(Above: Michael Kors with his mother, Joan, in the photo he posted on his Instagram page announcing her death this week.)
While I was in New Orleans last week, I was thinking a lot about Michael Kors and our time together there for a story about the place for Travel+Leisure magazine, which is no longer online, as well as a big profile I did about him for Vanity Fair when he took over Celine for a time, a story that prominently featured his mother, Joan, who was such an important presence in his life, both as an ever-deepening well of maternal comfort and an overweening champion of his career which was critical to his massive success as a designer. I was shocked and saddened to read on August 8th that Joan had died peacefully in her sleep of heart failure at the age of 84. Michael wrote on his Instagram page: “I am at a total loss over the sudden passing of my beloved mom, Joan Kors. She was my undying supporter, full of strength, smarts and style. My mom was a true one of a kind.”
August 9th was Kors’s 64th birthday.
In memory of Joan and in honor of his bittersweet birthday this year, below are excerpts from the Vanity Fair story and an edited version of my Travel+Leisure piece about Michael and his love of New Orleans.
Before Joan’s introductory section in the Kors Vanity Fair profile, I prefaced it with the end of a conversation in Paris I had with the then president of the Fashion and Leather Goods division of the LVMH Group, Yves Carcelle —“fashion supremo,” as Suzy Menkes referred to him—the man C.E.O. Bernard Arnault trusted to oversee Louis Vuitton, Loewe, Celine, Christian Lacroix, Givenchy, Kenzo, Berluti, Stefanobi, Fendi, Emilio Pucci, and Marc Jacobs International. He was kind enough to meet me in his office and share his terrace and view of Paris with me - not just his views of the fashion business and Michael. Carcelle was at LVMH until his death from kidney cancer at the age of 66 in 2014.
JOAN/VANITY FAIR EXCERPT:
“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. 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.
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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 rearranges 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 acting,” 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.”
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Examples 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 corner 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. 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.
(The boychik with his gorgeous mom.)
EXCERPTS FROM THE TRAVEL+LEISURE NEW ORLEANS STORY:
Michael Kors swings open the door to his cottage at the Hotel Maison de Ville in New Orleans. Located around a muggy French Quarter corner from the main hotel, Cottage One was once the residence of the naturalist John James Audubon. Another kind of American naturalist, playwright Tennessee Williams, found the hotel proper over on Rue Toulouse more conducive to his fevered work. “You can never be too thin or Toulouse,” he once, it is said, drunkenly paraphrased the Duchess of Windsor to the appalled delight of a society matron who was escorting him home to room No. 9, where he completed A Streetcar Named Desire. “Whenever people were making a movie in New Orleans in the old days, these cottages were where they stayed,” Kors says, leading me toward a silver service brimming with the chicory concoction that so deliciously passes for coffee down here. “I like to imagine Liz and Dick running around naked out in the garden, fighting and drinking. I mean, I can’t imagine being in New Orleans and not having a cocktail and being a bit passionate and throwing at least a shoe.”
Michael Kors has had a flair for the dramatic ever since he was a child actor who traveled from his native Long Island into New York City to audition for commercials. It is the same flair he put to use at the age of 19 when he designed and marketed his first collection for Lothar’s, a midtown Manhattan boutique frequented by 1970’s fashion mavens. With flair muted now by maturity and a master’s exquisite eye, Kors has combined a love of luxe materials and historic travel references (St.-Tropez, Sun Valley) to create a company that is well on its way to becoming a billion-dollar brand.
More than most designers,” New York Times fashion critic Cathy Horyn wrote, in her rave of Kors’s 2004 fall line, he “showed how to get the mix of luxury and boho camp right.” It is just such a mixture that attracts the designer to this sybaritic American destination. When some vacationers think of New Orleans, images of Mardi Gras and its Girls Gone Wild debauchery come to mind. For others, the two favored weeks are when Jazz Fest sets up its stages out on the grounds of the city’s horse-racing track. Conventioneers tend to spend their time hopped up on the honky-tonk vibe of Bourbon Street. But for a sophisticated traveler like Kors, New Orleans is at its most enticing when he can simply show up during one of its downtimes (say, that first week of Lent, here in America’s most Catholic of towns) and get into the sultry rhythm of the place by lazily tasting its myriad Creole culinary creations or getting to know its marvelously eccentric characters, who populate the porches as well as the private well-appointed recesses of the French Quarter and the Garden District. Kors has been coming to New Orleans for so long that he is treated like the prodigal tourist by many of the town’s dowagers, its debutantes, its mischief-makers, its merchants.
Kors works overtime to create a personal connection with his devotees. Unlike many of his peers, he actually enjoys presiding over trunk shows, the small gatherings that a designer conjures in selected cities so he can get to know his best customers. Indeed, New Orleans has always been one of Kors’s favorite stops. “When you start traveling to do trunk shows you get sort of jaded,” he admits. “You think, ‘Every city is the same. Everything is homogenized.’ Well, when I came here I realized that was not the case at all.” Kors started out some 20 years ago selling his designs in this city at an old-guard ladies’ specialty store on Canal Street called Kreeger’s. These days, he shows his Michael Kors line at Mimi, an Uptown boutique. “The women in this city are not only warm and funny and ingratiating, but they are also very honest,” he insists. “They’ll say, ‘Honey, you can’t wear that coat in New Orleans. It’s too hot. You’re gonna have a heart attack if you put that on.'”
Kors rhapsodizes about Banana Reily, a client of his who is an heir to the Tabasco fortune and used to drive a yellow Mercedes. “She’s one of a kind,” he says. “Banana is the person who pointed out to me that women down here—contrary to what you might believe—don’t like to wear linen. That goes back to Tennessee Williams. His men always had on linen suits. Women here have always thought of linen as masculine. The ultimate test of femininity and style in a city this humid and hot is to stay crisp and neat.”
Outside, through the cottage’s opened French doors, the hiss from a gardener’s hose accompanies Kors’s conjecture. The hose’s spray haloes the tropical foliage around the pool and lingers in stubborn clouds of steam in the morning light. A transistor radio the gardener keeps in his pocket blares a static-filled tribute to Ray Charles. Charles’s gravelly plaint now hangs in the air along with the hose’s spray. Kors pauses to soak up some Ray.
###
Every trip Kors takes to New Orleans includes a fashion stop at Mimi, where he has the longest retail history of any designer in the 34-year-old store. “I keep coming back to this town because of people like Mimi,” he says. “She gives you the full magnolia. They’re all so damn funny here. You have to learn how to do cocktail party chatter at a very early age in New Orleans.” Mimi hears Kors’s Long Island twang and sweeps in from the beauty salon located in the back, wearing vintage Michael Kors. “I’ve forgotten what Mimi’s last name is, she’s been married so many times,” Kors says as he kisses her on both of her eerily smooth 60-year-old cheeks before attempting an introduction. “It’s Robinson,” Mimi says. “I went back to my original name. I told my third husband I wasn’t changing it again. I’ve got four children by two different husbands and I’m too old to trade up anymore. I was born a Robinson and I’m going to be buried a Robinson.”
Mimi’s friend and shop manager, Rae Matthews, rushes in from the round of morning hospital tests she is required to undergo before her latest bits of plastic surgery can be performed at the end of the week. “Whew! What a relief! I’m not pregnant!” she laughingly tells them before going over the list of procedures she’s scheduled to have: a tiny brow lift and a little liposuction here and there. “It’s just maintenance,” says the 43-year-old Matthews. Mimi adds: “We love our nips and tucks in New Orleans as much as we love our nips at the bourbon bottle.”
Rae and Mimi spend the next hour reminiscing with Kors about their past exploits in New Orleans. “I did one of my trunk shows here at Mimi the day that Audrey Hepburn died. It was all anyone talked about. They kept saying, ‘But she needed to eat mo-ah,'” Kors says, approximating that diphthongal sway of a Southern belle’s belligerent sweetness. “Living in New Orleans, even Audrey would have been challenged to stay that chic and thin, drinking Sazeracs and eating rémoulade all the time.”
###
Banana Reily, the New Orleans dowager to whom Kors is most devoted, is wearing a toffee-colored taffeta shell jacket first seen in Kors’s collection 16 years ago. Her hair is styled in a golden pageboy, and she has attached a highly jeweled David Webb frog brooch to the front of her equally golden choker, resulting in an ornate necklace of her own design. The 77-year-old Banana looks like Bette Davis, if Davis had been decidedly taller and a glamorous fashion model instead of a glowering diva of the soundstage. Banana enters Galatoire’s this evening as if the restaurant were in fact her own personal runway. Galatoire’s—a high-society favorite, though it possesses a distinctly egalitarian flavor—has been the city’s culinary crown jewel since it first opened in 1905. Banana is with her oilman husband, Chuck, an 83-year-old decked out in a white linen suit and a custom-tailored shirt and tie. Heads turn at every table as the couple joins Kors and his other guests, Mimi and Rae.
In a town where the social order is constantly pecked at, Banana and Chuck have sat atop the heap for decades now. “I have a long history here at this place—longer even than I have with Chuck,” Banana says as they take their seats. “And we’ve been married for fifty-seven years.”
“Yeah, but the fun started fifty-eight years ago,” Chuck says, winking at his beautiful wife, who overlooks this bit of nuanced ribaldry with a practiced wave of her hand.
“Banana, do you know a man named Tommy Ellis?” asks Kors. “I met him this afternoon at Meyer the Hatter.”
“Oh, Lord,” Banana exclaims as Chuck orders the first of many Sazeracs for both of them. “I grew up dancing with Tommy Ellis. He was a wonderful dancer. The only man who could dance better than Tommy was Chuck, so he’s the one who got me.”
“Chuck’s still the best dancer in town,” Mimi chimes in as Kors compliments the old gentleman on his white linen suit.
“He wanted to wear his seersucker,” says Banana dismissively. “But I told him he couldn’t wear seersucker after seven-thirty. It’s just not done.”
Chuck ignores his wife and orders a round of appetizers for the table: shrimp rémoulade, crabmeat maison, oysters enbrochette, fried eggplant, and soufflé potatoes. The waiters treat him with the deference that a longtime customer commands. People joke that Chuck has his secretary stand at the window in his nearby office with a pair of binoculars during lunch hour in order to tell him when the line to get into the restaurant has shortened enough so it won’t look bad when he strolls right in. Galatoire’s is known for not taking reservations, though it now does in its newly refurbished upstairs room. Locals, however, prefer to stay on the raucous first floor.
“You know how these soufflé potatoes got invented?” Chuck asks, showing off his Galatoire’s expertise. “Napoleon was out in the field and told his chef he’d be back at six o’clock, but he didn’t make it back till eight. The chef had to figure out something to do with the potatoes he’d already made, so he threw ’em in the skillet again and they puffed up in the hot grease.”
“Only in New Orleans did Napoleon reinvent the potato,” Kors says.
“It wasn’t Napoleon. It was his French chef,” Banana says. “Get the story right.”
And what’s the right story on how Banana got such an interesting name?”My real name is Anne. But when I was three years old I was a tall, skinny little thing and my hair was yal-la,” she says. “Been called Banana ever since.”
“Tell you what, too: I slipped on her peel the first time I met her,” says the ever-winking Chuck.
“I have a sister named Puddy,” says Banana, as the potatoes and fried eggplant arrive. The Reilys instruct Kors on how best to eat them: first they spoon a bit of béarnaise sauce over them, then sprinkle powdered sugar atop that, a strangely delicious combination. “You can’t be in New Orleans and not gain five pounds,” Kors says. “It’s illegal. It’s against the law to leave this town without gaining weight.”
Kors and Banana begin to recall the days when he’d come down to New Orleans to visit Kreeger’s. “They said, ‘One of our best customers is about to come in, and she’s honestly one of the few women in town who can understand your clothes,'” Kors says. “It was Banana. She walked in, took one look, and said, ‘I’ll take the whole rack.'”
“And from that day onward I haven’t worn anything but Michael Kors,” Banana says. “That’s been twenty years. Chuck and Michael—they are the two monogamous relationships in my life.”
By the time our main courses arrive, Galatoire’s has become a rollicking, table-hopping party. “You should be here for lunch on Fridays,” the waiter whispers over the din as he serves me my oysters Rockefeller. “Anything can happen on Fridays. And I do mean anything,” he says, his voice full of sexual innuendo. Just then, a buxom Southern female hurtles toward the designer and rubs his face in her décolletage. “I’m wearing your perfume!” she exclaims. “Smell me, Michael! Smell me!”
Kors comes up for air and Banana, rescuing him, says that he must meet a friend of hers over in another, much quieter corner of Galatoire’s: Ella Brennan, the matriarch of the famed restaurant clan, who is at a table filled with several other Brennan women.
“You can see where we come to get good food,” says the gracious Miss Ella. “I read about you all the time,” she tells Kors. “You’re doin’ good, boy.”
“You’re not doing so bad yourself,” Kors tells her. “That was like finding Sirio Maccioni eating at Da Silvano,” Kors says, naming Le Cirque’s owner and the downtown New York restaurant favored by pasta-loving powerbrokers, as he escorts Banana back to her seat.
“I prefer the 21 Club myself—particularly if I’m in the mood for steak tartare,” says Banana, who grimaces good-naturedly as the waiters clink several water glasses to get the attention of everyone in the room. “Oh, God,” she groans. “That means they’re going to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to some poor soul this evening.”
“The lovely Sophie is celebrating her ninth birthday!” announces the overly dramatic waiter. Banana quickly melts when she sees the blushing child at the next table. “Oh, how precious,” she says, and decides to sing louder than anybody else tonight. The room erupts in applause as Sophie blows out the candles on her birthday cake.
“She’s fabulous,” Kors pronounces. “But you know what I say?If she weren’t pretty, we wouldn’t sing as well.”
###
After dinner, Kors insists the group head around the corner to the Bombay Club for a French Quarter nightcap. Banana and Chuck politely excuse themselves and head home, though Mimi and Rae are game for one more martini. “The last time I was here, I watched a woman who was so drunk she threw up in her purse in the middle of telling a story,” Kors recalls as he slides into a booth next to the piano player. “She did not miss a beat. She opened it up. Threw up. And kept right on talking. Didn’t even go to the bathroom to freshen up. She wasn’t a floozy, either. Quite stylish. My jaw dropped—and it takes a lot to make my jaw drop.”
“That was the night I had been to a party at the Reynoirs’ house,” Kors says, citing another Garden District society name. “Gus Reynoir—he was a man for whom the word burly was invented—got a bunch of us to come to the Bombay Club. He even brought the piano player from his party. The poor guy who was playing here didn’t know what to think. Gus went up to him and said, ‘You finished for the night yet?’ The guy shook his head no. Gus plopped down five one-hundred-dollar bills on the piano and said, ‘You’re finished now. Get up. I brought my own.’ Sure enough, Gus’s piano player took over. Only in New Orleans do you bring your own piano player to a piano bar. People in this city really know how to party.”
Kors settles into the leather booth. Mimi and Rae put their heads on his stylish shoulders. Tonight, the piano player gets to keep his gig.
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