to walk in just the coat.”
It can all be pretty hard to keep up with. “Would that make you nonbinary?” Kors continues. “I'm so confused. Does ‘nonbinary’ mean you don't specifically think in terms of male and female? Is that what it is?” He sighs. “I don't know what words I'm supposed to use now. You have to realize,” he adds, “I was born in the Roaring Twenties.”
But for the most part, he applauds these changes. “I mean,” he says, sitting on his couch, “this is not just a game for a very rarefied group of people anymore. You don't have to be super-skinny. You don't have to be super-young. You don't have to be super-rich.… As a designer, it's fun.” As a big corporation, maybe not so much. Not long ago, the original investors in Michael Kors sold off their remaining stake. One of them, Hong Kong billionaire Silas Chou, recently announced that he was backing a new horse, Instagram influencer Arielle Charnas. “The reality is, the next generation is going to come, and they're going to have their own point of view,” says Kors.
Of course, Kors could cash out too—go relax on a yacht with a famous friend. But he's not there yet. Not when there are places to go, markets to tackle, politicians who clearly need a fashion intervention. “We go through periods where, seemingly on the outside, everything stays the same,” he says. But there's always something new coming around the corner. “And if you're not up for the change, it's done.”
Jessica Pressler is a features writer at ‘New York’ magazine.
A version of this story originally appeared in the October 2019 issue with the title "Fashion Inferno."
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Ruven Afanador
Hair by Thom Priano for R+Co. haircare
Makeup by Allie Smith for Bridge using Mac Cosmetics
Prop stylist: Todd Wiggins for The Magnet Agency
