For his 40th anniversary show, Michael Kors designed a love letter to nightlife glamour and the theatre he has missed so much over the past year. Here’s everything you need to know.
Photo: Courtesy of Michael Kors
“I think there might be a communal burning of yoga trousers,” Michael Kors said in a preview for the virtual fall/winter 2021 show he called “a love letter to urban life”. Filmed in New York City’s theatre district, the film didn’t only herald our post-lockdown return to getting dressed and going out, but Kors’s 40th year in fashion. For a self-proclaimed “theatre aficionado and freak” (“Listen, I stop over in London just to see a show because I want to see before anyone in New York does!”), celebrating his anniversary in lockdown simply wasn’t an option. As the vaccinations get underway and cities like New York and London gradually start rebooting their nightlife, Kors decided to devote his show – and indeed his collection – to a ceremonious twosome: dinner and a show.
Photo: Courtesy of Michael Kors
Produced in support of the Actors Fund – to which Kors encouraged his audience to donate – the film opened with a star-studded cast of stage actors highlighting the importance of getting New York show business back in business. Featured on video calls, they appeared as framed pictures on the wall of Sardi’s where Kors traditionally goes for dinner before a show. “We all leave the restaurant, strutting down the street to show our finery before getting to the theatre. It’s my fantasy night out,” he said, and he wasn’t exaggerating. Models from Adut Akech to Naomi Campbell sashayed down the street to the Shubert Theater where Rufus Wainwright performed an unplugged medley in homage to the stage and the city, culminating in “There’s No Business Like Show Business”.
Photo: Courtesy of Michael Kors
During lockdown, Kors has been speaking to clients around the world about their experiences and desires during the pandemic. “In the last two months, every woman says, ‘I want to get dressed up again. I wanna shine, I wanna feel glamorous’,” he said. A timeless sentiment, it inspired Kors to reimagine some of his own timeless classics from 40 years of fashion shows. “I didn’t remember that when I was young – foolish as we can all be when we’re young – I kept really bad archives. I gave clothes away. If a model said she really liked a dress, I said, ‘Fine, keep it!’ If a friend wanted a coat, I said, ‘Sure, keep it!’” Instead, he recreated a number of pieces from his memory of them, labelling each with a unique QR code for customers to scan and dive into its history. A shiny red coat, for instance, will take you to a website with films of Cindy Crawford carrying the original piece in the spring/summer 1999 collection, and Bella Hadid wearing the reimagined version today.
Photo: Courtesy of Michael Kors
The idea of timeless was reflected through every garment in the collection, each evoking a universal and unchanging feeling of glamour, of going out, and being seen. “The idea of things that light up,” as Kors put it. It fuelled a collection constantly underpinned by eveningwear, both in full-length silhouettes with enough sparkle to light up New York, but also in day dresses and tailoring imbued with the glamour of night. “Legs, legs, legs,” Kors said of a look composed from a jacquard zebra skirt with a cashmere pullover and topped with an intarsia shearling coat. “I just feel like it’s the opposite of feeling schlumpy – it’s really celebrating that strut, walking into a restaurant and making an entrance.” Or, as he observed: “It’s the opposite of a woman with a tote bag.”
Photo: Courtesy of Michael Kors
Kors’s timeless philosophy – both in terms of clothes and the art of evening glamour – was epitomised in a second-skin black sequinned body worn with a slinky trouser and a matching coat with plume trims chicly swung over the arm. It could almost have materialised in any decade, and evoked in its wearer – and her audience – the same allure of night-time opulence and thrill, a feeling reawakened as we emerge from lockdown. But while Kors was looking to a near and better future, his anniversary collection didn’t close its eyes to current affairs. Inspired by the cold-shoulder top Dolly Parton wore to get her vaccination, immortalised in a song on YouTube, Kors joked he had designed a “vaccination top” for the collection: a beige knit with a single cut-out shoulder.
Read Next: Michael Kors at 40: A Celebration of the Designer’s Life in Fashion
Originally published on Vogue.co.uk
