To present his Resort collection today, Michael Kors gathered editors at the Whitney Museum, with a view of the Hudson River and New Jersey in the distance. Apologizing for the clouds, he said he chose the location to remind us that we live on an island. Kors is building a new house and has islands on the brain. The subject matter agrees with him. This was a terrific, zippy collection, full of sarongs, strappy maillots, halter dresses, and one sleek embroidered djellaba that, thanks to Kors’s innate sense of polish, will likely see just as much action in the big city as in Bora Bora or the car-less Hydra, two islands he said he’s visited recently.
Kors’s tropical prints are more versatile than the next guys’ primarily because of their palette: He used navy, brown, black, and white, with bright lemon yellow options for the extroverts in his audience. By pairing them with solids or boyish pajama stripes, he tempered their typical exuberance further. To adopt Kors speak for a moment—although, let’s face it, nobody gives quotes like MK—this was Tropicália à la tomboy. The femme aspects of the collection charmed equally as much. He’s often observed that no one’s doing laps in his bathing suits—his customers wear his maillots at parties on boats. Riffing on that idea, he made a dress out of swimwear, cutting a strappy jersey column with a sexy cutout at the midriff. Other pieces that qualified for what he described as the “super easy, super glamorous point of the whole collection” included a jumpsuit with wide, asymmetric leg openings that read like a breezy dress, and a floral-print, ankle-length halter dress.
