It seems audacious to choose this particular moment in American history to dub camouflage the new fashion basic, but Michael Kors claimed precedent by pointing to its fashionability during the Vietnam era. Social comment or simply a classic print? You decide, Kors said before his show. Either way, camouflage provided the graphic cornerstone of a collection that reveled in a desert-toned earthiness. The print appeared in an army jacket worn with patchwork fatigues (nothing ambiguous there) and, memorably, as a hoodie under a dark-chocolate linen suit.
Kors always builds his collections on a dream couple. This time, it was Taylor and Hudson in Giant, with a dash of Stieglitz and O'Keefe. (The designer got Douglas and Zeta-Jones for his front row, who are surely a dream couple in the eyes of someone, somewhere.) A relaxed, Texas-Taos vibe prevailed: the models wore sandals, and a cashmere sweater was blanket-stitched, as was a pair of chamois jeans. Jackets, shirts, and trousers had a pre-worn crinkle, courtesy of the season's ubiquitous metal/cotton blend. And one shirt drew its print from the pattern on a bandana.
For a Michael Kors show, it verged on funky, though the designer's jump-back reaction to the word suggests that he feels it compromises his innately chic, urban sensibility. Still, when he turned to big-city black-and-white, Kors showed it as a hooded linen sweater over loose linen trousers and as a wrinkled cotton suit—and always with sandals. Like we said, kind of funky.
