I.M.

by Isaac Mizrahi

  For four months I stayed in my little apartment and sewed a lot. I went out nights to old-movie revivals and new nightclubs. It was a beautiful autumn filled with cold, overcast afternoons in Central Park and I felt lucky to be out of the loop, doing as I pleased. More than anything else during that time off, I made sketches. Day after day, for those months, I sat with my paints at a big, round table that dominated my tiny room. It was a real pleasure for me to pick up my paintbrushes again. When I’d finished Parsons, my sketches devolved into much less elaborate things, made solely to communicate ideas to pattern makers and associates, whipped together in haste with colored pencils or whatever was lying around. Now I got to luxuriate in gouache. That group of sketches was a manifesto, a solidifying of ideas, a basis. There were sketches of ball gowns styled like overalls, and beaded, striped fisherman’s T-shirts worn with duchesse satin evening coats made to look like L.L.Bean barn jackets. Jumpsuits that tied onto the body like kerchiefs. Beaded tartan-plaid pantsuits and trench coats with crinolines. They were the most beautiful sketches I’d ever made to that point. (Recently I had a retrospective at the Jewish Museum and I used several of them in the show.) Those sketches were being done in preparation for something—what, I didn’t know.

  One day the phone rang and it was Calvin Klein’s personal secretary calling to see if I would be interested in meeting him. I was reticent. Calvin was someone I admired, but I knew it would be difficult being around all those neutrals. Working for Calvin seemed like a big opportunity because he had recently parted company with his star associate, Zack Carr, who left to start his own line. But there was nothing Machiavellian about my choosing that job. I had no intention of replacing Zack, no illusions about working there, no desire to further myself at the House of Calvin Klein. As a matter of fact it was hard for me to pretend I even wanted to work in another design room. What drew me there was that glaring flaw in my character: the ugliest, most competitive part of my nature, which sometimes takes over. Objectively I know fashion is a rat race with, at best, dubious rewards, but any invitation to participate is irresistible to my shallower parts. I was drawn again to the glamour, the fun, the powerful klieg lights of fashion, which seemed to shine more relentlessly on Calvin than anywhere.

  When I set off on the allotted day to meet him, a bag lady at the Seventy-second Street subway station looked at the acid-blue flannel paper-bag waist pants I was wearing and said, “You go around scaring people in that?” I raced home to change into something more subdued. But it was an omen about entering a place where compromise would have to prevail.

  * * *

  Calvin worked in a vast three-story loft on the corner of Thirty-ninth Street and Seventh Avenue. It was so big I often got lost. The showroom was decorated by Joe D’Urso and featured hollow carpeted platforms, track lighting, and pin-spotted white cymbidium orchids everywhere—every room looked alike and did nothing to anchor one’s sense of place. All three floors had a hush about them; one floated through the busy hallways, eerily quiet, like the streets of Tokyo without the humor.

  I was shown into Calvin’s private office through the main entrance. There was also a sneaky door to it through the fitting room, which enabled Calvin to escape the premises with no notice and still be perceived as present; or appear out of the blue, as a reminder of his omnipotence. That day I sat waiting in his office, studying the décor, a gamut of objects, from African masks to Stieglitz photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe, one of his main inspirations. He startled me, gliding in from the unseen entrance, like a good-looking specter. Tall, boyish, with a deep, breathy voice that enhances the overall seductive effect.

  He reviewed my sketches, those dear things I had pored over for the last fifteen weeks. “These don’t look a thing like my work,” he said, and I felt a combination of disappointment and relief, convinced he had no intention of hiring me. Then he said, “But they could.” I never understood what he meant by that. Did he like what he saw? Enough to integrate some of the ideas? Or was it his way of saying he was going to bend me to his aesthetic will? In the room that day he offered me a job. “We’re leaving for Europe at the end of the week. If you start tomorrow you can meet everyone first.” Much as I wanted a few more days off to process things, I couldn’t resist the offer, and within three days I was on a plane to Italy.

  * * *

  Almost immediately upon my accepting the job, Calvin was thrown from a horse and spent weeks out of commission. When he returned to work he brooded around the design room on crutches, like a well-dressed Brick from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Every girl and boy flirted with him, including me, in my own passive-aggressive, professional way. But Calvin was elusive. I was used to knowing the people I worked with, each design room forming a kind of family unit, dysfunctional or otherwise. Calvin was the negligent parent of about six or eight of us who vied constantly for his attention, like a bunch of starving children. Actually starving. I observed that the thinner you were, the easier it was to get his attention. Any ounce of extra weight was magnified in that design room tenfold, which was lethal when combined with my natural proclivity to feeling fat. I quickly lost twenty pounds. I ate nothing but almond butter and rice cakes, and I was always exhausted. I was the thinnest I’d been in my entire life. Definitely way underweight. But I looked great. I dressed like a punk Audrey Hepburn, in clothes I made myself: skinny side-zip ski pants with stirrups and tight short-sleeved turtlenecks. Christiaan, the famous hairdresser, told me never to wash my hair again and to use olive oil on it every day, so I had what might be called Jew-dreads. I wore kohl on the lower inside rims of my eyes, Erace on my lips, and white translucent rice powder, which gave me a glowy pallor. With my skeletal frame, it was chic in a ghoulish way, and I got Calvin’s attention.

  I learned a lot working there. Fittings were more formal than they were at Perry Ellis. Calvin would make surprise entrances from that private office door; at times I felt like applauding, the way an audience applauds a star on his entrance. We pinned our expectations on him to know the right thing, and he always did. He had a great eye for tailoring. Even though he couldn’t sew, and I never saw him sketch, he knew exactly what he wanted—always something directly or indirectly related to a man’s suit jacket. I’d watch him closely, even when he was working with lace or an evening dress he was tailoring, giving structure, editing away. He was a great editor. He knew exactly what to get rid of in order to tighten the tension around what remained. The Alfred Hitchcock of fashion.

  We got to know each other a little, but he remained sphinxlike. Boys had crushes on him. Girls had crushes on him, too. And he didn’t do anything to discourage anyone. At that time he seemed to be the textbook definition of bisexual. A history of gossip about liaisons with men didn’t preclude him from dating Kelly Rector, who ran the design room, and who I immediately liked. We trusted each other in those rooms full of tricky personalities. Kelly is gorgeous to look at, with a childlike awe for design that people sometimes mistake for haughtiness or condescension. The fact that she’s so pretty and was in Calvin’s good graces led people to resent her position, or to misread her thoughtfulness as disdain or lack of direction—similar to the way shy people can be misread as standoffish.

  One day a few months after I started there, days after returning from Italy where we had completed our fabric buy for the season, Calvin announced another trip to Europe. It was a total mystery. There were vague plans to visit the fabulous embroidery firm Maison Lesage, in Paris, which was not a resource we had used before. Prior to meeting the rest of us in Paris, Calvin and Kelly went to Rome with the design manager Melissa Huffine and Melissa’s then-boyfriend, Nuno Brandolini. Nuno is from a noble and very well-connected Italian family, so all I could come up with was that Calvin wanted to meet the Pope.

  That Sunday, on my way to Paris, I stopped for a newspaper in the airport. On the cover of the New York Post was a paparazzi picture of Calvin and Kelly leaving a justice of the peace’s office in Rome, having been married the day before
, the wedding, presumably, arranged by Nuno. When I landed in Paris the next morning I couldn’t help feeling like an interloper on what should have been their honeymoon. The appointment with Lesage at the Plaza Athénée went off as scheduled in the bridal suite. We continued on to other parts of Italy, an anomalous schedule of fabric shopping, sweater fittings, and what felt like wedding dinners. We continued on to London, and at the final dinner at Mr Chow’s, Calvin ordered lichee nuts for dessert. When they arrived at the table and the waiter cracked one open, a torrent of ants poured out. I screamed and leapt away from the table. To that point, I think it was the only time I’d ever seen Calvin laugh.

  About a year after that trip, Grace Coddington was hired to replace Kelly, who had decided to stop working. Rumors about Grace’s departure from British Vogue were rampant, and when it was announced she was moving to Calvin Klein as design director the news crashed like a tidal wave. I idolized Grace from my days at Perry Ellis, where we had met briefly, and thought what fun it might be to work in close proximity. And we started off with a bang, always agreeing in design meetings, and dining or going to inspirational exhibits and shows together. When she moved into her new town house I sewed her some linen slipcovers, which she still refers to as the most beautiful she ever had. But a month or two later it occurred to me that the stiff, committeelike approach to design at the company saw no chance of thawing under Grace’s rule. If anything, things became more and more bureaucratic there. My influence at Calvin Klein might have been felt for a season or two, but I was never truly integrated there. While the other designers were sketching mannish suits and coats, I was doing sketches inspired by 1950s Technicolor musicals. One day I passed Calvin in the hall. I was carrying my newest drawings, and he asked to see them. The top sketch was an ostrich-feather coat over a grey-flannel strapless top and trousers—my attempt at softening things up. He looked at me, perplexed, and said, “Okay! Keep at it!”

  In the fall of 1986, I began to realize that what was the beginning of something for Calvin and Grace was the end of the line for me. One day about six months after her arrival, Grace sat me down in the fitting room and broke the news that they decided I wasn’t going to Europe on the trip to buy fabrics that fall. And that was the day I decided to quit, while I was still somewhat ahead.

  20

  I was on the phone with my mother late that summer and she said, “You know you have a small trust fund,” which was news to me. She’d never mentioned an inheritance in the three years since my dad had died. That night I learned that my father left my sisters and me each fifty thousand dollars, and the money was there whenever I wanted it. It wasn’t much, but it was something to consider.

  Why Calvin hadn’t fired me as yet was baffling to me. Great as he is, humor was never his strong suit, on or off the runway. More than once from that sneaky fitting-room door, he walked in on me doing Liz Taylor or Streisand impersonations for a rapt audience of designers, fitters, merchants—whoever was around. He’d freeze, smile ironically, and retreat to his office. I managed to hold my own there for a little over two years with mixed results, and finally among the layers of hierarchy, my bitterness started peeking through. One day, with the entire staff there, I disagreed with one of his decisions about a textile I loved, and in a fit of black humor I said, “Calvin. Are you getting creative on us all of a sudden?” A pall set over the proceedings as happens when a joke crash-lands. When I finally gave Calvin my notice, I think he was relieved.

  I knew it was time to strike out on my own, and the trust fund was the good omen I needed. It wasn’t so much the money itself—I would have struck out on my own even without the money. But I felt ready. The luckiest break I had was that I didn’t realize how ill-prepared I was. I didn’t know how impossible the road ahead was, nor how much money would be needed—I was armed with ignorance.

  I yearned to make clothes that had been formulating in my mind from the days that I started sketching in my basement atelier. And since I’d started working professionally my vision had intensified, and I had a clear idea about what I wanted for the future. There was a balance I could strike; a reason to form a house. What the world was missing was American clothes with a real sense of humor. And color. Color would be a huge part of it. I wanted to create unexpected, jarring combinations of colors that couldn’t be contained in a category like “pastels” or “brights,” or, my least-favorite category descriptor, “jewel tones.” I wanted a world where you’d choose colors from a huge array—so much color that a mistake would be a good thing; accidental pairings of bright pink, tomato red, pale saffron, and henna; or deep sky blue with purple undertones mixed with Yves Klein blue, yellow, and olive green.

  * * *

  My first task was to find a space to set up a tiny atelier. I had my heart set on being in SoHo even though a decade before my father had warned me against the abominations of the area. His first job in the garment business years and years earlier was in one of the sweatshops there, legendary for their horrid working conditions. Since that time those factories had disappeared and SoHo was a burned-out neighborhood. But by 1986, there was an enclave of artist studios and a few start-up galleries. It would be a while before the majority of new shops and restaurants would assemble, and for those few years you could feel the energy pushing forth through the cobblestone streets about to explode in the cast-iron factory buildings—a potent contrast with the squalor of its decrepit past. And: It was the only place I could afford.

  A real-estate agent named Susan Penzner, who later became a good friend, brought me to a loft on Greene Street, small by comparison to any of the design rooms I’d worked in, but huge in my imagination. When I walked in, I felt that room in my bowels. I saw the studio in the same way I saw a puppet theatre in a garage before there was one. It felt like my place.

  Sarah Haddad (who had since remarried and renamed herself Sarah Cheney) and I had remained friends, even though it was a number of years since we’d worked together after the IS New York label folded. Though I wanted to stay as far away from the community as possible, I knew Sarah was a strong-willed, capable person who really believed in me. I knew I could talk to her about my ideas and be taken seriously. The steep odds against our success never occurred to her; again, ignorance was a major asset. I knew it probably would have been better to have someone with a lot more experience as a partner, but from the first phone call I knew she was ready, and I knew that she was smart enough to pick up whatever she didn’t know. I was feeling my way as I went along, and it was nice having someone enthusiastic and familiar in the fold.

  It also seemed like I had my first commission: Melissa Huffine, who had worked as the design manager at Calvin Klein and who became a good friend, had been teetering nervously on the edge of becoming an Italian aristocrat. She’d finally become engaged to Nuno Brandolini after a long courtship, and they announced their engagement. She chose me to make her dress. It took months of arranging and fittings and every resource I had at the time. The dress was composed of an off-the-shoulder peasant blouse with full sleeves made of silk organdie covered by a meticulously cut corset of about thirty panels made in silk peau de soie over an enormous bustled ball-gown skirt and train. The color was dark cream, almost bone. In the late daylight, she looked like a John Singer Sargent painting. The bridal party added to the effect: little boys dressed in navy blue double-breasted suits and flower girls in dresses I made—cream silk pinafores trimmed in navy blue ribbon.

  On the big day I was driven to Melissa and Nuno’s house in Southampton where I oversaw the dressing, all the time containing my hysteria. Every socialite in New York was invited to that wedding. Oscar de la Renta, whom I didn’t know at the time, was there. It made me so nervous to think that all those perfect people dressed in Chanel and Valentino would be scrutinizing my work at close proximity.

  I’ve always had a tendency toward disaster fantasy. The first dresses I made for public spectacle filled me with a particular dread. Any time there was someone dressed
in my clothes at an important event I imagined a seam ripping at a crucial moment or someone stepping on the train and ruining it. That day I was especially filled with such dread.

  At the reception Oscar made a point of coming over and telling me how much he liked the dress. It seemed like everyone liked it. All the papers had items about the event and about my dress, referring to me as a new designer name. A day later the back cover of WWD was split between Melissa’s wedding and the wedding of someone I had heard about, a very glamourous young editor at Vogue named Elizabeth Saltzman, who had already begun making a name for herself. Her wedding to Glenn Dubin took place at the Puck Building (hooray 1980s!) the same Sunday as Melissa’s. Elizabeth’s dress was a straight, white sheath with a train, made by Stephen Sprouse. Right after the ceremony Sprouse himself cut the train off with a pair of scissors, a modern, almost violent act. This was photographed for posterity and published in WWD alongside a picture of Melissa in my dress, which was the complete opposite—a study in taste and decorum. Pleased as I was about what my dress looked like and even the attention, I was nonetheless annoyed by the implied comparison. On their own each dress had merits and flaws, but next to the Sprouse, mine seemed staid. I was baffled as to what the dresses had to do with each other and why they were presented side by side. I knew the coverage was more to do with society weddings than wedding-gown designs but I felt inadvertently misrepresented and resentful of sharing the tiny editorial space. No matter how illogical my feelings—it wasn’t about me—I couldn’t help noticing how unfair it was to be juxtaposed thus. It was the beginning of a lot of that.