Michael Kors Pre-Fall 2012

To hear Michael Kors tell it, women in Houston don’t have any trouble finding a reason to don an entire suite of diamonds-or emeralds or sapphires-within the daytime. And if he’s on the town for a trunk show, they honestly dress up. “The last time i used to be there, Lance (LePere, Kors’s husband and inventive director) was like, ‘I don’t understand. Why are they wearing evening clothes? It’s twelve noon,’ ” Kors recalls. “I said, ‘They’re excited we’re here.’ ” Needless to say they were. Kors is the foremost personable designer in fashion, always chatting . . . and always listening. “You hear women say, ‘I was stuck in my over-the-head fur and couldn’t get it on on the coat check,’ ” he says. “We learned you ought to hide a zip somewhere. Or if the coat has a belt, it falls, and also you leave it.”

For pre-fall, he solved the belt conundrum by simply attaching them to the coats. And what coats they were, particularly the charcoal felted flannel with a crisscross lapel that buckled, harness-like, and the cleanly cut, pony-hair balmacaan in a black-and-white oil-splattered pattern that was inspired by Richard Avedon’s landmark work, Inside the American West. Kors’s other major influence was the spectacular Ann Bonfoey Taylor exhibit on the Phoenix Art Museum (he and LePere traveled the whole approach to Arizona simply to soak up the show). The outcome was a suite that fused a cowboy sense of romance with Taylor’s equestrian chic: an extended ruffle skirt with a cutaway hem in a graphic check, devoré silk dresses in turquoise and crimson, the foremost delicate peasant top in Chantilly lace.

Being at the road has also taught Kors how women really shop. For example, he now knows that once pre-fall hits stores in May, “it’s working women buying clothes for work, people buying things to wear to a summer wedding, and fashion obsessives buying their first coat of the season.” So what does he do? He makes something for them all: a brilliant-versatile, not-too-conservative Taos plaid dress for the office, a protracted lace skirt with a tissue-weight cashmere tank for the nuptials, and a dip-dyed Mongolian lamb jacket destined for closets belonging to girls like his ladies in Houston. “They do not buy a coat because they want it,” he says. “If they’re in love with it, they simply occur the air-conditioning.”