I.M.

by Isaac Mizrahi

  Having two summer-job offers created a conflict. Even though Perry Ellis was the most important American fashion designer of that moment, I wasn’t his greatest fan yet. His clothes were less grown-up than I might have liked. And, truthfully, I was holding out for a job with Geoffrey Beene or Pauline Trigère, or one of the more established designers. And on the surface, the Perry Ellis studio paled against the job at the fabulous costume shop at the Public Theater, that colorful room full of costumes all hung from the ceiling—a glorious reward for a garage puppeteer. Should I follow my theatrical bent or hunker down and stick to the responsible plan I made to succeed in the fashion world? I felt the road distinctly forking beneath my feet. Never one to give in to the easy, attractive option, I decided it was almost a regression to take a job working at a costume shop—glittery and fun as it seemed. I had set out to conquer the fashion world and nothing was going to take me off course.

  * * *

  That summer job at Perry Ellis transformed my attitude toward what working in fashion could mean. Perry made the pursuit of excellence seem as important in fashion as it was in medicine or law. Lives might not have been at stake, but it was evident that even something as superficial as fashion required first, the desire to make something of quality; and second, the necessity of sacrificing almost everything else to hard work. I’d arrive early in the morning and was usually met by Nina Santisi, (Laura’s sister), who would have already been there for an hour. She was in charge of public relations and had the busiest job at that place in those days, coordinating magazines’ requests to photograph Perry’s clothes. She had the exacting efficiency of a schoolteacher and the look of a beautiful English aristocrat, with peachy, poreless skin.

  Patricia and Jed would show up sometime around 10:00 A.M. and at 11:00 A.M., the fitting model would arrive for the daily production fitting, which is when clothes from the most recent fashion show are adopted onto the line, scrutinized for fit, and adapted to the figures of real women. Perry arrived just before noon for the end of the fitting. He would begin his day by answering to Peggy Lee, his personal assistant, a wry, quiet, good-looking woman who kept all his affairs in order. After Perry conducted numerous phone interviews and business calls, a late lunch was brought in. Then we would proceed with a design meeting that would last into the night, till at least 8:00 or 9:00 P.M., with breaks only to take care of studio and salesroom demands. Around show times our workloads increased triplefold. We worked most Saturdays and a lot of Sundays, and no one seemed to mind or even notice. As a result of all that time spent together, the lines between the personal and the professional blurred—we were more like family than coworkers.

  My mother was only too happy to assist in blurring those lines. She came to the showroom more than a few times to order clothes wholesale for herself and my sisters, and was delighted to meet the people I worked with. She came up one day wearing an original pony-skin box jacket with huge leather-covered buttons and bound buttonholes that she’d kept from the 1960s, knowing it was just like something Perry had revived for one of his recent collections. Recognizing the wink, Perry was amused. He said, “You have a stylish mother.” And then, “She never throws anything away, does she?” After that, they carried on sporadic communications via me. He’d say something that he knew I’d say to her, and vice versa. Once she sent him chicken soup. I almost didn’t give it to him, but she called Peggy Lee to make sure he got it. It was packaged in one of the round plastic Carvel ice-cream containers she used for freezing her monthly batches of chicken soup, and I was mortified when she demanded I get the container back afterwards.

  I developed a lot of close relationships in those years, but the most important was with Jed, who became like a brother to me. Jed was a bit overweight, and he did the same thing I had always done—deflect attention away from more personal aspects of himself by becoming a kind of jester. I was his sidekick jester. After a while he learned that I did outrageous impersonations of Aretha Franklin and Streisand and Polly Mellen, and he’d ask for them regularly. He had a great sense of humor and would stop everything for a joke. After days and days of pressured work late into the night, Jed would find the perfectly timed comic moment to stop what he was doing and let out a random, ear-shattering, bloodcurdling SCREAM. It was a release that everyone adored, it made us laugh and laugh. You could hear people in different rooms, upstairs, across halls, just laughing.

  A lot of the humor in the design room made fun of the casual racism, sexism, and homophobia that had terrified me as a child. I was now surrounded by people who mocked it in a way that neutralized it. Perry’s threshold for this sort of humor was high. He was such a WASP, and yet when he freely referred to the rest of us as “Kikes” and “Wops,” etc., clearly in jest, we screamed with laughter. He was fond of saying things like “Mary, today I think I’ll have one of those delicious Jewish rolls for lunch … What are they called?” And someone would say, “Really, Mary? It’s called a bagel.”

  * * *

  The offices at Perry Ellis were salonlike. Glamourous, influential people were in and out all day. I think the reason editors liked being there so much was because not only were the clothes great, but there was a sense of ease and humor about the place, so different from the other houses on Seventh Avenue, which took themselves very seriously. Aside from the model fittings, entertainment luminaries were constantly coming up for clothes. Within the first week I worked at Perry Ellis I encountered a number of celebrities—people like Glenn Close and Lauren Hutton, who were big fans of Perry’s. On my third day on the job, as a joke, Perry sent me into the little fitting room (really a closet) with Tommy Tune’s suit for him to try on, and he was standing there stark naked, a sight that made me blush. Perry ribbed me about it for weeks. Within the first month I was assigned the job of dressing Mariel Hemingway, who was to be Perry’s date for the Met Gala that year. She was staying at the Stanhope, across the street from the Met, and I dressed her in a “gown,” which to Perry meant a floor-length, black, hand-knit, Shetland cardigan sweater.

  Early one morning that summer, the public relations department called to tell us Lauren Bacall was on her way up to look at clothes. Perry was away and Jed knew what an old-movie freak I was, so he made sure I was assigned to that detail. It wasn’t until I saw her walking toward me in that showroom that I believed what was happening. I’d seen all of her movies in revival, but I had also pored over old issues of Harper’s BAZAAR containing portfolios of pictures taken of her by the great Louise Dahl-Wolfe. To my mother she was a goddess—a beautiful Jewish girl from Brooklyn who hit it big. “If anyone in Hollywood knows clothes, it’s Lauren Bacall,” my mother said again and again. She told me stories about Norell making couture clothes for Bacall in the 1950s, and in the 1970s Halston doing the same. I hung on every word of my mother’s stories, which represented a fashion past that had to do with quality and vision more than sensationalism or flash.

  It was early in the morning for Bacall when she came up those marble stairs to the showroom, and evidently before her morning coffee. She was grumpy, wore dark sunglasses, a trench coat, a bucket hat, and she had a Band-Aid on her face as though she’d cut herself shaving. Our meeting was polite and after about fifteen minutes of restraint I finally said: “Miss Bacall. You have to know how much I adore you. As an actress, but also as a fashion icon. Designing Woman alone. I mean…” From that moment I think she understood that she had an adoring audience, and as the morning wore on and the coffee took effect, she thawed. Two hours later she was still gambolling round that huge marble showroom in her pantyhose, throwing clothes on and off, laughing and enjoying herself. At the end of the appointment she was descending the stairs to leave, and I said to her, “If you ever need anything, please call. Actually. Just whistle. You know how to whistle?” We both groaned, but then she paused and gave me that big wonderful smile.

  There was an extravagance that went with fashion in those days. Veronica Webb and I were talking recently about what it used to be
like compared to what it’s become in the industry, and she said, “Darling, we were raised in Versailles. The kids today can’t imagine the grandeur!” It was the luxury business, and we were steeped in luxury amidst all the hard work and long hours. Samples were remade three and four times in the pursuit of perfection, no expense spared. Vogue was known to reshoot most of their stories at least once, for the slightest change of an eyebrow or the gloss of a lip. There were private cars, seaplanes to shootings at Perry’s house on Water Island, fabulous dinners and parties, and the most beautiful flowers appearing in the office and sent to our apartments.

  The real extravagances were the materials. Mad amounts of the most beautiful, luxurious textiles were ordered each season. “Sampling fabrics” means to order between fifteen and thirty yards of something in order to give it a try. Ideally the sample fabrics would arrive in New York a month or so after the fabric shows, to give the designers a chance to try them out—to make a skirt or jacket or evening gown, figure out how to manipulate the fabrics and decide which they liked the best. It never really worked that way, though, because mostly the Italian mills were late to deliver. So you hedged your bets and got into the practice of ordering much more than you needed so as to have backup fabrics at the ready. Sample cuts were pyramided on the floor of the studio because the shelves were stuffed to their limits. Before a collection there was hardly room to walk for the piles of sample cuts.

  There were also stacks and stacks—literally walls—of shoe boxes full of sample shoes. In the same bet-hedging way, a designer would order excesses of accessories for his fashion shows. Looking at early prototypes of shoes one could never tell if the corrections would be made satisfactorily, so you’d order twenty times as many shoes as was needed for the average fashion show (which, in those days could go on for 150-plus looks—today, twenty or thirty looks in a show would be deemed lengthy and boring). The footwear and handbag makers would be responsible for sending hundreds and hundreds of samples, which sometimes arrived a day before the shows. Once, Perry decided he wanted one particular crocodile pump shown with everything. Crocodile was and still is a difficult thing to bring into the country, and those shoes languished in customs for days. They were released to us hours before the show and arrived on the premises as the crowd was assembling. The memory is burned in my head forever of Patricia Pastor tearing open boxes, throwing shoes across to me, and shouting, “Give these to Lynn Kohlman! And these to Nancy Donahue!”

  Dining out in groups after work was just as regular an occurrence as working late. Jed and I went to dinner at Café Un Deux Trois, or Anita’s Chili Parlor, or any number of places that have since closed. Perry sometimes took us out to lavish dinners at Elio’s or Café des Artistes. One of his best friends was Tina Chow, and all of us in that studio were in awe of her. Talk about intimidating exotic beauty. She would drop in to visit Perry, not knowing I was alive, while I would study her every inch. Her moonlight skin. Her painstakingly buffed nails. Her short black-lacquer hair and bright red lips. The cashmere cardigan worn over a Hanes T-shirt with mannish grey-flannel trousers. Nothing ostentatious, only discreet quality from the bones out. The first time Perry took us to Mr Chow, the fabulously chic restaurant owned by her husband, Michael Chow, my head exploded. It was the most elegant room I’d ever been to. The Lalique doors. The ivory lacquer walls. The Thonet chairs. The menus contained in Hermès leather binders. The scene was fabulous in a way I couldn’t yet fathom. Fashion editors André Leon Talley and Marian McEvoy, who were close friends of Perry’s, would join us on occasion and supply a running commentary, complete with histories and gossip. It was art, sex, drugs, cuisine—any and all conversations running at once. A grand variety of people from different walks of life. The beau monde.

  In keeping with Perry’s obsession with the British Isles, at one point he tried to establish the idea of afternoon tea served at the studio, and for a while every day at four, everything would stop and tea would be brought in, along with petit fours and crustless tea sandwiches from a place called William Poll, which are still my favorites. Any number of people would join for tea. Manolo Blahnik. Barry Kieselstein-Cord. All sorts of celebrated editors and photographers. It was a good idea, but it didn’t last long. The schedule got the best of these teas, and after about six or eight weeks, it was over.

  Tea service or no, the daily Perry Ellis salon marched forward, every influencer of the day in and out of those offices. Major fashion editors and buyers would stop in unexpectedly—people like Carrie Donovan, a treasure of a woman who ran The New York Times Magazine fashion pages. I immediately adored her, and she me. She called me “Yvessac” and said to Perry about me the day we met, “You really know how to pick ’em.” Another constant presence was John Duka, who wrote a weekly column for The New York Times about fashion and style subjects called “Notes on Fashion,” and who became quite a huge star on the scene in the early 1980s. (He is also rumored to have been Larry Kramer’s model for the role of the journalist boyfriend in The Normal Heart.) John was witty and I was always impressed with his ability to write something interesting and culturally based—not just surface-scratching like other, more shallow fashion journalism. He was also very handsome and seemed to have all the confidence in the world, which inspired the opposite in me.

  From the time I started at Perry Ellis it felt like I was under twenty-four-hour surveillance from Condé Nast, especially Vogue. If I hadn’t already believed it, it was drummed into my head in those early days that Vogue was everything, and nothing else mattered. At Perry Ellis, if two magazines wanted the same dress, it always went to Vogue. It’s a rule I embraced, and it stayed with me through all my years on my own. At the time Vogue was run by Grace Mirabella, a smart lady whose mystique was wrapped up and protected by two or three of her favorite editors, who represented the magazine. One was Polly Mellen, an exuberant woman who at the age of fortysomething looked exactly as she does forty years later—with her forever-white bob and fabulous legs. Polly had the uncanny knack of finding the new thing before everyone else and dropping it sooner. She was known for stomping her feet and clapping like a seal at fashion shows when she liked something, and sneering if she didn’t. She exuded an energy that encouraged designers to do daring, sometimes outrageous, things. I admired her from afar for months, and when I graduated from Parsons she came to the senior fashion show dinner dressed in a crotch-length Stephen Sprouse fluorescent-green pailletted minidress with white tights and silver leather Mary-Janes. She approached me from across the ballroom at the Hilton hotel, and said: “Dearie, you’re the young man I’ve seen at Perry Ellis. My, but you’re going places, aren’t you?”

  There was Jade Hobson, who everyone thought would be Mirabella’s replacement when she retired. Jade was Polly’s polar opposite. She sat stone-faced through most previews and shows where Polly was bouncing off the walls. And finally at the end Jade would crack a little smile and whisper almost inaudibly, “Golly, that’s chic.” Jade was a knockout to look at and might have been mistaken for a fashion model herself. One day, right after I started at Perry Ellis, I was at the airport and I noticed a woman waiting for her car at the curb. She looked exactly like an Arthur Elgort photograph one might see in Vogue. There was Jade, complete with narrow knee-length skirt, flawless legs, high heels, clutching her fisher fur coat, big hair undulating in the wind, a Louis Vuitton suitcase at her feet. Jade really walked the walk.

  Early on at Perry Ellis I was witness to some of the complicated and unkind politics of the fashion press. There was a fashion critic who hated Perry for dating someone whom that critic had set his sights on. He gave Perry bad reviews for the rest of time because of that. John Fairchild, the publisher and editor in chief of WWD, had a lot of fun making and breaking people. Lucky for me, he liked me a lot. He called me “Genius” whenever he saw me, and he praised me to the heavens when I went out on my own. The first day I met Mr. Fairchild I was on the street, styling one of the Perry Ellis dresses they were shooting for a pre
view. I retied a satin bow on the dropped-waist of the dress the model wore, which Mr. Fairchild noticed. He proclaimed, “Now that young man knows how to tie a bow! There’s only one other person I’ve seen tie a bow like that: Mr. Yves Saint Laurent.”

  My mother and I dined out on that comment for months.

  * * *

  Designers start as early as a year in advance of their shows to have everything ready for the one big day. Fabrics are developed, as are accessories, venues are booked, dates are reserved in the fashion calendar. The purpose of fashion shows is to present the new collection to the press, and there are more and more of them every year. Editors shuttle from city to city and from show to show, and the competition for an elite A-list audience is fierce. Lately showmanship has taken a great position in fashion week, and the giant extravaganzas can often outshine the clothes. In the old days, New York fashion week occurred after the European shows, which began in Paris. This was a no-win scenario. If you showed clothes that didn’t fall in line with what had been shown in Europe you were seen as démodé. If you did show clothes that reflected the European trends, you were considered a copyist. A strange phenomenon of the time: New York designers were supposed to be greatly influenced by the European collections, and if you went too much against the grain you were considered outré, contrary. The powers at WWD considered it the New York designers’ duties to cash in on the trends that were begun in Europe, and their reviews reflected that stance. But things had begun to change when I worked at Perry Ellis, and he was at the forefront of those changes.