On Monday night, Michael Kors will take the stage at the American Museum of Natural History to receive a much-deserved prize. The CFDA is presenting the designer with its Positive Change Award in recognition of his decades of work advocating for people in need and supporting philanthropic organizations. Among them are God’s Love We Deliver, which cooks and home-delivers nutritious, medically tailored meals for New Yorkers too sick to shop or cook for themselves, and the United Nations World Food Program, with which he launched the Watch Hunger Stop campaign in 2013.
In the last fiscal year, God’s Love supported more than 16,000 clients and their kids and caregivers with 4.3 million meals, an organizational record. Cindy McCain, the World Food Program executive director, has stated that Kors and his company have, “provided millions of nutritious school meals for children over the past ten years.” Those kinds of numbers are undeniable, but even more persuasive are Kors’s own words on the subject of giving back. He spoke with Vogue about his history of doing good.
Do you remember an early experience that triggered this lifetime of giving back?
I grew up as an only child, and I think my mom wanted me to realize that the world was not filled with only children. She always stressed—never using the word empathy, because I was too small—that you have to be aware that not everyone is in your situation, and to think about other people. I remember being really little on Halloween and, taking my UNICEF box door to door, when I trick or treated, and I remember my mom saying, ‘whatever you collect, I’ll match it.’ One year, we sat down and we were thinking about how could I raise even more money with my UNICEF box? And we came up with the kooky idea that I could dress up as a UNICEF box. So my mom painted a cardboard box, and the minute I showed up, ringing doorbells, dressed as a UNICEF box, I collected more money than I had ever collected before. Little things like that taught me early on as a young child, about just getting outside of yourself, of thinking about someone else.
And then, fast forward to the 1980s, and I had a small business. I was slowly growing it, but I certainly did not have a big platform, nor, nor did I have access to lots of funds. But when the AIDS crisis really came crashing in, and it was literally every corner I turned, friends, coworkers, it was just everywhere, people were dying and people were sick. And I think early on, there was truly the sense of helplessness and not knowing, not knowing what was going to happen, and also feeling, what could you do to help? I think maybe because I’m a very pragmatic designer, I kept thinking, you know, I want results. Show me results. What can we do where I see results? And I heard about God’s Love. Sometimes people think that it has to be such a complicated answer to a difficult question, but it was actually a very easy answer that, okay, there are people who, number one, feel shunned, have no contact with the outside world. They’re ill and they need human contact, but they also need nutritious food. The first thing I ever did was actually deliver meals, and you saw immediately how this affected people. So in a strange way, it was the perfect thing for me, because there was this immediate change in what you did for a person at that minute, at that moment.
