But after a full month away, depression took its hold. In the past I had chosen to be alone, which is all the difference between solitude and loneliness. A month later I returned to New York, thankful to be in one piece, having learned a lesson: I wasn’t the world traveler I thought I might be. In the years that followed, I did a lot of traveling to far-flung places, which brought me great satisfaction and a lot of inspiration coupled with a great deal of angst and hardship. I smile when I think back on that first trip abroad, or any travel for that matter. Yet another case of looking back fondly on something that’s really such a pain in the ass.
15
In the fashion business, being too early is just as bad as being too late. Timing is everything. Often I’d introduce something and then abandon it before people got through buying it, leaving it for others to cash in on. A quote of mine has made the rounds over the years: “Good designers bore very easily.” In fact, the minute something is established as fashion, I literally hate it. When skirts are long I want them short, and vice versa. And this is not limited to clothes. Anything really popular—a show, a novel, a restaurant—seems to suffer in my estimation from being “fashionable.” It’s been that way since I can remember. When bell-bottoms first happened in the late 1960s I wasn’t even a fully formed person and I remember hating them after only six months. When my parents took us to see The Godfather in 1972 I remember all the advance hype made me skeptical of it. In my estimation a good designer is through with something as soon as he does it, and then is on to the next thing. In its own crazy way, this might be considered a form of antifashion. I wish there were another word to capture what I strive for. Call it surprise. I like surprise much better than fashion.
Learning who you are is about learning who you’re not and learning who came before you. To me, one of the most important things is learning to make clothes and accessories. If you have style and taste you can make a go of things, but by knowing how to drape, how to construct clothes, how to sew, you stand a better chance of bringing it all to a higher level. If you make the clothes yourself, you’re capable of creating something “inventive.” After my interviews with Mollie Parnis and Anthony Muto, I was inspired to not skip any steps. I had already begun teaching myself to sew and was taking draping classes at Parsons in the evenings, but I knew if my clothes were to be on the level with Norell or Geoffrey Beene, I had an enormous amount to learn about the craft of making clothes.
The night before I officially started at Parsons I went out to the Mudd Club, one of my favorites at the time in TriBeCa (back then a burned-out, seedy neighborhood). The Mudd Club had a modern, “new wave” energy, and there was no scene at the door, you just walked in. The music was less disco, more rock and roll. It didn’t thud and pulse like a lot of the other discos I frequented. It felt chic and not as sex crazed. It was a Sunday night, and I got there rather early, and it felt brighter than usual that night, like someone had turned all the lights on. I noticed a girl smoking a cigarette alone on a bench opposite me. She was beautiful, with brass-colored hair; thick, beautifully arched eyebrows; a smile full of great white teeth; high cheekbones; and big dark-brown eyes. Part Doris Day, part Julie Christie. We started talking. She told me she was there with the designer Zoran, whom I had admired. She came off as slightly older than me, and I assumed that she and Zoran were dating, because when she introduced me to him later he glared at me and seemed to intentionally step on my foot. Later we said good night, and that was the last I thought I’d see of Zoran or the beautiful girl.
The next morning I arrived for the first day at Parsons School of Design and there was the girl. Jackie Spaniel. She was sitting at the pattern-making table next to me. She came from the outer reaches of Pennsylvania and had none of the wiseass jaded ways of the rest of my New York City friends. She had a purity, a freshness, an endless reserve of optimism and smiles, and it was a wonderful change of pace. That same day I met Peter Speliopoulos—dark-haired, sharp-featured, brought up Greek Orthodox middle-class in Springfield, Massachusetts—who also considered himself an outsider in his family, which included three younger, straight brothers. Peter and I had so much in common. We were both gay, from religious homes, and we had huge expectations of life and big ambitions in the fashion business. Peter, like Jackie, had that attractive, out-of-town sunniness that fed on curiosity.
Learning about fashion will always be tied up with the pursuit of society and nightlife tinged with immorality. We had as many opportunities to learn about sketching and sewing as we did staying up late and partying. But it wasn’t the typical dorm-room partying with coeds chug-a-lugging from kegs. New York City was our campus, and our partying ran the gamut from chic Upper East Side clubs to strip clubs in Times Square. We plunged into the night scene of the city with the same energy we gave to our classes in draping and sketching.
The school was run by a woman named Ann Keagy, who for over thirty years was known on Seventh Avenue as a perfectionist with an eye for talent. She cultivated relationships with people like Calvin Klein and Bill Blass, and had pull in every design room from Seventh Avenue to the avenue Montaigne. She ran that place like an army barracks, and the teachers under her were drill sergeants. Every stitch we made was scrutinized and harshly graded. Almost nothing was perfect enough. Every piece of muslin we picked up to drape with had to be blocked, a process of straightening out the grain by pulling and steaming. Then, in order to know what direction that grain was going when we draped, each panel had a length and width grain thread that had to be identified. There were many simpler ways of doing it, but we were taught to pull these threads. That meant hours of delicate work with a straight pin for no other reason than to confirm what was abundantly obvious already. It was the way our ancestors did it, and Ann Keagy thought it was best, so we did it. And I never regretted it—except while I was doing it. I remember sitting in the smokers’ lounge with my classmates and someone wondering aloud if Brooke Shields, a girl slightly younger than us who was making millions in the fashion business, ever had to pick grain threads.
We had all kinds of immersion-type classes. We had eight-hour drawing classes with a beautiful older model named Victoria who looked like the Klimt paintings of Adele Bloch-Bauer. She would dress up in old clothes—tailored suits, grand ball gown skirts, feather stoles, mannish coats—and would do different poses lasting anywhere from one minute “gestures” to twenty minutes. We had other drawing classes with the great Steven Meisel who began his career as a fashion illustrator. His favorite model was a transsexual named Teri Toye, who was also the muse of Stephen Sprouse. Meisel would make us draw Teri in the flash-intervals of a strobe light, or in complete darkness.
We had rigorous textile-design classes where we learned the different properties of silk, wool, cotton, and synthetics. How they grew and where. The difference between one filament and another. How yarns were finished and spun, and woven or knitted. We learned to administer “the burn test”; burning cloth to determine whether it’s silk or wool or cotton from the way it smelled when it burned, notes which are imbedded in my nose to this day. (I still quote my textile teacher: “Wool is god.”)
The most influential teacher at Parsons was Frank Rizzo, who went slightly against Ann Keagy’s brand of tyranny in favor of a more freewheeling, glamourous approach. He was a small man with grey hair, aviator eyeglasses, and a mouth that was built in a natural upturn, so that even when he was angry or hurt, he looked happy. He taught design when I was a junior and senior, and later he succeeded Ann Keagy as dean of fashion design. He knew and taught everyone from Donna Karan to Marc Jacobs and Zac Posen.
Rizzo and I had a special rapport from the start. He was someone who seemed interested in my happiness and really amused by me as a person. And I felt the same about him. He was the only one of my teachers who ever encouraged my diverse range of talents and never advised me to narrow the field. He knew of my interest in the theatre arts and said on more than one occasion, “If they can’t catch up to you—fuck �
�em!” I knew that he lived half the time in Tennessee with his boyfriend, Richard, a tall handsome guy with a drawl, who owned and ran a flower shop in Crossville, a heroic idea to me. I loved that Frank kept himself so separate from the rat race and would traverse the country once a week to be home. He was a wonderful design teacher, but he was also a magnificent and fearless role model for the many young gay men and women that crossed his path.
Even having all that background at Parsons evening school and more technical skill than most people in my class, I still didn’t get the full essence of fashion as a subject—the object of the game—until second-year design classes. Our sketches were open to class critiques, and I noted that the focus was on flashier sketches, which seemed antithetical to my ideas about ingrained quality that wasn’t made too obvious. In a world saturated with images, one had to do clothes that wouldn’t be a bore, but that also weren’t only exaggerations. They needed to be clothes that caught the attention, the right kind of attention—noticed for being smarter than the average designer blouse or pantsuit.
I started knowing what I wanted and didn’t want. Organically, I hate overtly sexy clothes. I observed—I guess with all the going out at night—that the least sexy thing was someone trying to be sexy. If a young woman or man is beautiful, they look less so when they call attention to it. Also at that point I discovered that I liked even the dressiest clothes—ball gowns, tuxedos—to look as casual and functional as ski gear. My mother encouraged these thoughts about sporty clothes. We met for our Saturday morning breakfasts only rarely by that point, but during one of them she pointed out that great American style was much more casual than European. She told me I took after my grandfather, her father, Alfred Esses, who was nicknamed “The Sport” and “The Prince of Wales” because of his great ability to make everything he wore at once elegant and casual.
I began to think more and more about the message a woman sends forth with her clothing. The social and political reflection of who she is. How flashy is she? How reserved? How big is her hair and how high are her heels? Does she have a sense of humor? This messaging is a big part of anyone’s identity, and it became my job to help people send the message they wanted, and that I valued. It was a subject I had a lot of background in, having grown up with a mother and sisters who definitely dressed for end results.
* * *
The first major design assignment in my junior year was a swimsuit ensemble. Star fashion designers were brought in to critique our work, and mine was the great American designer Charles Suppon. He had a celebrated collection called Intre Sport, which was an early take on athleisure. You could wear those clothes to the office, then to cocktails, and maybe even to the gym the next day. One of the more fabulous things he did was a shaggy, knitted-mohair sweat suit that was photographed a lot that year. Having him as a critic cemented my awe for this irreverent mixing of genres. He also worked in the theatre, not just as a costume designer, but as a writing collaborator with Peter Allen, among others. His clothes were great, but the idea of his diversity, his work in the theatre, was what most impressed me. He seemed like he had a fun social life, too. He often walked into class disheveled and bleary-eyed. One morning Peter leaned in and whispered, “He smells like sex.”
One of the major inspirations that I took from working with Suppon was the idea of doing exactly the clothes you wanted without worrying about what was expected of you. For this project my idea was a white, strapless, one-piece swimsuit with sage-green-striped insets on the thigh, creating the illusion of striped swim trunks beneath the strapless maillot. Over that was a box-quilted coat of an ordinary, but very pure and beautiful, white sheeting fabric quilted with white cotton terry cloth on the reverse, all edged in sage-green webbing that looked like it came off a sneaker. The whole appeal of the coat had to do with the glorious white freshness of two different textures and the subtlety of the light lamb’s-wool padding in between. The quilting was a straight three-inch grid that came across as industrial—like the softest, coziest elevator pad imaginable. The coat stopped right below the hip line and had a boxy, oversized shape. I love the luxury of oversized clothes, a taste I developed in high school. With my self-image, I always felt sexier in fuller, more covered-up clothes.
Charles Suppon picked my design as his Gold Thimble Award winner that semester, which meant my design would be singled out as the winner in the midterm fashion show. This was a huge surprise for me and everyone else in the class. My design seemed so plain compared to some of the flashier projects. To my second-year draping and sewing teacher, whose instructions I always ignored, this was an affront. It was a huge boost to my creative ego, though, and suddenly I was being noticed in class and in the school itself. It was a different thing now to walk the halls or sit in the smokers’ lounge.
I got the sketch back from Suppon with a red Magic Marker star and a big note that said: “Show this with goggles and swim flippers.” I hated that note. It negated all the good that came from being awarded the Gold Thimble. I didn’t understand at the time what an amusing idea it was to style it like that. I had imagined the model with braided hair and bare feet, and his vision of it as a joke about sports clothes was too edgy even for me. Like any self-absorbed college art student, I couldn’t accept such a radical revision of my work, so I devised a plan to get Suppon to change his mind. I thought if I could only talk to him he would understand my position. How could it hurt to call the guy and at least try? In those days directory assistance was a powerful thing. He was listed, and he answered the phone.
“Who is this?”
“Isaac Mizrahi. The student you gave the Gold Thimble to. Listen. I’m not sure I agree with the idea of showing my swimsuit with goggles and swim flippers.”
“What is this? Who—”
“I thought if I called and explained—”
Dial tone.
The next day I was summoned to the teachers’ lounge, a windowless room that felt like a big prefabricated closet with wall-to-wall industrial carpet that smelled of synthetics. The entire design faculty was assembled there, all of them scowling at me, Frank Rizzo at the head. I was warned that if anything like that ever happened again I would be thrown out of school.
In the end I got my way. The girl walked in the show with braided hair and bare feet. And to this day, I regret it.
* * *
My favorite class was one called “Museum,” which convened every Wednesday morning in the costume archive of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where we were shown some of the great clothes of history up close and were able to inspect and handle them while wearing white cotton gloves. One advantage I had living at home was my mother’s encyclopedic, anecdotal knowledge of midcentury designers—American and otherwise. She told me stories about Norman Norell’s alliances with Marilyn Monroe and Lauren Bacall, which weren’t covered in those classes. She told me about Norell’s love of theatre and his abilities as a costume designer, which often gets passed over in historical documents about him. He had a distant friendship, a kind of aesthetic dialogue, with Balenciaga. For instance, my mother told me there was a time when both would only show their austere and modernistic clothes on Asian models with high stiff coiffures, huge butterfly eyelashes, and erased lips. My mother would fill my head with fabulous facts and ideas about clothes that I would then use in class, amazing the faculty with the things I knew.
A few of my mother’s choice proclamations:
“Norma Kamali is the Claire McCardell of her age. Racy, inexpensive.”
About a Pauline Trigère coat she acquired at Loehmann’s: “It was so beautifully made that when it got dirty it took itself to the cleaners.”
And:
“Chester Weinberg is a designer’s designer. He’s the brains behind American sportswear.”
On the virtues of Norell:
“The reason Norman Norell is so great is because he understands two things: textiles and women.”
Rizzo was enchanted by these stories and proclamations. He pr
actically invited himself to my house to meet the woman he called Sarah, never referring to her as my mother, which lent a kind of sophistication to our mother/son relationship. So with much trepidation I got “Sarah” to cook dinner one Thursday night, and I invited Rizzo and my new friends Peter and Jackie. I was anxious about it, but the evening went off smoothly, in large part thanks to Rizzo’s charm and great discretion. He was the same size and stature as my father, and he seemed to have great respect for my dad’s stories about working his way up in the garment trade. And the fact that Frank was not obviously gay—at least not as obviously as some of the other faculty at Parsons—made the evening easier.
After that, there were a few more dinners in Brooklyn with Rizzo and various others, all at my mother’s invitation. She liked Frank. She liked cooking exotic Syrian dishes and promising to send him the recipes. She loved that he knew all these famous, fabulous designers, and yet he chose to dine with her. It was my mother’s way of involving herself in my life. She was coming to terms with the fact that I was not headed back to the fold after graduation, so she made it her business to get to know the world I was trying to root myself in. If she couldn’t go with me into that world, she would do all she could to bring it to her.
16
Without exactly meaning to, I came out to Sarah Haddad, with whom I’d remained friends after we closed IS New York. One evening in the spring of 1979 we were having a late dinner after seeing Evita on Broadway. I was describing a new club downtown called The Underground, which had taken over the old Andy Warhol Factory, and I got carried away with the telling.
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