Michael Kors Kicks Off His Rodeo Return With A Canter’s Takeover

The designer gathered friends at the storied deli for a dinner to celebrate the opening of his new boutique

Words by ELIZABETH VARNELL
Photography courtesy of GETTY IMAGES

Olivia Wilde, Michael Kors, Marisa Tomei, and Kerry Washington.

MICHAEL KORS created his own glamorous version of Los Angeles in celebration of his new Beverly Hills boutique on Tuesday, June 4. He gathered Gabrielle Union-Wade and Dwyane Wade, Olivia Wilde, Kerry Washington, Marisa Tomei, Mindy Kaling, Quinta Brunson, Shailene Woodley, Alexandra Shipp, Zoey Deutch, Kaitlyn Dever, Jennifer Meyer, and a host of others at Canter’s Deli in the city’s Fairfax district, where he served a menu created by Spago, Wolfgang Puck’s Beverly Hills flagship restaurant. Guests dined on Alaskan halibut, pan-roasted jidori chicken, and Westholme Australian Wagyu amid the leather booths and midcentury counters of Canter’s, where soups and sandwiches have topped the menu for decades. The evening paid tribute to Kors’ favorite mix of haunts in town while marking his return to Beverly Hills, a place he has revered since the 1970s, when some of his family moved to the West Coast, and where he first launched a namesake boutique 20 years ago.

Beyond Kors and his culinary slight of hand, the toast of the evening was the new two-level Michael Kors Collection boutique on Rodeo Drive, four miles down Santa Monica Boulevard. The new 1,500-square-foot space, with its neutral palette of antique brass, raw concrete, oxidized maple, blackened steel, and gold Calacatta marble, has a residential feel with a street-level entrance filled with natural light and a lower level where new looks, handbags, and accessories add the dramatic flair. But on this night, guests reveled inside the deli known over the decades for visits by such luminaries as Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, and Taylor Swift. Guests at Kors’ gathering reflected on their own late-night stops at the eatery while raising a glass to the designer’s new shop as DJ Kitty Ca$h kept the turntables spinning.