Jennifer Hudson and Michael Kors

In Paris, it’s the new way to take the blah off a long day of fashion shows: Throw a party, a private one, and invite your nearest and dearest (even if it’s three hundred people) and have special musical talent flown in just for the evening. Or a cluster of really beautiful film stars.

Karl Lagerfeld did it Saturday with Blake Lively and Florence + the Machine. Then on Monday, Michael Kors followed suit at the American Embassy. Kors’s excuse was not only his three decades in the fashion business, but the opening of his largest store on the planet—it measures about 7,000 feet—located on rue St. Honoré.

“He is the essence of American style, emblematic and gifted,” said Charles H. Rivkin, United States Ambassador to France, of Kors, who came, saw, and conquered Paris Fashion Week with this fantastic blowout bash that ended with Mary J. Blige on stage in front of a seven-panel mirrored screen (so torch singer glam!) that reflected the shimmering nude halter Michael Kors jumpsuit she wore, and in which she took to the stage—after, of course, the main course of filet of beef with potato with truffles, or turbot and morel mushrooms. Blige (who flew in just for the party and showed up with a broken toe, jammed into her Louboutin stilettos) started her one-woman set by announcing she would star in an upcoming biopic on the life of the great Nina Simone. Then, she sang one of Nina Simone’s great ballads, “Ne Me Quitte Pas,” in French and a cappella, as Simone always did. She lived up to the challenge with a virtuoso calm.

Kors was literally in his own “Stairway to Heaven” (a song he requested Blige sing, along with her personal anthem to romance, “One Love”) as Blige sang for guests like Susan M. Tolson (the French ambassador’s wife) and Emmanuelle Alt, the new editor of Paris Vogue, who belted out songs with Kors, karaoke-style, through the first course of shrimp cocktail.

“Shrimp cocktail is my absolute favorite thing,” Kors, wearing an elegant black suit and tie with a white shirt, Rat Pack–style, told me across the candelabra-lit table. And, since he hates the pink cocktail sauce in Paris, Kors flew in his own tomato-based cocktail sauce, as well as Parmesan toast points, from E.A.T. in New York.

The dinner was held at two long communal tables, totally turned out with white roses in small glass and silver metal bowls, that boasted guests like Jennifer Hudson (who was on my left) and the actress Amber Heard, in a nude Michael Kors dress, who came with her partner, Tasya van Ree, and regaled us with anecdotes about doing her own film stunts and about moving from Los Angeles to Chicago to star in a new TV series, The Playboy Club. “It’s a mix of Mad Men and Moulin Rouge,” she said.

Jennifer Hudson, who made up for her overdrive Oscars tangerine gown and coiled ponytail, by looking ever glamorous in her navy, liquid stretch evening column dress and simple hair. She had no train bearer, and was happily showing pictures on her iPhone of her eighteen-month-old son, David Daniel Otunga, Jr., holding his teddy bear. “She’s going to have the same dress in twelve colors,” Kors said of Jennifer. I critiqued Miss Hudson’s heavy Oscars red-carpet look this year, and I told her, it’s better to come to Paris, looking incredibly elegant, in her new super-thin frame and a Kors column.

“If I had a drag name, it would be ‘Connie Control’,” said Kors when I asked him how he selected the look for the second best dressed lady of the evening, Zoe Saldana, who also flew in for the event, wearing a simple white satin Kors shirt, and brilliant, black caviar–beaded knickers, with thick-heeled silver shoes. “It’s sort of my homage to Liza Minnelli,” Zaldana told me. Note: Every single Kors dress, including the one on Ambassadress Tolson and the one on his own mother, who was a guest, was vetted by none other than the designer, himself. Did you know Kors designed his mother’s wedding dress? Go figure! Second marriage, one assumes.

Connie Control also chose the dinner music and designed the clear plastic tent, which gave a feeling of being in the middle of the American Embassy’s legendary garden. The grandiflora Louisiana in front of the main table where Ambassador Rivkin sat next to Lee Radziwill, looked like an enchanted garden that had been lit the way they did son et lumière at Versailles, back in the day—the day being the Golden Age of Louis XIV. The only thing missing was a water cascade.

The dinner was swift, served on a simple white plate, trimmed in gold, and Blige got up and started singing before the chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream and wild strawberries was served. Blige was still singing as I left the beautiful evening and glided back through the main salons of the embassy. She was scheduled to perform “Happy Birthday” to Tolson later in the evening, and, as I looked over my shoulder, I saw that guests—along with Michael Kors—had left the long tables and were waving their arms and rocking to the music.

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