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The major talking point from the Michael Kors Collection Spring Summer ’23 presentation in New York this afternoon was Anne Hathaway, who revived a look from The Devils Wears Prada (a chic faux-alligator brown coat, paired with a fringe) to sit front row next to Anna Wintour. It was a great full-circle moment, and a testament to the fact that Hathaway seems incapable of ageing, but it certainly wasn’t the only key takeaway from Kors’ resort wear-gone-sexy S/S ’23 outing.

A supermodel-filled runway (Bella Hadid, Natasha Poly, Małgosia Bela) revealed an array of sexy, sleek clothing that evoked the effortless heyday of New York City in the 1970s. Kors was paying homage to Halston, the mononymous icon of American glamour whose life was captured in a Ryan Murphy series last year, and Halston’s contemporaries Stephen Burrows, and Rudi Gernreich. Kors is, in many ways, the natural successor of that triptych, having built an empire with his canny ability to intuit what makes American women feel effortlessly sexy.

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Sexiness was, in fact, a key pillar of this collection—the opening look was a Michelle Pfieffer-in-Scarface-style white suit, though in this iteration, the blazer was even lower cut and the skirt slit even higher. Sarong-style skirts were worn with skimpy bralettes or crisp shirts unbuttoned to the navel. Kors’ signature stretch-jersey eveningwear came with plunging necklines and his silk caftans with thigh slits. It all amounted to a public declaration: skin is back.

Kors has long been referred to as the “king of jet set”, and in the past, he designed for the women who split their time between a Park Avenue apartment and being whisked off to some tropical locale on their husband’s private jet. Kors has been modernising the Michael Kors woman in the years since, aware that his customer nowadays is A) more likely to pay for the jet themselves, and B) doesn’t strictly delineate between ‘city’ and ‘resort’ in the same binary way.

“London is full of people wearing flip-flops to work instead of the beach,” Kors summarised to The Guardian. “What we wear on vacation is what we wear in the city.” That city/resort hybrid was enforced by the runway, which was lined with palm fronds, through an abundance of tropical prints, slinky black beachwear, and lightweight cashmere knits, the latter tied effortlessly over the shoulders. The colour palette—minimal neutrals with pops of red, green, and gold—added a festive quality that was hard not to warm to. See you in Saint Barts.

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