New York fashion week: Michael Kors takes wrong turn on safari style

Source From: http://www.guardian.co.uk/fashion/2011/sep/14/ny-fashion-week-michael-kors

In many ways the designer Michael Kors is the 21st-century American equivalent of Gianni Versace in the 1980s.

Like that most "molto sexy" of Italian designers, Kors's vision of the ideal woman is impossibly Amazonian, impossibly wealthy, and so impossibly retrograde that all one can really do is park one's feminist beliefs at the door and sit back and let him claim, once again, that a bathing suit is not a bathing suit unless it's cinched with a python belt, topped with python straps and finished off with some stilettos or – for spring/summer 2012 – flat gladiator sandals that strap all the way up one's personal trainer-toned calves. In the world of Michael Kors, a £15 bikini from asos.com simply does not exist.

Also like Versace, while Kors may aim very firmly at the Upper East Side crowd (Kors, one suspects, does not see the word "socialite" as a diss but as a job title), he completely understands the importance of mass appeal. Although less well known outside the US – his utterly American luxe sportswear style appeals more to those who live between New York and California – he is a celebrity in his own country thanks to his high profile and vaguely self-parodic appearances as a judge on the TV show Project Runway. Of all the American designers, Kors is perhaps the one who best knows how to play the game.

Which made Wednesday's show something of a surprise. Kors has always been one of the few designers who thinks about his customer first as opposed to what would look edgy and credibility-enhancing in a fashion shoot.

In fashion parlance, he is a commercial designer as opposed to an editorial one. But Wednesday's show, which took the eternally popular and eternally misguided theme of "safari", looked like something designed solely for a magazine fashion shoot in Africa, probably starring Angelina Jolie lounging decorously on a designer handbag while gazing soulfully at some noble tribesmen.

It's hard to imagine that even Kors's devoted and monied fans would spend triple figures on tie-dyed baggy trousers, animal print kaftans and other such gap year-esque fare.

This show was an abject lesson in the foolishness of imposing a "theme" on one's collection because, when Kors allowed himself to go out of Africa, the clothes were great: a pair of slouchy trousers fitted perfectly around the bum but bagged elegantly around the legs, the long evening gowns at the end will be perfect for Jolie to wear to the Oscars. The rest was a little too Lonely Planet, which some of us left behind a decade ago.