If the MoMA Sculpture Garden location didn’t spell it out, Nico’s velvet voice on ‘Sunday Morning’ over the loudspeakers did. It’s a mod, mod world for Michael Kors this season. Back in his showroom, black-and-white pics of Edie Sedgwick and Nico mingled with colourful Calder sculptures, Matisse cutouts, and a graphic canvas by Carmen Herrera. A shot of Lever House, photographed from the middle of Park Avenue, was also in the mix.
A Paris trip to see the Alexander Calder show and a Los Angeles jaunt for LACMA, along with a move-in at a new house, had Kors thinking along modernist lines, he explained. “Plus, I’m a hot weather baby, so when the weather gets warm,” he said, “I want to have something that pops.”
These midcentury references have been replayed over and over since Edie and Nico’s salad days, but Kors kept his interpretation feeling crisp and fresh. Sharp, often asymmetrical cuts predominated—the hems of dresses zig-zagged left to right or were shorter front to back or trailed streamers from the side seams. And the colour palette was a zippy mix of red, yellow, green, and blue against a backdrop of white and black. The overall impression was clean and streamlined, but Kors made room for ornament, too. Brushstroke paintings were reproduced in both print and raw-edged fabric embroideries, and Matisse’s curvy cutouts provided the outline for a sequinned cocktail dress.
Accessories were integral to the composition: layered leather pendants, bags with metal handles influenced by Marcel Breuer’s tubular steel chairs, bug-eye frames, and the long, vestigial and now suddenly ubiquitous scarf all got play, not to mention white go-go boots. A sneak peek at MoMA’s 2027 schedule reveals an exhibition devoted to the modern Dutch master Piet Mondrian titled “Mondrian Boogie Woogie.” Kors’s clients will know exactly what to wear.
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