He had me at The Talented Mr. Ripley.
Though I was dubious that the Netflix series could live up to the 1999 film or Purple Noon before it, I was a quick convert when it streamed this summer. Michael Kors and his husband Lance LePere fell hard too. The mood board in Kors’s showroom was pinned with a photo of Dickie and Marge from the Ripley miniseries, along with black-and-white photos of Italian cliffs and sea.
“It was still romantic, but darker,” Kors said of the series. “And did you know it was shot in color because Showtime, its original network, wouldn’t green light it in black-and-white? They converted it.” The noirish cinematography of the series, so different from its sun-drenched predecessors, is essential to its appeal, and it influenced Kors’s collection, as did its rougher-around-the edges sensibility.
This wasn’t a dark collection—that’s not in Kors’s design vocabulary. His idea was to dig into the “rustic opulence,” he saw in elements of Ripley and on a recent trip to Ischia and Procida. Naturally, bathing suit dressing played a part. The show opened with a 1950s maillot, high-slit skirt, and a leather basket bag, and closed with an embellished broderie anglaise bandeau and long skirt.
In between it back-and-forthed and blended city and country, high and low. Raffia trimmed everything from a ribbed knit tunic sweater to a lace dress, and embellished a “cocktail shaker” of a skirt worn with another maillot. Craft was very much in focus here, but it didn’t impinge on Kors’s trademark polish. On that front, he engineered shirts to stand away from the shoulders, and cut sequin and lace party dresses with portrait necklines. Marge covered, he turned his attention to Dickie, combing a navy top coat, black trousers, and brown turtleneck with white accessories. Did you clock the copies of the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera in those basket bags? “Print isn’t dead,” he said at our preview. I appreciated that too.