In the middle of Michael Kors’s mood board for fall was a black-and-white photo of his grandparents on their wedding day. “I was always absolutely enraptured with how my grandmother looked in her dress,” Kors said at a preview. “There was such simplicity to it, so chic. It’s the height of the ’30s. When my mom passed away over the summer, we were going through everything, and all of a sudden I saw this garment bag, and I opened it up and there it was. It’s the ultimate sleeping beauty story.”
The dress was a two-fer, with a modest tunic over a “sensuous, sinewy” bias-cut number, the latter of which proved inspirational. “I started thinking about what endures,” Kors said. On the mood board, his grandmother was surrounded by women of other generations in bias-cut slips: Carole Lombard, Elizabeth Taylor, Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell. And for a counterpoint, there was tailoring of the Katharine Hepburn and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy school: strong yet feminine, with sharp shoulders and sculpted waists in Prince of Wales checks, herringbones, and camels.
Kors is at his best reworking polished New York classics like this. He doesn’t just know the American sportswear canon, he’s helped shape it these last 40 years, as the mood board photo of Rene Russo wearing his designs in The Thomas Crown Affair (a quarter century ago this year) reminded anybody who looked.
Fashion has changed since that movie came out in 1999, of course, and those shifts were reflected here, in the way a cashmere hoodie, say, replaced a turtleneck sweater under a tailored jacket, or in the fact that a sequined hoodie was worn solo, sans pants. Still, this came across as one of Kors’s more timeless proposals. A woman couldn’t go wrong with the slightly oversize navy trench, or the cool black aviator jacket. Most elegant was a look Kors laughingly described as “both grandparents” that combined an elongated double-breasted black jacket over a black silk knee-length slip dress with a split train that was modeled on the “sleeping beauty” wedding dress.
