Isaac Mizrahi

A premier American designer, Isaac Mizrahi (born 1961) established womenswear and menswear businesses noted for their uncluttered, witty designs before he was 30 years old.

Isaac Mizrahi was born in Brooklyn, New York, October 14, 1961, the youngest child and only son of Zeke and Sarah Mizrahi. He grew up in Ocean Parkway, New Jersey, in the tightknit Syrian Jewish community. Zeke Mizrahi worked in the garment industry, first as a pattern cutter on Wooster Street and later as a childrenswear manufacturer. Isaac's mother was instrumental in exposing him to fashion at an early age. A devoted fashion lover, Sarah Mizrahi exposed young Isaac to the genius of designers Balenciagas, Chanel, and Norman Norell. He would often accompany his mother on shopping trips to Saks Fifth Avenue and Bergdorf Goodman. She would also take Isaac to the ballet and to movies.

When Isaac was eight, his family moved to the middle-class Midwood section of Brooklyn. He contracted spinal meningitis during this time and his confinement was spent eating junk food and viewing television, especially old movies. The 1961 remake of Back Street, about an affair between a fashion designer and a married man, was a pivotal event in Mizrahi's development. The glamour of the fashion industry depicted in the movie became an inspiration to him to design clothes. When Isaac was 10 years old, Zeke Mizrahi bought a sewing machine for him. Isaac set up a workroom in the basement and created clothes for puppets for neighborhood birthday parties. At 13, Isaac was designing clothes for himself, his mother, and a close friend of his mother, Sarah Haddad.

Mizrahi was expelled several times from the strict Ye-shiva school he attended for impersonating rabbis and scribbling fashion sketches in his Bible. At six years old, the school required him to begin psychotherapy or they would not let him return. One Yeshiva teacher encouraged him to audition for Manhattan's High School of the Performing Arts - the school used as a basis in the movie and television series Fame. He was accepted and took diction, speech, singing, dance, and academic classes. He had a small role in Fame and wore a costume of his own design. At 15, while attending the Performing Arts High School, Mizrahi produced clothing under his first label, IS New York. His financial mentor for IS New York was Sarah Haddad.

When Sarah Haddad's husband fell ill, IS New York closed. Mizrahi continued to sketch his ideas. Zeke Mizrahi showed the sketches to a childrenswear designer, Ellie Fishman, who suggested that Isaac should attend the Parson's School of Design.

After graduating from the Yeshiva in 1979 he enrolled in Parsons full time. By his junior year at Parsons Mizrahi was an outstanding student. His junior collection, a final project, was videotaped by the school to show to future classes. Mizrahi got a job at Perry Ellis for the summer following his junior year. Perry Ellis was Mizrahi's first industry mentor, the man he called "my guardian angel." He continued to work for Ellis part-time during his senior year and was hired after his graduation. In 1983 Ellis fell ill from AIDS. During this time Isaac's father died. After working at Perry Ellis for two years after graduation, Mizrahi left the company and joined Jeffrey Banks to help spearhead a new womenswear collection.

He remained at Jeffrey Banks for a short time due to the withdrawal of financial backing by the parent company. Mizrahi then joined Calvin Klein, but remained there for less than a year because of personnel changes. During his short time at Calvin Klein he created one of the company's most interesting collections, highlighted by streamlined red suits.

After leaving Calvin Klein, in June 1987 he and Sarah Haddad-Cheney pooled $50,000 each and opened Mizrahi's own womenswear company. They occupied a loft on Greene Street in SoHo. Seven stores bought the first season's collection. By the first collection show in April 1988 Haddad-Cheney had secured additional financing from the owners of Gitano Jeans company. In 1990 the company's workrooms and showroom moved to an expanded space on Wooster Street. Mizrahi's menswear collection premiered in April 1990.

In 1995, Douglas Keeve directed a 79-minute documentary entitled Unzipped in which home movie clips of Mizrahi's childhood are pieced together with excerpts of his influences (including Mary Tyler Moore and the 1922 documentary Nanook of the North) which won the Audience Award at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival and was praised for being "funny, succinct and modestly instructive about a fairly recondite business," Martha Duffy commented in her article for Time. The film presented a thorough portrayal of Mizrahi, the man - so fearful of rejection he hovers near depression. Viewers even see a few temper tantrums. His hard work and success, however, surge him out of dejection and one appreciates Mizrahi, the artist - a designer with a flamboyant personality. Audiences also learn a good deal about the fashion world from drawing board to catwalk. Besides the praise Keeve garnered for his documentary, viewers previously unfamiliar with Isaac Mizrahi learned that he doesn't take his success for granted, maintaining both a sense of humor and perspective. Audiences saw real-life footage of Mizrahi as a hyperactive baby, sketching fur pants while in bed, teasing supermodel Naomi Campbell about her navel ring, and crying when he reads about Jean-Paul Gaultier beating Mizrahi to the runway with a fashion first.

Unzipped seemed to be the extra spark in Mizrahi's fire. Although his company had been earning $10 million a year, a 1995 Newsweek article noted that he had yet to turn a profit. After Mizrahi made his debut on the silver screen, his popularity and recognition became even more prominent. When Mizrahi launched a new collection in February 1996 in New York, he also broadcast it live via satellite to locations outside the state. His new "Isaac" label featured two pink stars instead of A's, declaring, "Our motto is, Inside every woman is a star."' He's been tapped as star material himself, being called the Calvin Klein of Generation X.

The year 1997 proved to be a milestone in Mizrahi's career. He announced an unprecedented deal with three major Asian markets in Japan, Singapore, and Korea which included freestanding stores, in-store shops, wholesale distribution, manufacturing, and sublicenses in Japan and shops and distribution in Southeast Asia, an online ABC source reported. The deal was estimated to generate at least $150 million in retail sales by the year 2000.

In 1989, after two collections, Mizrahi received his first award, the Council of Fashion Designers of America's Perry Ellis Award for new fashion talent. In 1990 Mizrahi received the coveted CFDA Designer of the Year Award. He was also named best designer of 1990 by the Fashion Footwear Association of New York, and Crain's New York Business included him in their annual "40 Under 40" award for great strides in business at a young age.

Mizrahi stated that his inspiration came from "food and fun" and "motion and movies." "Le Miz," "Le Wiz," or "The Miz," as he was nicknamed, was compared with such design greats as Claire McCardell, Geoffrey Beene, Halston, and Norman Norell. His creations have been referred to as "classics, with a twist," "a blend of ease and elegance," and "simple shapes, clear colors and unlabored touches of wit" - all hallmarks of American style.

Further Reading

Several periodicals of the early 1990s feature Mizrahi and his designs: "A Conversation With My Alter Ego," Harper's Bazaar (March 1993); "Mizrahi Unzipped," Newsweek (July 24, 1995); "Life Along the Catwalk," Time (August 14, 1995); "Mizrahi Loves Company," Entertainment Weekly (March 8, 1996); "Movement - That's What Design Is All About," ELLE Magazine (June 1990); "The Great Hip Hope," Michael Gross, New York Magazine (October 1, 1990); "The New Smash Hit: Le Miz," Gentlemen's Quarterly (August 1990); "Nobody Beats The Miz," Vogue Magazine (February 1989); and "Shooting Stars, Isaac Mizrahi," Sarah Mower, British Vogue Magazine (September 1989). Online sources include "Media savvy Mizrahi beams himself up to launch line," http://www.detnews.com/menu/stories/34751.htm; "Mizrahi's Asian Coup," http://www.wwd.com/samples/today/Thursday/014.html; "'Unzipped' follows fall & rise of designer Mizrahi," http://www.cis.yale.edu/ydn/paper/9.23/9.23.95storyno.DB; "Unzipped," http://www.panix.com/~bfrazer/flicker/unzipped.html; and "Unzipped," http://www.mogul.co.nz/reviews/unzipped/unzipped.html. For a book on fashion facts see Lynn Schnurnberger, Let There Be Clothes (1991).

• Born: New York City, 14 October 1961.
• Education: Attended New York High School for the Performing Arts; graduated from Parsons School of Design, New York, 1982.
• Career: Assistant designer, Perry Ellis, New York, 1982-83; womenswear designer, Jeffrey Banks, New York, 1984; designer, Calvin Klein, New York, 1985-87; formed own company, 1987; menswear collection introduced, 1990; began designing costumes for ballet and modern dance productions, from 1990; designed accessories line, 1992; handbags, 1993; shoes, 1997; lost backing and closed business, 1998; debut of one-man show, LES MIZrahi, 2000.
• Awards: Council of Fashion Designers of America award, 1988, 1989, 1991; Fashion Industry Foundation award, 1990; Michaelangelo Shoe award, New York, 1993; Dallas Fashion award for Excellence.

Isaac Mizrahi worked, upon graduation from Parsons School of Design, for Perry Ellis, Jeffrey Banks, and Calvin Klein. When he started his own business in 1987, he intimately knew the world of American sportswear at its best, but his work refined the sportswear model by a special sense of sophistication and glamor. His ideals, beyond those he worked for, were such American purists as Norell, Halston, Beene, and McCardell, each a designer of utmost sophistication. Suzy Menkes analyzed in the International Herald Tribune in April 1990: "The clean colors and Ivy League image of Perry Ellis sportswear might seem to be the seminal influence on Mizrahi. But he himself claims inspiration from his mother's wardrobe of all-American designers, especially the glamorous simplicity of Norman Norell."

It is as if Mizrahi was challenged by distilling the most well-bred form of each garment to an understated glamor, whether tartan taken to a sensuous evening gown but still buckled as if Balmoral livery; pocketbooks and luggage ingeniously incorporated into clothing with the practical pocket panache of McCardell; or versions of high style in adaptations of men's bathrobes or sweatshirting used for evening. While Mizrahi was often commended for the youthfulness of his clothing, the praise was for the freshness of his perception, his ability to recalculate a classic, not just a market for young women. His interest in the Empire waistline; his practicality of wardrobe separates in combination; and his leaps between day and evening addressed all women equally. In the early 1990s, many designers and manufacturers saw the value of simplification: Mizrahi sought the pure in tandem with the cosmopolitan.

When Sarah Mower of Vogue described Mizrahi in September 1989 as "that rare thing in contemporary design: a life-enhancing intelligence on the loose," she rightly characterized his revisionist, rational, distilling, pure vision. With his fall 1988 collection Mizrahi was immediately recognized by the New York Times as "this year's hottest new designer" in unusual color combinations (such as rust and mustard and orange-peel and pink) as well as the diversity of silhouettes from baby-doll dresses to evening jumpsuits to long dresses.

Mizrahi had clearly demonstrated the range of a commercially viable designer while at the same time demonstrating his simplifying glamor and the cool nonchalant charm of his smart (intellectually and aesthetically) clothing. The spa collection of 1988 included rompers and baseball jackets and playsuits as well as the debonair excess of trousers with paperbag waist. His spring 1989 collection assembled sources from all over the fashion spectrum to create a unified vision of elegance and appeal. The fall 1989 collection featured tartan (later developed by Mizrahi for a Twyla Tharp American Ballet Theater production in 1990) with most extraordinary accompaniment. In a notable instance, New York (21 August 1989) showed Mizrahi's tartan dress with his raccoon-trimmed silk taffeta parka in a perfect assembly of the wild and the urbane.

In 1990 Mizrahi showed a short-lived menswear line and sustained his color studies, creating double-faced wools and sportswear elements in watercolor-like colors, delicate yet deliberate. Spring 1990 was a typical Mizrahi transmogrification: black and white patterns recalling both art déco and the 1960s was, in fact, derived from costume for the Ballets Russes. In 1991 Mizrahi's themes were American, creating a kind of Puritan revival in dresses with collars and bows in spring/summer 1991 and an American ethnic parade in fall 1991, including Native American dress and a notable totem-pole dress inspired by Native American art.

Mizrahi's drive to find the most sophisticated version of each concept he developed was the leitmotif of his work. His spring 1991 collection examined motifs of the 1960s, but with a clever sharpness not observed in other designers of the same year looking back to the period. In 1991 his tube dresses with flounces were inspired by Norell, but given proportion. McCardell's audacious applications of cotton piqué are extended by Mizrahi's love of the same material and Halston's radical simplicity is inevitably a source for any designer longing to return to essential form. Mizrahi's color fields owed their consciousness to Perry Ellis, but the particular color sensibility was Mizrahi's own. Mizrahi's immaculate, ingenious modernism was as clearly aware of sources as it was pushed toward the clarification of form.

Mizrahi had referred to his style as a "classic New York look," which presumably meant a casual American idiom, but inflected with big-city reserve and refinement. Mizrahi captured something of Manhattan chic and glamor of the 1940s and 1950s. His fashion was indescribably beautiful in subtlety and sophistication. Yet Mizrahi soon gave it all up to pursue another dream—performing. From the early 1990s Mizrahi had begun collaborating with choreographers like Twyla Tharp and Mark Morris, and designed costumes for an increasing number of ballets, modern dance productions, and even film.

Mizrahi himself was the subject of a documentary film, Unzipped, detailing the assemblage of his 1994 fall collection, working with Douglas Keeve, who directed, and Michael Alden, who produced. Released commercially to raise funds for varied AIDS programs, the experience must have helped crystallize Mizrahi's direction for the future. In 1998, after Chanel pulled its backing, Mizrahi closed his fashion business and was suddenly with little to do. Within a year he turned in a new direction, writing a one-man show about his life. The funny, satiric cabaret show was LES MIZrahi, yet the only similarity to the long-running and much honored show, Les Misérables was in name only. LES MIZrahi, debuted in Greenwich House Theatre in New York in October 2000, and was well received by critics and audiences.

For those yearning for the perfectly designed Mizrahi dress or outfit, a former protégée, Behnaz Sarafpour, garnered raves for her debut collection in 2001. Amid the praise for the black and white collection, however, were comments about Mizrahi's obvious influence on her style. For his part, Mizrahi declared in the May 2001 Vogue, "She knows what people really want to wear…. She's a great editor of her own accord. I learned as much from her as she did from me."

Generous, funny, immensely talented—that's Isaac Mizrahi. Whether on the stage, behind it designing costumes, or dressing Hollywood's elite, he made an indelible mark on the fashion scene. When asked by US Weekly in November 2000 if he missed designing, Mizrahi admitted this was so but countered, "I don't miss the business side of it. Just the idea of doing that makes me cringe." But would he ever return to designing? "I can't say never," he told US's Marc Malkin, "There are all sorts of ways to sell clothes that feel more like me."

Publications

On Mizrahi:

Books
• Martin, Richard, and Harold Koda, Bloom, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1995.
• Stegemeyer, Anne, Who's Who in Fashion, Third Edition, New York, 1996.

Articles
• "Mr. Clean: New Designer Isaac Mizrahi," in Vogue, February 1988.
• Slonim, Jeffrey J., and Torkil Gudnason, "Retro-Active: Back to the 1960s with Isaac Mizrahi," in Interview, March 1988.
• Foley, Bridget, "Isaac Mizrahi: Setting Out for Stardom," in WWD, 18 April 1988.
• "Color Me Chic," in Connoisseur (New York), October 1988.
• Hoare, Sarajane, "Vogue's Spy: Isaac Mizrahi," in Vogue (London), November 1988.
• Bender, Karen, "Isaac Mizrahi," in Taxi (New York), February 1989.
• Mansfield, Stephanie, "Nobody Beats the Miz," in Vogue, February 1989.
• Mower, Sarah, "Isaac Mizrahi," in Vogue (London), September 1989.
• Jeal, Nicola, "The Divine Mr. M.," in the Observer Magazine (London), 1 April 1990.
• Hepple, Keith, "Plum in the Middle of the Pomegranate," in The Independent (London), 12 April 1990.
• Menkes, Suzy, "Mizrahi: The Shooting Star," in the International Herald Tribune, 17 April 1990.
• Wayne, George, "Brooklyn Kid K.O.s Couturiers," in Interview, June 1990.
• Talley, André Leon, "The Kings of Color," in Vogue, September 1990.
• Gross, Michael, "Slaves of Fashion: Isaac Mizrahi, the Great Hip Hope," in New York Magazine, 1 October 1990.
• DeCaro, Frank, "Mizrahi Loves Company," in Mademoiselle (New York), January 1991.
• "Isaac Mizrahi," in Current Biography, January 1991.
• Bernhardt, Sandra, "I and Me," in Harper's Bazaar, March 1993.
• Foley, Bridget, "Hard Acts to Follow: Isaac Mizrahi," in WWD, 24 October 1994.
• Spindler, Amy M., "Cocktails, Anyone? Clothes that Strut," in the New York Times, 2 November 1994.
• Menkes, Suzy, "Mizrahi's All-American Swirls," in the International Herald Tribune, 3 November 1994.
• Ezesky, Lauren, "Isaac Unbound," in Paper (New York), March 1995.
• Spindler, Amy M., "Luxurious Armor by Karan, Klein, Mizrahi," in the New York Times, 8 April 1995.
• "Dueling Isaacs," in WWD, 10 April 1995.
• Pogrebin, Robin, "Mizrahi, Once Again the Main Attraction, Sings it Like it is," in the New York Times, 3 October 2000.
• Mattingly, Kate, "From Off the Rack to Off the Wall," in Dance Magazine, October 2000.
• Malkin, Marc S., "Isaac Mizrahi's Next Stage," in US Weekly, 6 November 2000.
• Comita, Jenny, "Life After Isaac," in Vogue, May 2001.

— Richard Martin; updated by Owen James

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