Michael with his mother, Joan Kors

 
  Models in Kors’s Fall 2011 show

The actress Rene Russo believes she may know an equally essential secret to Kors’s success. “It seems to me that Michael is a naturally happy guy; he certainly exudes that,” she says. “He also always strikes me as a very kind person, and that he enjoys his life, and all of that really shows in his clothes.”

In the 1980s, Russo was a young model, freshly transplanted from her native Burbank, California, to New York, when she met Kors, a kid from Long Island with a cherubic face and untamed curly hair. “I didn’t know anything about the business at all, and I would go to these offices with my portfolio, and people were so dismissive of me,” Russo remembers. “Then one day, I went up to Michael’s studio, and he walked in like sunshine. He was so young himself, and I don’t know if he could feel that I was awkward or insecure, but he really put me at ease, and I loved him for that.”

She has worn his clothes consistently on red carpets through the years, but their most famous collaboration came when she wore pieces from his collection in 1999’s The Thomas Crown Affair, a film that has attained something of a cult status among fashion lovers for the styling of Russo’s character. “I’ve got a few of those pieces, and I still wear them because they’re just as amazing today as they were then,” she says. “There’s a beautiful black sheath, a coat and a few of the turtlenecks. Everything he did was so perfect for the character; she needed to be strong and all business, but also beautiful and sexy, and the clothes really helped to make that statement. I don’t know any other movie I’ve done in which the clothes defined the character the way Michael’s did.”

And the Stars Came Out
Russo was among the star-studded lineup sitting front row at that Fall show, an A-list roster that included Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, Anjelica Huston, Debra Messing, Angie Harmon, Patti Hansen, Emma Roberts and Bette Midler, who had a plan of her own for the designer. “The show day was full of surprises, and normally I’m not good with surprises—for my 30th birthday, I redid the guest list for my surprise party,” Kors says. “All the celebrities normally come backstage before a show starts; you get a second to catch up a little, and they try to take a sneak peek at the racks before the show. But Bette had not arrived, and she’s always unbelievably on time. Then I heard she was there, but everyone said, ‘No, you can’t say hello yet, just wait here.’ I asked why, and I was told, ‘Just wait—you don’t have to know everything.’”

When he finally was allowed to greet Midler, she had a ukulele in hand and launched into a rousing chorus of “Happy Anniversary.” “I grew up enraptured by her music, so that was a big moment for me,” Kors says. “You hear designers complain all the time about how hard our jobs are, and I always think, Why would anyone complain? You get to do what you love to do, and you get to experience things some people only dream about. I think about that when I think about the day of this show, and how my day started with thinking, Why is Bette Midler carrying a ukulele?”