“Here, take a fajita. ” Michael Kors spins the lazy Susan like it is the Wheel of Fortune so that a starchy circle lands in front of me personally. “Add a little bit of onion to it. Some hoisin. Put a little cucumber on which duck skin - turn it into a dietetic delight! ” The 55-year-old United states designer arrived in Shanghai from New York yesterday and, despite a bit of jet separation, he’s in good spirits. He’s currently on the wave half of the wall-and-wave mindset he’s adopted over a lifetime of travel. “You hit a wall, ” this individual says, pantomiming the impact, and moving into a fluid, rolling-with-the-homies arm motion. “After that, you ride the wave. ” This is Kors’s first trip to the town, where he’s come to open a glistening, two-story flagship. He will also sponsor a thousand style-savvy guests (including the actors Camilla Belle, Freida Pinto as well as Hilary Swank, who have been flown in for the occasion) at his label’s first-ever hyper-immersive, multimedia runway show in an airplane hangar an hour’s drive away. However right now, he’s focused on food. Picking at another dish, he says, “Ooh, I love crystal shrimp! ” His smile widens the way it does when he has about to crack a joke. “You know her, right? The drag queen through Nashville? She’s friends with Won Ton Consommé! ”
He shoots a peek at his husband and business partner, Lance LePere, who met Kors whilst interning at his Paris office. “What color are the walls, Lance? ” Scanning the empty, ornate main room of the Dragon Phoenix restaurant, LePere says, “Um … Ladurée? ” Kors shakes his head. “You should be exhausted. I say it’s Claridge’s. ” Kors raises an eyebrow as if he has just taught everyone an important lesson on globalization. “The world is linked, ” he says. “Ladurée turned into Claridge’s, which is really Tiffany, and Audrey Hepburn just wafted by! ”
It’s this limitless book of campy one-liners that has made Kors such a pleasure to watch for ten seasons as a judge on the fashion competition series “Project Runway, ” that helped propel his business into a billion-dollar empire. The show is also the reason why, on the other side of the world, he can’t cross the street without running into a fan -- or a knockoff of one of his coveted handbags.
After dinner, while going through the Bund, a city-center boardwalk surrounded by oddly shaped skyscrapers with bright lamps casting rainbows along the Huangpu River, Kors is stopped multiple times - often through smartly dressed women in their 20s, who, ironically, recognize him by the aviators he wears anytime he’s out in public, even at night. He gamely presents for photos - almost always with his arms at his side, superhero-style, and with that toothy showbiz smile. He absentmindedly hums “Slow Boat to Tiongkok, ” a pop standard from the ’40s that’s been covered by his idols Liza Minnelli and Bette Midler. “Everyone is so young here, ” this individual says. “I feel like Methuselah. ”
The following night, Kors arrives at his brand new shop on Nanjing Road, not far from Tory Burch and Abercrombie & Fitch stores and across the street from where Chairman Mao’s former home has been turned into a art gallery. He’s here to cut a ribbon, to christen the place, and Miranda Kerr was invited to help. The store is packed with photographers. “They must be here for Miranda, ” he says, bounding off into the crowd with that arm-swinging, sideways stroll he uses to close out his runway shows.
Kors’s origin story in the wonderful world of fashion is about as American as apple pie - or, as is the case for a Jewish boy growing up in suburban New York, Sunday-night Chinese. Their “liberal and out-there” mother, a former model who attempted to try out for your Philadelphia Eagles football team (“at 128 pounds, she wasn’t what they experienced in mind”), was loving but far from doting, allowing her young teen son to take unchaperoned weekend trips into the city with friends. There was not a time when he didn’t care deeply about theater, fashion and the theater of style. According to legend - and nobody loves to mythologize Kors more than he does -- he designed the dress for his mother’s second wedding when he was five years old. At 16, instead of going to his prom, he stopped by “to watch the red carpet arrivals, ” and then headed off to Studio room 54, where he was a screwdriver-drinking regular in “Olivia Newton-John ‘Physical’-era” clothes. A short stint in acting school was followed by a shorter one in the Fashion Institute of Technology; he dropped out after nine months to operate at Lothar’s boutique, whose owner gave him the chance to display his own styles. Soon after, Kors was discovered by Dawn Mello, Bergdorf Goodman’s fashion movie director at the time, who set his career on the right path, and by 1981, at the age of twenty two, his clothing was being sold in stores around the country.
Even as a child, he was drawn to the rush of adventure. Whenever, in grade school, his classmates brought guppies for show and tell, this individual brought European currency. “There I was, like, ‘This is Italian lire. They are French francs. ’ I think I was bitten really young, ” he states, taking in the cacophony of the city from the rooftop patio of his collection at the Peninsula hotel. (He orders “one club sandwich, no egg, having a side of fries, ” before marveling again at the view. )
The actual stamps in his passport have reflected his evolving aesthetic over the years - combining the known and the unexpected to keep his classic designs fresh season right after season. Glamour and aspiration are what fashion is all about for Kors, that has never been one to work through his demons with all-black ensembles. “I consider design the way I think about travel, ” he says. “If it’s completely from left field, it turns out to be the thing you wear once and never once again. But if it’s something you know too well, you’re bored by it. ” Right now, every time he goes somewhere, he checks to see what people are wearing -- and listens to get a sense of what might be missing from their closets. This started in Paris, in 1997, when he was hired by the French fashion house Céline. “It was the first time I’d noticed that women would buy white winter jackets, ” he says. “They didn’t give a hoot. ”
He’s since “played with Capri, Wyoming and Big Sur, ” but not with any sort of specificity. “We will not get back to New York and do sea-foam green and gold cheongsam wraps. We never want to turn it into, ‘Oh, here she comes, wearing the nationwide costume of Zimbabwe! ’ ” While dining out in Sydney a few years back, for example , he noticed a woman wearing a strapless dress over a bathing suit best rather than a bra; his 2011 resort collection captured the undoneness of a trip to the beach, with sarong-like skirts and ombré T-shirts. Last year, on a getaway upon Long Island to design looks for spring 2014, he became transfixed by the way the drapes in his beach house blew in the wind. “That was the moment, ” this individual says. The ensuing designs mixed in bits of airy white linen, but there were absolutely no Norma Desmond nightgowns or robes. “It was just a feeling - absolutely nothing literal. It’s like if you buy something too place-specific for your house, like, ‘What am I going to do with this Balinese prayer table? I live in a one-bedroom within Murray Hill! ’ ”
Even on this short trip to Shanghai, he’s used mental notes of the people he’s seen and the clothes they wear: “natty” males carrying clutches, the prevailing use of yellow and, on one woman, a particularly eye catching pair of diamante heels, “almost like she was playing soccer with a gemstone ball. ”
The thing that separates Kors from his less approachable peers - actually the thing on which he’s built his entire business - is his plan to be liked, and with it the effortless way that he’s made himself right into a likable showman, as engaged at the Met Ball as he is when speaking with his customers. And he in turn can tell a lot about a culture from his general public appearances. In the Tokyo store, people not only waited “perfectly and calmly, ” but also “in single file, ” while his Toronto crowds have always been “friendly. ” He was mobbed at a cosmetics store in Manila by women putting on traditional Philippine garb - “organza sleeves, very Imelda-ish. ” But absolutely nothing quite compares to New York, where his annual Fashion’s Night Out event turns into exactly what he describes as “Gunfight at the O. K. Corral - we had a girl throw her infant to cut a line and meet me. Then there was clearly the sofa-jumper, but that’s anticlimactic compared to the baby-thrower. ” On the street, he has had women remove their shoes to prove to him that they’re putting on his designs. “I’ve even signed asses in New York, ” he states. “I have! It’s the weirdest thing. ”
Later tonight, Kors is going to be driven to the Hongqiao International Airport for the Jet Set Experience, a runway vision with holograms, a fake snowfall and the one-off pieces - from cutaway swimsuits to floor-length fur coats - he’s created for the event. He’ll air-kiss actresses and, when it’s all done, take the stage for a Broadway-style send-off next to the supermodel Rosie Huntington-Whiteley. But that’s not for another few hours. It is his final afternoon in Shanghai, and he’d like to spend it looking at the French Concession, an area lined with colonial homes and peppered along with market stalls. It’ll have to be quick - “drive-by sightseeing, ” as this individual calls it. “I want to take in all the sights and sounds and smells of the city, ” he says. And then out comes that giant grin again. “A small ceramics shopping wouldn’t kill me either. ”
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