leisure-class

Swirling her glass of wine, she remains puzzled and furious at the blithe acceptance of this apocalyptic event by her feckless husband, Bruce, a wealth manager, and her standard-issue Manhattan leisure-class coterie: the bickering artsy couple, the hanger-on magazine editor with no money, the diffident gay decorator.

The promoters are dreaming of making it big in business; the girls are dreaming of making it big in the fashion industry … and the whole thing is this globally interconnected tribe of upper-class, leisure-class people, hopping from one place to the next.

To some, the scene on the pier recalled “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” Georges Seurat’s pointillist painting of bourgeois Parisians lounging near the Seine, which is shaded with a rebuke of their leisure-class pursuits.

Growing up in Merrick, Long Island, Michael Kors was surrounded by women who loved fashion: “My mother was a former Revlon model, my grandmother was obsessed with Bill Blass and beige and I had two midriff-bearing aunts who idolized Cher,” says the designer, who drew dresses in the sand at the family beach club, where he first observed the leisure-class glamour that would become his eponymous label’s signature.

She was a leisure-class beauty who devoted her days to philanthropy and culture.