Fashion Week: Michael Kors’ Runway
Michael Kors Image by Getty Images
Michael Kors Image by Getty Images
The designer was born in Long Island, N.Y. to Joan Hamburger, a Jewish former model, and her husband Karl Anderson, a college student. His mother remarried when he was five and the designer later changed his name to Michael David Kors. Kors now lives in New York City and married his longtime boyfriend in August of last year.
Kors started his label in 1981 when he was fresh out of the Fashion Institute of Technology, and started selling his clothing at Bergdorf Goodman and Saks immediately. Women were attracted to his modern takes on classics and pieces that made them look at once classy and hip. Now, decades later, he has flagship stores around the country, and beauty, eyewear, fragrances, home, handbags, jeans, shoes and underwear lines. And of course, he has mega celebrity factor from his role as a judge on Project Runway, where his Jewish roots sometimes show. According to a New York Times profile he once told a young designer, “One of my aunts might have worn that dress. It’s, like, a good bar mitzvah moment.”
Before today’s show Kor’s tweeted the gist of his newest collection: “Graphic stripes, bold shades, and geometric glamour.” Two models wore black dresses with small triangle shapes in the back. A male model wore a green and black striped sweater with matching green pants. One model looked drop-dead gorgeous in a bright, red backless dress with a shiny but simple matching belt around her waist. In the finale models walked the runway according to the colors they were wearing, a move that made one Twitter user so excited she exclaimed via tweet, “OMG.. his ending is genius. Going by color, such a smart move.”
All, in all, his look was simple, preppy, but very fresh: The perfect all-American combo.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
