Michael Kors

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An Early Start and a Short Formal Education

Kors' affinity for fashion started when he was very young, and his mother thought it might have been caused in part by his exposure to the apparel industry through her modeling career. Exposure is the key mechanism: a child who sees clothing work at home encounters garments, fittings and presentation as ordinary life rather than as a distant glamour. The clearest early evidence is concrete — at the age of five, he redesigned his mother's wedding dress for her second marriage. Redesigning a real dress for a real occasion is a practical act, not a sketchbook exercise, and it shows the instinct operating on an actual garment. His formal training was brief by comparison. In 1977 he enrolled at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City, dropped out after only nine months, and took a job at a boutique called Lothar's across from Bergdorf Goodman on 57th Street in Midtown Manhattan. Retail work across from a great department store placed him where luxury clothing was sold and worn, and four years later, in 1981, he launched his Michael Kors women's label at Bergdorf Goodman itself.

Licensing, Collapse, and Recovery

In 1990 the company launched KORS Michael Kors as a licensee. Licensing means another firm produces and sells a line under the designer's name, which expands reach quickly but leaves the designer dependent on the partner's survival. That dependence became clear in 1993, when a Chapter 11 filing caused by the closure of the licensing partner forced Kors to put the KORS line on hold. The cause matters: the setback came from the partner's closure, not from a failure of the designs to sell. He got back on his feet by 1997 and launched a lower priced line, a recovery strategy that widened the customer base for his own name. In the same year he was named the first women's ready-to-wear designer for the French house Celine, so 1997 marks both a personal relaunch and a major external appointment arriving together.

Celine, Menswear, and a Full Product Range

At Celine, Kors turned the fashion house around with successful accessories and a critically acclaimed ready-to-wear line. A turnaround means an established house that had lost momentum regained it under new creative direction, and the two engines named are accessories and ready-to-wear — the products that sell in volume alongside the clothes that win critical attention. He left Celine in October 2003 to concentrate on his own brand, ending a dual career in which he had run an American label while directing a French house. Kors launched his menswear line in 2002, while still at Celine, extending his own name beyond womenswear. The company he founded now sells men's and women's ready-to-wear, accessories, watches, jewelry, footwear and fragrance — a sportswear designer's name carried across nearly every category a customer wears or uses, which is the commercial shape of American sportswear design at full scale.

The sequence of Kors' career also shows how the same skills operate at very different scales. Redesigning a dress at five, selling at Lothar's, launching a label at Bergdorf Goodman, rescuing his own company after a licensing collapse, and turning around Celine all depend on judging what women want to wear and how it should be made and sold. Sportswear, his stated field, rewards exactly that judgement, because it is clothing bought for daily life and repeated wear rather than for a single ceremony. His recovery after 1993 is therefore as much a part of the definition as the Celine appointment: the first proves a designer can survive the failure of a business partner, and the second proves the same designer could direct a French house while rebuilding his own name at a lower price level.