Michael Kors says success lies in refusing to be a snob
From manners to microshorts, the world has gone casual. And Kors is there to dress it
Every third woman these days totes a Michael Kors handbag. Their ubiquity goes some way to explaining his success. He pre-empted the obsession with “mid-market” priced architecture years ago. The present trend for “accessible luxury”? You could almost say he invented it.
“My wheels started turning a long time ago,” he says, when I ask him why he decided to make his bags so relatively affordable, recalling a time in the early 1990s when he was in Bergdorf Goodman on the first day of its seasonal sale. He watched as women “rushed the racks” looking for bargains, and had a lightbulb moment. “Why am I not thinking about them? Why can’t I be more democratic?
“Not just with handbags – with shoes, jewellery, watches, everything. The reality is that people mix up everything anyway. When I was 20, I might have literally spent a month’s rent on buying a jacket and then wore it with a pair of thrift shop pants. For a lot of fashion people, price and the idea of wearability and saleability are dirty words. As are age, size, height. I never felt that way, even a long time ago, because I did so many trunk shows and personal events. I was so young when I started; if I hadn’t done that, I truly would have been designing in the dark.”
Kors’ success lies in his refusal to be a snob. Or rather, in his yearning to be inclusive. He is interested in people. More unusually still, he appears to treat them all the same. “Even with celebrities, I mean, I can be pretty blunt with them,” he says devilishly. “I’ll say: ‘You look like you can’t move in that. Take it off’.”
No wonder close friends such as Liza Minnelli, Bette Midler, Kate Hudson, Sarah Jessica Parker and Blake Lively all adore him. “The simple truth is that if you understand people and you’re curious about them, it’s a huge leg-up. Whenever I talk to students or designers who are just starting their business, I say: ‘Have you spent time in a store? Are you on the street?’ And also: ‘Are you only friends with other fashion people? Because if you are, it’s a disaster. Get out of your bubble’.”
Kors’ birth name is Karl Anderson, but when his mother, a former model, remarried businessman Bill Kors, she gave him the option to change his first name, too. He was a child model growing up in Merrick, New York – he appeared in a TV ad for Lucky Charms – then an actor, before enrolling at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York in 1977.