Anders Christian Madsen reviews the Michael Kors Spring/Summer 2026 show.
“People always say, ‘What is American fashion?’ Well, I have to be honest,” Michael Kors said during a preview the day before his show. “We invented comfort, we invented speed. We didn’t invent the ballgown, we didn’t invent the custom-made suit. We invented the idea of ease.” He was wearing a blazer over a T-shirt with jeans and trainers: the casual-formal uniform that has defined the last decade in fashion and clearly isn’t going anywhere. Just look at Julia Roberts in Versace’s new look at the Venice Film Festival.
Our undying attraction to that silhouette isn’t simply about ease. It’s about the kind of nonchalance that you can only get away with if the essentials you’re wearing – the blazer, the jeans – are chic; if they’re casual but considered. Kors, of course, is the king of that combo. Presented in the coolly unassuming Terminal Warehouse in Chelsea, his Spring/Summer 2026 collection was a study in the considered tweaking of archetypal garments.
The trousers of suits draped into sarouel-like flowy shorts, dresses were lightened into veil-like underlayers, and a fully-perforated suede trench coat suddenly felt more like a dress. “The weather is upside-down. Cities that used to be cold are now hot. Inside the air conditioning is crazy, outside it’s roasting hot. So, I think we all can learn from people who live in very hot weather places,” Kors said, nodding at the global influences that imbued the collection.
The trousers of suits draped into sarouel-like flowy shorts, dresses were lightened into veil-like underlayers, and a fully-perforated suede trench coat suddenly felt more like a dress.
Kors lives the lifestyle he portrays on his runway. This summer had taken him everywhere “from Big Sur, California to Puglia to Norway to South Africa to Marrakech.” His constant globetrotting makes for an inherently cross-cultural silhouette whose elements feel kind of familiar to certain places but, most of all, like a global wardrobe. “An earthly elegance,” as he poetically put it. Next to that casual-formal silhouette of jeans and blazers likewise worn around the world, it feels a lot like a shared way of dressing. Perhaps that’s fashion instinctive rebellion to these strange times of isolationism.
If Kors made a proposal for ease, he jazzed it up in the bag department. “I think this is a TikTok bag,” he said, swaying a frilly handbag from side to side. “In Seattle, a woman said to me, she said, ‘I’m so tired of going to lunch or dinner and everyone has the same bag.’ So, I said, that’s why we don’t make a lot of them!” he quipped. He wasn’t kidding. Some of the bags in the show will only limited to just 50 pieces in the whole world. “That’s what special.”
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