I.M.

by Isaac Mizrahi

  * * *

  In those days all of the important designers—Geoffrey Beene, Bill Blass, Oscar de la Renta, Anne Klein—were located in one building: 550 Seventh Avenue. Donna Karan, who had recently set up her own offices, did so in that building, and it seemed to me like an exclusive club, outside of which you stood no chance of succeeding. By comparison, SoHo was a dead zone. The art scene was thriving there, but in those days fashion editors and buyers were offended if they had to walk one block out of their usual route, and most of the people I looked up to strongly advised me not to set up my studio anywhere but in the garment district. Kal Ruttenstein, who was the fashion director for Bloomingdale’s, told me I was crazy and I didn’t stand a chance anywhere but Seventh Avenue. Another young designer located only twenty blocks south of the fashion district who had gone out of business was painted to be a spendthrift by the press. One of the line items they focused on were his bills for private cars, which he was forced to send for people in order to get them to come see his collection. Something else Kal told me was never to send private cars for people, what he really thought was a piece of valuable advice.

  But the thick fashion scene that prevailed on Seventh Avenue was antithetical to everything I wanted to do. I couldn’t tell the difference between one designer and the next, especially in the stores after all the fuss and styling had been removed. I was like a conscientious outsider, and it was that distance that allowed me to think differently. SoHo was deserted in those days. Walking the streets any time of the week you might run across one or two people but not more. If you wanted a crowd you’d have to go a few blocks south to Canal Street or over to Broadway. If you were hungry there was a place called Food. It was a cafeteria on the corner of Prince and Wooster with a Socialist mien and bare-bone amenities. I don’t even think there was air-conditioning. The light was dim but not on purpose; the place barely had light fixtures. The food was cheap and abundant and the clientele reflected the local population; often you couldn’t tell the difference between an artist and a vagrant.

  There was a beautiful anomalous restaurant called Chanterelle created and run by David and Karen Waltuck, whom I later became friends with. It was on the corner of Grand Street and Mercer. Whenever I wanted to impress the “uptown” crowd I would take them there. These were editors and friends who wouldn’t go far afield of the old guard, elegant restaurants like La Caravelle or La Grenouille. Chanterelle was the place to prove that there was another kind of elegance in New York City. It was the most beautiful room, with austere cream-colored walls, a plain brass chandelier and dimmed lighting, and a single, massive flower arrangement located against the center wall of the room. There was a new design for the cover of the menu every few weeks, made by artists bartering for food—Cy Twombly, Jennifer Bartlett, Ross Bleckner to name a few. I took John Fairchild and C.Z. Guest there for lunch once, and reluctant as they were to admit it, they knew they were experiencing something as fresh and new as it was luxurious. It was akin to what I was trying to evoke in clothing: beautiful, original, technically flawless, and casual.

  Really, the neighborhood was pioneered by the art community. Artists had studios there and galleries opened fabulous converted spaces that felt luxurious in their austerity and industrial-chic edge. Sonnabend, Castelli, Pace all had galleries that I visited regularly. (I had one of my smaller midyear fashion shows at the Pace Gallery on Wooster Street in early 1988, and Richard Serra called Arne Glimcher to complain about fashion photos being taken in front of his oil-stick painting, which was hanging in the gallery. It took a lot of cajoling from my friend Susan Dunne to stop me from calling him back and giving him a piece of my mind.)

  With all the energy in the world I went to work setting up shop. My little space needed painting, so I painted it. I needed cutting tables, so I built them. Sewing machines were moved from my tiny apartment on West End Avenue (for a while I didn’t know what to do with all that extra space at home). I hired a young woman recommended by Frank Rizzo, named Annica Andersson, who had just graduated from Parsons, to help me make clothes. It didn’t take the fashion cognoscenti long to get off their asses. Within a year or two SoHo—and my studio in particular—was the place to be.

  I started with a small collection for resort that came out of me like a jumble. There were bathing suits and cover-ups; lightweight coats in lemon-candy yellow or dark jade-green taffeta that could work for day or night; little evening dresses; an azalea-pink wool jersey halter dress to the knee with a huge taffeta ruffle at the neck; a big, white lampshade hat that I made with my friend, the great milliner Patricia Underwood. Every piece was a sort of fucked-up tribute to Audrey Hepburn. It was new, but it had a definite place in a woman’s life, rather than being just a useless new idea. Right away there was a lot of attention. I wasn’t worried about selling, I’d decided this would be a trial run and any actual sales would be gravy.

  * * *

  One day late that summer of 1986 the phone rang, and a voice said, “I have Dawn Mello on the phone.” Dawn Mello, who ran Bergdorf Goodman, was one of the most visionary retailers in the history of fashion, and notice from her could make your name. She was cheerful and excited on the phone and said she’d heard good things about my work and that she’d like to send her buyers to take a look. I’d seen Ms. Mello at appointments at Perry Ellis and Calvin Klein, but we’d never formally met. We eventually became friends, but at that point in time she came across as aloof, intimidating. Toward the end of the phone conversation, which was going well, Kal Ruttenstein’s words rung in my ears. I said “Uh. Mrs. Mello. Sorry. I would love for the buyers to come down, but I don’t think I can send a car.” There was a long pause on the other end and she said, sounding a little baffled, “Don’t worry, dear. They’ll take a taxi.”

  The buyers walked in, and I could sense their intention to order clothes, though I couldn’t understand what had led them there. No matter how optimistic I felt, in the fashion business, as with all businesses, nothing is real till you have the order in your hand. We proceeded politely, nervously, carefully, to show the clothes one piece at a time. I booked two models to show the tiny collection, which was a necessity. The buyers were suspiciously friendly and awestruck themselves. It was my first sense that there was some sort of buzz out there about me, about what I was doing. I don’t think it was because of the five or six years I spent in the industry in advance of launching my own label as much as people understanding how motivated I was to make a success. And maybe, too, how strong the clothes were. What strikes me in retrospect is how easily it could have turned against me, but for the moment I felt the presence of good fortune. By the time those buyers were ready to leave after that first appointment, the main concern was how quickly we could get clothes to the store.

  I had been warned by everyone, including Kal, about the treacherous laws of supply and demand in the fashion business, how dangerous it was to take orders and not deliver, or, something I considered a high-class problem: getting too big too soon. Those were pitfalls no one had any real solutions for. So many reasons to fail, of which I took no notice. Business in general is something I had no idea about, something I think no one starting out ever has any idea about. To be fair, it’s not something one can figure out in advance; it has a lot to do with luck, especially for a Type A like me. I knew a lot about beautiful clothes, how to make them, how to instruct others to make them, and that was all. Business was a monster under my bed, a mass of problems, ready to elude me as easily as eat me alive. If I took time to figure it out, in my short life, I would have no energy or focus left to do what I was best at. The ideal situation is to have a trusted partner, in my case Sarah, who would handle all that. But deep down I knew that she didn’t really have the experience we needed. And so I operated in a state of high denial mixed with a kind of religious determination and trust in a positive future.

  Youth, darling.

  21

  My head was down, absorbed in my work. It was summer and the door was ajar, and I
felt a stir; someone had wandered in. There were only two or three of us working at that time, and we looked up. It was a middle-aged woman with deceptively average-looking features: premature salt-and-pepper hair, watery blue eyes, and a puckered half-smile. She was dressed in Chinese pajamas and had a serene, otherworldly quality, and spoke in a deep, rushed whisper. She introduced herself as Julie Britt. She said she’d heard of me through Jade Hobson at Vogue. I was curious but too busy to inquire further so I quickly took her through the collection. She was almost completely silent as she looked, and that puckery smile never left her face entirely. She whispered, “Wonderful.” Then she promised me she would be in touch and floated out.

  A week later she called and asked to come and meet me about a commission. By that time I had done a little research and found out she was a great stylist of major importance who worked with the best fashion magazines and photographers. When she arrived she went straight to the rack and pulled out three dresses and asked me if I could show up with them the following day for a shoot with Richard Avedon. Richard Avedon. Really. She said they’d like to have me on set to “dress the girls.” As busy as I was at that time, keeping my eye on the ball, hard at work making clothes, I decided I couldn’t miss this.

  I took a taxi up the East River Drive on a hot summer afternoon. We were stuck in traffic and I sat there, sweating, filled with dread about my little business, commitments piling up, bills not making sense. My head was so full of stuff at that time, and I couldn’t really believe I was on my way to meet this man I had designated a decade earlier as my personal saint. I thought the job might actually be something Avedon-related or some other kind of thirdhand association. Finally, the taxi pulled up to a small town house on East Seventy-fifth Street, and I paused outside wondering if it was the right address—a small place for such a huge legacy.

  I walked into the little house with my garment bag and encountered a lady with oversized octagonal glasses, a dark ponytail, and a smile that revealed teeth which took up more than a usual share of a face. She was seated at a plain little desk, on the phone. She gestured for me to have a seat. After finishing on the phone she leapt up and introduced herself. Norma Stevens. Smiling like a Pac-Man she said, “Julie told me all about you, and we are all really excited.”

  The moment I set foot inside that town house the world got better. There was something you felt as you entered, that no matter what came out of that place, it would be the best. It was like passing through a portal from ordinary to excellence.

  Norma led me through the building, first past a small kitchen with a communal seating area, then through heavy double doors to the inner sanctum. We passed a dressing room where I noticed a number of models—some famous ones like Kelly LeBrock and Janice Dickinson—and a big team of hair and makeup people working on them under the guidance of my new friend Julie Britt, who looked up and waved. Finally we reached the studio.

  Richard Avedon was a small man with an extra-large head covered in shaggy heather-grey hair. He wore aviator-style eyeglasses and was dressed in blue jeans and a blue button-down shirt. He was busy working out lights with his assistants. Norma waited for a break in the activity and whispered something in his ear. He came over, beaming. “Julie tells me you’re a genius.”

  I tried to talk. I called him Mr. Avedon, and he stopped me midsentence. He said, “Call me Dick.” It wasn’t an option. He refused to be called anything else. Not Mr. Avedon, not Richard, only Dick. I think it had to do with his ideas about economy; Dick was the shortest form of address. Maybe, too, it made him feel slightly younger and hipper to be called by his first name, and more casual—“casual” being another of his imperatives.

  I learned quickly that Dick liked to weigh each and every decision about a shoot and pass it before a kind of committee, which everyone who was invited to work in the studio that day belonged to. Each question that arose would be followed by a scholarly pause. Eventually someone would take their life in their hands and chance an opinion. Then someone would either agree or counter with another piece of advice, and the floor would be open for discussion. Eventually an answer would arise. It was different from being at Calvin in that the answer wasn’t a foregone conclusion of beige. Also, here I felt I was on equal footing with the others. It was a good lesson that “design by committee” wasn’t necessarily something to be scorned. As it turned out, I could collaborate happily with others more suited to my natural tastes.

  The clothes I brought to the sitting that day remained in the garment bag. I couldn’t figure out exactly what I was doing there. Eventually I would participate in five or six similar shoots, all part of an ongoing campaign for Revlon featuring “The most unforgettable women.” They were designed as double-page spreads with four or five gorgeous women from all different generations: Christy Turlington, Iman, Tatjana Patitz, Cindy Crawford, Rachel Williams, Lauren Hutton. For each sitting Julie had arranged a theme. The first was flapperish; all the clothes were black with a lot of jet beading. There was one day when the girls were actually wearing dresses of mine, which couldn’t be perceived because of the focus on this overpowering sculptural jewelry Julie had gotten from somewhere. One day there were these dramatic white gazar collars stiffened with wires that I helped to style around the girls’ faces and shoulders while Julie and Dick oohed and aahed at my ability to manipulate these shapes. Another day I wrapped the girls in different animal-print scarves and throws that Julie brought in. That shoot jogged something in Dick’s memory. He had one of his assistants dig out some contact sheets from his archives, pictures he took in the 1960s of Madame Grès wrapping Streisand’s head in thick, white butcher linen. He had them Xeroxed for me, and I studied those gorgeous pictures for weeks.

  Avedon and I became friends and dined together a few times in the house he lived in above the studio on East Seventy-fifth Street. A housekeeper would leave food in roasting dishes with notes attached: Heat at 375 on convection setting. The apartment had décor that captured a time in New York City from my childhood, the early 1970s. It had a dining table under a slanted skylight that ran parallel to a white, narrow, open-plan kitchen. The living room had a vaguely Japanese feel, fitted with cabinetry that felt like elegant fruit crates had been stacked. Around the various rooms were all sorts of fabulous photographs of his, tacked up or framed and propped against walls. I thought of it as the perfect setup: working all day in the studio and walking upstairs at night to bed.

  He gave me fatherly advice about everything. And if I ever wondered why I had a complex about my weight, there’s this story: When Dick and I knew each other I had recovered a little of the weight I’d lost at Calvin Klein, but I was still bone thin. At one point I brought up my weight and was about to tell him the story about growing up fat and losing seventy-five pounds in high school and the recent eating disorder I’d experienced. He stopped me and said, “You know, there are some men who just look better fat. Fidel Castro, when I first photographed him, he was thinner. The second time, years later, he had put on a lot of weight and was much more attractive. You’re one of those people. You look better fat. Don’t lose a pound.”

  * * *

  I got to meet a lot of wonderful people working with Dick. I met Suga, who I think was the greatest hairdresser who ever lived. I also met Kevyn Aucoin, the fabulous makeup artist, who I would go on to work with exclusively. We became great friends. At some of those shoots I felt like I was contributing something. At others I felt useless. I was one more voice in the committee of people who agreed or disagreed with Dick. But each of the days was a fantasy, a heavenly break from the realities of my studio. And each day I learned something about beauty and refinement. The best lesson I learned was a kind of restatement of an idea I knew instinctively: that in order to create excellence I had to totally immerse myself in the task at hand and forget everything else.

  One day Julie called and asked me about a piece from my first collection, a canary-yellow coat with an extreme drawstring ruffle-collar, and whether I c
ould make it for her in black by the following week. It sounded like another fool’s errand, but one couldn’t say no to Julie. Or Dick. And I loved the rarified air of this new association. So I made the coat in black (Taroni) double-face satin, the most gorgeous fabric available on Earth. I taxied up with my garment bag for an extra-early call that day. When I got there Dick wasn’t in his usual jeans but instead in a grey flannel suit and a tie. He seemed more anxious than usual. I said, “What’s with the suit?” And he said, “For the great one, I wear a suit.” Audrey Hepburn was coming that day for one of the “Unforgettable Women” ad shoots. Dick said the only way she would agree to do it was if he would do another portrait of her, later in the day, for a UNICEF press release.

  Dick and Audrey Hepburn were kindred spirits. They were from roughly the same generation, both Taurus, both around the same height. He felt a kind of ownership of her and was invested in a way I had not seen before. Almost teary-eyed, he told me “Right off the boat they sent her to me. Even before they sent her to Hollywood.” (It was unclear who “they” were. I assumed it was the Hollywood executives who had discovered her in Europe.) He photographed her extensively before she had seen her first screen test, and those pictures preceded her to Hollywood. Not to mention the countless times he took her picture after that. The movie Funny Face was inspired by Avedon. Fred Astaire portrays “Richard Avery,” a thinly disguised version of Dick, who discovers a model, played by Audrey Hepburn, with whom he falls in love. Dick was very involved with the making of that movie as a special consultant, yet he was abandoned by the studio midway. Once he regaled me with tales about working on Funny Face and how much the studio hated him after they began shooting. They considered him overinvolved, a nuisance, and he insisted that they once drugged him at lunch to keep him away from the editing room. According to him, he was their worst nightmare from start to finish. He found problems with everything from camera angles to finished color processes. He described it as something he regretted getting involved with, which was baffling to me, seeing as how it’s such a great and lasting document of his world, complete with appearances by Dovima and Suzy Parker.