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.
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