Isaac Mizrahi

Trained for the Stage and the Studio

Mizrahi's schooling joins two kinds of performance. He attended New York City's High School of Performing Arts, a school whose subject is appearing before an audience, and then the Parsons School of Design, whose subject is making clothes. Most designers have only the second of those. His career, as recorded, used both in roughly equal measure: he is introduced as a fashion designer, but a large part of his public record from the 1990s onward consists of appearances in television shows and movies. That is not a departure from the training but a use of it — the performing-arts education explains why a designer would be comfortable as a presenter and interviewer, and the design education explains what he was presenting. His family connection points the same way: he is the cousin of Sylvain Sylvain, the rock and roll guitarist who played in The New York Dolls, so the world of performance was in his family as well as in his schooling.

Unzipped and the Collection as a Subject

In 1995 a movie was released about the development of his Fall 1994 collection, called Unzipped. The fact that a single collection could carry a feature film says something about how his work was seen. A collection's development — the months of designing, fitting and preparing a show — is normally invisible to the public, who see only the finished runway presentation. A film about that process treats the designer as a character and the season as a story with a beginning and an end, and it requires a designer willing and able to be watched while working. Unzipped dates from 1995, about his Fall 1994 collection, so the film arrived a year after the clothes it follows, turning one season's work into a permanent record rather than a passing show. It also fixed his public identity early: from the mid-1990s he was not only a name on a label but a personality audiences had seen at work.

Target, Television and the Red Carpet

The commercial side of his career took a mass-market form. Many of his designs were available exclusively at Target stores, which places a named designer's work in a national retail chain rather than in designer boutiques — the arrangement by which a couture-trained name reaches shoppers who would never enter a designer store, with exclusivity meaning Target was the only place those designs could be bought. Alongside that he built a television career of his own: he had a show on the Oxygen Network, and in fall 2005 the Isaac show debuted on the Style Network. He also worked as an interviewer rather than a presenter, serving as the interviewer for The Red Carpet Show on E! for the Golden Globes in 2006. That role put him on the other side of fashion's most public ritual: instead of his clothes being discussed on a red carpet, he was the person questioning the people wearing the clothes. His two named shows also show the television work developing into a format of its own rather than remaining a sideline of guest appearances: a show on the Oxygen Network first, then a show carrying his own first name, Isaac, debuting on the Style Network in fall 2005, on a channel devoted to style programming. A designer with a programme named after himself is no longer appearing on television to promote a collection; the programme is itself one of his products, sold on his personality in the same way the Target designs were sold on his name. Read together, the parts of his record describe a designer whose career ran on two tracks at once — clothes sold at scale through a national retailer, and a screen presence built on a performer's training — with Unzipped as the point where the two tracks first met.