KORS, OF COURSE

After joining the fashion galaxy at the French luxury empire LVMH, Michael Kors is designing three labels— including the once stodgy Céline—opening a flagship boutique on Madison Avenue, licensing his name, and launching a signature fragrance. As a fresh breed of style-setting young socialite goes for Kors's sexy, grown-up sportswear. KEVIN SESSUMS profiles the new American in Paris, who at age five designed his mother's second-wedding dress and now is hoping to fill the shoes of retired couture giant Bill Blass

“Michael has a feeling for a woman who wants to be elegant without being outrageous," says Yves Carcelle.

Welcome to Paris! Same show! Different station!” fashion designer Michael Kors exclaims in his nasal Long Island twang as he throws open the door to the atelier of the French company Celine, situated above the Courreges boutique at 40 Rue Francois-1 er in Paris’s Eighth Arrondissement. An assortment of assistants scurry about and provide a steady hum of whispered French beneath his ... well, let’s call it the Kors discourse, a running commentary which consists of his famed wit and pop-cultural references Fired off between gulps of fetched designer water. Kors, the American sportswear creator recruited by luxury-goods conglomerate LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton to remake its stodgy Celine house three years ago, is wearing his trademark khaki pants, black cashmere crewneck, and blindingly white sneakers. His blond hair is clipped quite close to the scalp. “I said, ‘Cut it like Steve McQueen,’ but I ended up looking like Mitzi Gaynor,” he told me two weeks earlier in New rk, while he was overseeing the fall 2000 show for his own, eponymous collection, as well as the presentation of the Kors bridge line, his company’s less expensive label. (New York will always be home to Kors. In Paris he stays in a suite at the Hotel Lancaster.) Moving the Celine atelier to 23-25 Rue du Pont-Neuf, he is also opening a flagship Michael Kors boutique on Madison Avenue at 76th Street in Manhattan this month, working on an assortment of licenses, and preparing to launch a signature fragrance.

“I’m not joking—this really is just a different station,” he tells me on that damp February evening as he puts the final touches on Celine’s fall collection. “We have our feathers and our jewels and fur, fur, fur! Oh! We mustn’t forget the most important people in the room,” he says, pointing at three women poring over pages full of numbers. “These are the lovely executives who come up with our lovely prices. Look at this croc boot,” he cries, holding up a piece of exquisite workmanship almost as long as his arm. “This’ll cost as much as the gross national product of Chad.”

A gift basket from Hediard is delivered as Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bundchen, with her pet Yorkie, Vida, comes striding into the atelier for her Final Fitting. “From Sigourney,” Kors warbles, detaching the card from the basket as the whole room swoons at the drop of a name. Bundchen checks out the goodies in the basket. “Mmmm, I like butter cookies,” she says, stuffing a few in her mouth as she strips off her T-shirt and jeans, ready to try on a crystal-encrusted leopard jersey dress, which will be the grand Finale—outFit No. 63—of the Celine show.

Wearing only the skimpiest panties and perilously high heels, Bundchen drapes an arm about her breasts as she waits for an assistant to bring her the Kors crystal creation. She alone of all the models who have traipsed through the atelier covers her breasts. This may be for one simple reason: she alone has them. “Some of these models are too skinny,” says Kors. “But they are supported all day long by people telling them how fabulous they look. ‘Oh, look! A tibia bone is poking through her coat! Fabulous!’ Well, if you can see a tibia bone through a coat, I think there’s a problem.”

Gisele, sparkling now in the dress, bends down to pick up Vida. She gestures with the silky little canine. “Vida likes the glamorous life.”

“Walk for me,” Kors instructs her.

Gisele drops the dog on a dime. Pivoting toward a wall of mirrors, she advances toward her own beauty. “I want this dress!” she implores. “Michael, give it to me!”

“Honey, that dress costs as much as a car,” he tells her. “You’re wearing a Mercedes.”

“I am a Mercedes,” Gisele informs him.

The fashion world always needs an “It boy.” Calvin Klein, Perry Ellis, Isaac Mizrahi, Tom Ford—they’ve all filled the bill at one time or another. The latest is Michael Kors, though at 40 he is certainly no boy. Kors had been designing sportswear for 18 years when he was named the 1999 Womenswear Designer of the Year by the Council of Fashion Designers of America. “I’m the oldest young designer,” he says, sitting in his workspace at 550 Seventh Avenue, the building that has housed the back-office showrooms of many of America’s most successful designers. Other current tenants include Ralph Lauren, Donna Karan, Oscar de la Renta, and Bill Blass. “Fashion is like everything else—it goes in cycles,” he continues, keeping an eye on an outfit being assembled on a fit model by his Kors design director, Alex Siegel, who is wearing an army fatigue shirt and brown corduroys held up by a beat-up belt with a Barcelona ’92 U.S.A. Shooting Team buckle. She takes a black fox stole from the model and hangs it around her fatigues.

“Right now the idea of sporty luxury has really taken hold,” says Kors, rolling his eyes at Siegel’s accessorizing flair. “It’s sort of, like, if you wanted to buy an adhesive strip you’d go to Band-Aid. Suddenly it makes sense to come to me. Especially lately, with clothes, what’s normal is what’s interesting. I mean, what are you going to do? Send a girl down the runway with a hatchet in the side of her head? It’s gotten that insane lately. ‘Aahh! A hatchet hat!’ ... But let’s be realistic. It always boils down to who’s stylish. Historically, it’s always the person. Katharine Hepburn could wear a tablecloth and wineglass earrings and you’d be like, ‘Where can I get those wineglass earrings?’ Well, maybe you could get them at Dior. Maybe John’s made them already,” he says, referring to Christian Dior’s designer, John Galliano, another “It boy” LVMH has imported to its company.

“I don’t know, Alex,” Kors says, springing from his seat and heading toward the racks to choose another blouse for the model. “That outfit looks a little ‘dressed in the dark’ to me,” he says, using his favorite wisecrack, a derogatory term he attributes to an early Bernadine Morris review of his work in The New York Times. He pulls out a blouse of ivory silk charmeuse and hands it to the model. “That’s better,” he says after she puts it on. He taps her finger, stopping her from buttoning the blouse’s top two buttons, then arranges a strand of pearls on her exposed flesh. Next he places a herringbone cashmere overcoat over her shoulders so precisely that it appears to have been thrown there with the habitual ease of an East Side lady who lunches. “This is so Hope Lange in The Best of Everything,” says Kors. “Ever seen that?” Alex shakes her head no. “Joan Crawford and Hope Lange,” he rattles on. “Rona Jaffe. A good one. This is so Hope: her first expensive suit.”

Now that Bill Blass has retired, Kors is being touted as the designer best situated to carry on Blass’s legacy with a new generation of expensively suited socialites. “He’s a good egg, and he works hard,” says Blaine Trump, wearing a blue leather Celine jacket, as she settles into her front-row s at the Michael Kors fall show in Bryant Park. “His clot are very sensual,” she says above the din. “That has to with his use of luxurious fabrics.” A photographer steps on foot. “He works in something like 12-ply cashmere,” she s; grimacing.

Aerin Lauder, the granddaughter of Estee and an executive at her family’s cosmetics empire, has also been seated in the front row. If any member of this new breed of socialite can be considered Kors’s favorite customer, it is Aerin—along with her sister, Jane. She is wearing a tobaccocolored leather Gucci suit.

“Feeling butch today?” she’s asked. “Actually, not at all,” she says as she kisses Samantha Boardman and Alexandra von Furstenberg hello. “Just very mature. That’s what’s so wonderful about Michael’s clothes. They’re grown-up as well as sexy.”

That’s a perfect mid-kiss description of what Blass has been up to for the past 40 years. Kors good-naturedly mimics the 78-year-old legend as he relates a conversation he had with him last year. “He goes, ‘When I was in Paris, it was the 50s, and I was at the Ritz having a drink,’” he begins, attempting to capture Blass’s blase growl. “‘All the French dames were wearing that Dior “New Look.” They all looked like birthday cakes. C. Z. Guest and Gloria Vanderbilt walked into the Ritz to have a drink, too. They had twinsets and gray flannels on. They blew every other dame in the room out of the water!’ I still can’t believe I have a company in the same building as Bill Blass. The first time I walked past this building I was just starting at F.I.T. [the Fashion Institute of Technology]. Gloria Guinness was getting out of her car. This was when she was really sick. It was all so glamorous. There was snow on the ground. And the driver carried her over the snowbank so she could come into 550 and shop. I was 19 years old. That image stuck in my head forever—Gloria being carried over the embankment by her chauffeur.”

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61% /Tichael is a smart enough guy that one IVJ. would have thought he would have steered clear of such obvious Bill Blass references—the pinstripes, the pearls, the red lips, the fedoras, even the Gershwin music,” says Cathy Horyn of the fall 2000 Kors show as she stands outside the Yves Saint Laurent boutique on Rue du Faubourg StHonore during Paris’s ready-to-wear week. Horyn, the latest scribe to take over Bemadine Morris’s beat at The New York Times, is the business’s most astute critic. “Sometimes Michael’s sense of timing is not great. This glam thing is a perilous theme for designers right now, because it can become silly very quickly. But Michael is someone who delivers. He is someone who understands sportswear and how to make it sexy without it being Gucci. Gucci is more jetset, whereas Celine is more bourgeois. They just needed to tart it up a bit.”

The French bourgeoisie became enchanted with the Celine label in 1945, when Richard Vipiana opened a boutique specializing in children’s shoes and named it for his beloved spouse. By the late 1950s, the couple had expanded into leather goods and accessories, and by 1969, Celine Vipiana was designing ready-to-wear. By the 80s, the company’s image had gotten so staid that it became a standard joke to say that kept women shopped there in order to look like jilted wives.

Joan Juliet Buck, the American editor in chief of French Vogue, has a unique perspective on Kors’s arrival in Paris. “Up until that first girl walked out with her shortsleeved beige turtleneck with the fur doughnut and the straight skirt, they were thinking, That fucking American,” says Buck, sitting behind her massive desk at the Vogue offices, a few doors down from the Saint Laurent boutique. She bums a cigarette from her secretary. “Then they saw the clothes— which were everything they were aspiring to—and he wasn’t American anymore. You’re an American until you do something they want,” she says.

“I’ve always liked to see an American boy doing French luxe,” says Bernadine Morris. “If you extrapolate backwards, his early clothes would be like the Gap. This French connection has given him a boost. There’s more confidence now. American designers have always had an inferiority complex, although you can’t tell it by talking to them.”

“In the early days, Michael was a bit too American for Europe,” says Londoner Joan Burstein, the owner of Browns, the famous British fashion emporium, who is seated next to Celine Vipiana herself at Kors’s Celine show in the Carrousel du Louvre. “He’s changed the whole concept of Celine,” whispers Burstein, careful not to let the company’s legendary namesake eavesdrop on her opinion. “He’s made it very modern, but not offensive in any way. Everything he puts on a runway is wearable: that’s his great strength.” (“He is pointed in the right direction,” Madame Vipiana is later heard to remark hastily to a friend as she scurries up her row, turning heads and upstaging Kors before he can finish his runway bow.)

“Michael has the great ability to get along not only with the young socialites, who are his clients, but also with the Yves Carcelles of this world,” says Cathy Horyn, referring to the president of the Fashion and Leather Goods division of the LVMH Group—“fashion supremo,” as the Herald Tribune’s Suzy Menkes refers to him—the man C.E.O. Bernard Arnault trusts to oversee Louis Vuitton, Loewe, Celine, Christian Lacroix, Givenchy, Kenzo, Berluti, Stefanobi, Fendi, Emilio Pucci, and Marc Jacobs International.

'This is one of the most beautiful views of Paris,” says Yves Carcelle, inviting me out onto his Right Bank terrace. After watching the sun set over the Seine, he steps back into his office at LVMH headquarters, takes off his suit jacket, and settles onto a sofa, ready for a bit of conversation.

Carcelle has the generic good looks of an American game-show host. He’d be the ideal replacement for Regis Philbin in a Parisian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire—which could have been the company’s pitch in going after the many designers brought in over the past couple of years. Thirty-seven-year-old Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton. Narciso Rodriguez, 35, at Loewe. Alexander McQueen, 31, at Givenchy. Men’swear designer Hedi Slimane, 32, and Galliano, 39, at Dior. And Kors at Celine. Though Nan Legeai, who was then Celine’s president—the current president is JeanMarc Loubier—was instrumental in hiring Kors, one of the first orders of business for Carcelle when Arnault increased his duties from running Vuitton to overseeing the entire LVMH fashion empire was to sign Kors to an even longer contract and take a onethird stake in the Michael Kors operation in America. (Privately held, the other two thirds of Michael Kors, L.L.C., are owned in equal parts by Kors and his business partner, C.E.O. John Orchulli.)

This all signals quite a turnaround for Kors’s company, which filed a Chapter 11 petition back in 1993 because of a cash-flow problem resulting from licensing agreements that went awry. Liabilities totaled $1.4 million, including $1.3 million in unsecured debt. Assets were listed at $227,000. By 1999, however, it was reported that the company’s wholesale receipts had climbed back up to more than $30 million.

“For me, the only way to run a group of companies is that each one have its own positioning, its own value,” says Carcelle. “We thought that Michael was the perfect fit for Celine.”

“Which is what, exactly?,” I ask.

“Trying to make it your version of Gucci?”

“Not necessarily. Gucci has its own place in the market, which is ... nice. But Michael has a feeling for a woman who wants to be elegant without being outrageous.”

Carcelle is obviously being diplomatic, a necessary managerial talent in a business steeped in artistic temperament. He continues in the same vein. “Us—the suits, as they call us, which is a good expression for us, though we must remember they are the ones who make the suits—many of us have ended up in this industry because we are interested in creativity and the artistic side of life. But at some point you have to realize you are more of a manager than a creator. What is fascinating is to have this relationship with each other and try to, what I call, rationalize the irrational. You have to try to translate to the creative people the reality of economics. ... The designer is responsible for what he puts on the runway. As the manager, we don’t interfere at that point. But then we do the debriefing the next day, and it is important to tell the truth, apart from the evening before, when everybody is happy simply because it is finished. It is important to make a clear debriefing: here it’s not good for the image; here it was great for the price, but it won’t work commercially. They must understand what was good and what was bad.”

“Sounds rather parental. Unlike some of the enfants terribles you’ve hired at LVMH, Michael is more like the good son.”

“The good son—that’s a good description,” says Carcelle.

Michael Kors was born Karl Anderson Jr. in Merrick, Long Island, but he was allowed to change his name after his parents divorced when he was two and his mother married Bill Kors three years later. “When I got married again, he designed my wedding dress and clothes for the whole wedding party,” says Joan Kors over drinks in the bar at the Algonquin Hotel in New York the day after the fall Michael Kors show, her husky voice the exact low-pitched growl her son passed off as a Bill Blass imitation a few days earlier. She lights a cigarette, and on her hand glisten the diamonds of her dead mother’s wedding rings. Now single, the thrice-married Kors lives in Beverly Hills. An ex-model and accomplished athlete, the woman is still a stunner. Ordering another cocktail, she re-arranges the neck of the lox-colored cashmere turtleneck she is wearing, the latest gift from her son.

“Michael sketched out his wedding ideas, and we pretty much followed them,” she recalls. “I don’t know how to explain it, but we really did trust a five-year-old to tell us how to look. Pale turquoise and blush pink_Soon, though, he was studying act-

ing,” she says, running down the list of his commercials: Lucky Charms cereal, Charmin paper towels, freeze-dried apple chips. By the time he was 10, “Chuckles,” as he was known, was allowed to travel to Greenwich Village by himself and take acting classes at the Herbert Berghof Studio.

“At about that same time, he started making T-shirts with astrological signs on them. He’d do them in glitter. He had a shop in our basement called the Iron Butterfly and would take orders from all his friends.... I could not get him to go out and play. To punish him, I’d make him go ride his bike. He had training wheels until he was 12.” She lights another cigarette. “I was a big athlete, but this was back in the era when athletes smoked. We used to sit in the dugout and light up,” she says, remembering her softball days—she played until she was 50—when Chuckles was forced to be the team’s batboy. “I was the first woman ever to try out for the N.F.L. I liked all sports, but I fell in love with football. I played wide receiver. In the early 70s, I played with a farm team of the New York Giants. Michael promised me that someday, when he opened his own business, he would make me a sequined football jersey. But when I asked him to, he turned me down, because he said Mr. Blass had done that a long time ago. When I was pregnant, I would tell everybody that I was going to have a son and he was going to play football in the N.F.L. because I couldn’t. But I discovered when he was about two years old and I rolled a big beach ball to him and he couldn’t catch that ... well, I knew that was never going to happen.”

(^amples of the Kors discourse:

If I were a girl, there is not a chance in hell there would be less than eight carats on my hand. When I was growing up on Long Island, it was always about the women with rings ringing the deli bell, going, “I need my pastrami! Where’s the guy?” I was a little boy looking up at those rings. A ring-encrusted hand on a deli-counter bell to me is like Proust and his madeleines.

The smartest thing to do is to look old when you’re young. You will always then look the same. When you really are old, everyone will say, “God, she’s always looked so young!” Two examples: Jack Nicholson and Babe Paley.

Trunk-show town? New Orleans. You can always find a socialite there wearing a Balenciaga with a stain on it.

Ellin Saltzman—years ago, when she was at Saks—came in to see me with a cashmere dress on. It was August! I said, “Aren’t you roasting?” She said, “Cashmere is seasonless.” To me, nothing is more fabulous than women who don’t have to deal with the elements.

Pleated pants are never sexy.

You know who rocks my planet? Diane Von Furstenberg. She’s one of those tough-sexy women. She’ll be 80 and still be tough-sexy. And she has fabulous legs. Put the right pair of shoes on her and it’s like having great sex.

I stayed home from work the day Shari Lewis died.

Backstage at the Carrousel du Louvre before the Celine fall show, model Frankie Rayder plops down in the comer with models Maggie Rizer and Karen Elson. “I was talking to Joan [Kors],” she tells them. “You know what she and Michael did last night? They went to Planet Hollywood and had nachos and cheeseburgers. Isn’t that the best?” The three models nibble on McDonald’s French fries and a macaroon or two from Laduree. Eleven video crews are lining up to get a word with Kors. Out in front, a phalanx of photographers surges around Bernard Arnault and Yves Carcelle, then moves on to Catherine Deneuve’s daughter, Chiara Mastroianni, the actress’s love child with actor Marcello Mastroianni, who happily poses with big-jawed jet-setter Estelle Hallyday, the daughter-in-law of Johnny Hallyday, the Parisian singer. Carcelle works the crowd a bit. Arnault sits, sphinxlike, his rakish face looking neither right nor left.

“It’s all a fucking circus,” says Rayder. After the show, the circus moves on to the Ritz Club, in the basement at the back of the Hotel Ritz, where Celine is throwing a celebratory party for Kors and his staff. By midnight the place has pretty much cleared of revelers, but Estelle Hallyday and her gangly claque are calling for one more round of drinks.

“Why have the French welcomed Kors with such open arms?,” I ask Hallyday. “Is it because you are a friendly people?”

“No. Not really,” she replies. “Sometimes we are not. We are very ... aahh ... Frenchy. We love the French. But we saw his talent,” she says, shrugging. “We recognized it.”

Several feet away from her are Kors, his mother, a few close friends who flew over for the show, and members of his staff. He is without a boyfriend right now, so this is his whole world. Like a family gathered around a hearth, they huddle in front of a television screen and watch a video of his Celine show. Kors is at his mother’s knee, his head resting next to her lap. His grandmother’s diamonds catch the television’s glow. He looks up at the ring-encrusted hand. From the disco sound system, Donna Summer sings “She Works Hard for the Money,” but judging by the look of wonder on the blond boychik’s face, all he is possibly hearing is that short refrain from his Long Island past: “I need my pastrami! Where’s the guy?” Joan Kors strokes his head. “She works hard for it, honey,” Summer sings.