The autumn of 2026 will inscribe, in the book of time, the forty-fifth year of Michael Kors’s career. To mark this anniversary, he invited the elegant set, on a weekday evening, to the Metropolitan Opera House, that modern temple where art and vanity meet beneath vaults of light.

He recalled his journey, long as a Manhattan avenue, and confessed that the secret principle of his work had always been a love of refinement, glamour, and luxury, tempered by an inclination toward nonchalance, that comfort which is like the sweetness of resting at the edge of the world.

New York, he suggested, remains a sublime contradiction: a sovereign and tyrannical city, by turns austere and sumptuous, severe and enchanted, akin to those ancient capitals where splendor is born of excess.

His style, fluid as an urban current, revealed itself through singular metamorphoses: a gray trouser became a train-skirt, as if masculine rigor suddenly remembered grace; a tropical wool blazer softened itself with a bias-cut panel, accompanied by a weightless black turtleneck, like a veil over a statue.

Daytime was adorned with sumptuous jeans, straight and noble in their simplicity, blending cashmere with cotton. Coats rose like portable architectures, with their theatrical collars, their masterful pea coats, their fur stoles, their smooth leather gloves, their sculptural accessories that lent knitwear the dignity of an edifice.

A black top, vaporous as a wisp of incense, extended into a train while retaining the nonchalance of a simple T-shirt; it joined a silk georgette trouser, sprinkled with micro-sequins, like a night sky over a silent avenue.

Finally, integrated stoles completed these apparitions, ready to envelop the modern woman like an aura, so that she might enter the city with that quiet majesty which makes one believe, for a moment, that fashion sometimes touches poetry.

FM