I'll Have What She's Wearing

Refined neutrals, face-framing turtlenecks, a white coat that says: I've got 30 more. Twenty-five years on, Rene Russo's Thomas Crown Affair wardrobe remains the blueprint for grown-up glamour.

- BRIDGET FOLEY

"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."

Although Russo wears Kors's designs in almost every scene, he got involved only at the last minute, after the actress called him.