“I love what you do!” A woman approached Michael Kors during a visit to Big Sur—in the hotel pool, of all places. She wasn’t referring to his most recent hits. She went bigger-picture.
“The way Rene Russo looked in The Thomas Crown Affair!” she gushed. “I still base how I want to look on how she looked in that movie.”
“That movie,” John McTiernan’s redo of Norman Jewison’s 1968 original, is a slick, romantic caper. It’s also a fashion classic, a brilliant example of the role clothes can play in creating a fictional character. Russo plays Catherine Banning, a sophisticated insurance investigator out to nail Pierce Brosnan’s playboy cat burglar.
Twenty-five years after the film’s release, Russo’s sultry, commanding wardrobe looks as valid as it did in 1999. Arguably, her chic, unfussy clothes, most of which Kors designed, did much to define glamour as we know it today. That is due largely to Kors’s signature sartorial magic, which is rooted in realism.
“I always want to make people feel and look good in their everyday lives,” he tells me. “I don’t want it to look labored.”
Rene Russo in The Thomas Crown Affair.
Although Russo wears Kors’s designs in almost every scene, he got involved only at the last minute, after the actress called him. A top print model in the late ’70s, Russo had pivoted to film before Kors came of age as a designer, but they knew each other socially, and she wore his clothes. After years of playing unglamorous roles to build her reputation as an actress rather than a model- actress, Russo told Kors, “I decided it was time to make a movie where I get to look great.”
Shooting had already begun, leaving no time for him to break out the sketchpad. Russo, at 45, had retained her model body and could wear samples. Kors offered access to two runway collections, Michael Kors Fall 1998 and his debut for Celine, where he worked as creative director until 2004, during that heady moment of young Americans designing for European houses.
Kors describes Catherine Banning as “the woman in control in the room. She’s a boss lady, but she’s not a ballbuster.” And she likes to make an entrance. He saw her as “the queen of coats.” A fitting title, as she wears many. We first see her in a gray broadtail coat with a silver fox collar over a high-slit skirt and sheer black stockings. Another stunner: straight-cut white cashmere with a deep funnel neck.
Russo at the premiere of The Thomas Crown Affair.
“The white kills me,” Kors says. “A white winter coat in New York City is basically you telling everyone, ‘I have 30 more coats.’ ”
Catherine’s wardrobe moves between inviting sportswear and bodycon dresses. The former features plenty of face-framing turtlenecks in indulgent Loro Piana cashmere; the latter, a dazzling evening stunner in black. Except for a shot of color or two (ice blue coat, berry dress), costume designer Kate Harrington restricted the palette to refined neutrals that, despite the discretion, popped onscreen.
“I mean,” Kors says, “everyone talks about quiet luxury.”
Indeed, Catherine epitomized that vibe decades before the term was coined. It’s one thing for a character to be of her movie’s time. It’s quite another for her to have serious stylistic currency a quarter-century later. Deflate her coiffure and Catherine would look right at home now, strutting down Park Avenue and slipping into one of the red leather banquettes at Le Veau d’Or—the new one.
That should make ’90s Kors a hot commodity on the resale market. But in his own vintage forays, the designer has found otherwise. He once queried Doris Raymond, of the Way We Wore boutique in Los Angeles, about why she seldom carries his work. Her answer, he recalls: “Because people kept your clothes.”
The relevance of Russo’s Thomas Crown style reflects something beyond Kors’s savvy classicism, and our conversation turns to geeky musings about the birth of Modern Fashion, which we agree happened in the late ’90s. Okay, not the birth of Modern Fashion; Paul Poiret freed women from corsets, and Coco Chanel championed elegant sportif. But the late ’90s saw a reset nonetheless.
As Kors puts it, “We went from the ’80s and early ’90s ridiculousness, to ‘I hate fashion. I don’t want to be beautiful,’ to something so monastic that it scared people, to, finally, a moment that was the culmination of all of that. Maybe you did have some of the sex appeal left from the early ’90s. Maybe you did keep some of the simplicity, and maybe you did have this sense of things being dressed down. All that came together then.”
And maybe you got a phone call from a gorgeous actress who wanted to wear your clothes in her movie. And maybe she would use her modeling muscle memory to show off those clothes well before the fashion- Hollywood alliance made all actresses models.
Maybe then “you didn’t need the tropes of costumery to make her glamorous,” Kors says. You just needed real, great clothes and a compelling character who knew how to work them.
This story appears in the November 2024 issue of Town & Country, with the headline "I'll Have What She's Wearing." SUBSCRIBE NOW
Bridget Foley
Bridget Foley is one of the most respected critics in fashion journalism, and a contributor to Town & Country.
