I.M.

by Isaac Mizrahi

  I got particularly close to her during this period. I had a crush on Billy Stritch, who worked on that show as her arranger and pianist. I confided in Liza, who looked at me askance and set me straight right away: “Darling. He’s my boyfriend!” I really didn’t see that coming.

  The miracle of Liza onstage is one thing; the greatest example of making an entrance that I have ever seen. No one else walks on the stage and owns a room that way, whether it’s a tiny cabaret or Radio City Music Hall. But really, the surprise magic of Liza occurred during intermission night after night in the Radio City green room, which had been decorated with hundreds of votive candles (another nod to Halston). It would fill up with “friends” and adoring fans who were lucky enough to be admitted backstage. She would show up at the exact crucial moment every night in a glamourous, red crepe de chine kimono and greet everyone in the room, making each person feel like they were special and at the grandest, most exclusive backstage party that ever was. What I couldn’t figure out was how she had that energy. She would expend as much star power in the green room during intermission as she did onstage.

  In 1990 Halston died, which was a big blow to Liza. He was her best friend and had dressed her better than anyone from the very beginning. He was as much a part of her image as any of the shows or songs that came her way. I knew he was ill and had shut down his atelier, and while I was glad for the chance to work with her, I also felt conflicted because I admired him so much. Liza arranged his funeral, which took place at Alice Tully Hall. She put together a touching slide show of his life set to a melancholy, jazzy piece of movie scoring from Midnight Cowboy called “Fun City.” She asked me to speak, which I did. The fact was I didn’t know Halston and so I have no real idea why she asked me; I can only guess I was meant to represent a new generation who had been influenced by him.

  That funeral had a green room to beat all green rooms. Joe Eula. Marisa Berenson. Elsa Peretti. Every socialite from Kay Graham to Nan Kempner. But no one as larger-than-life as Liza, which I think was by design. When she spoke there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. After that I realized no matter what I did to befriend her, no matter what I could possibly design for her, I was merely a stand-in, someone she reluctantly accepted in place of her beloved Halston.

  Though I did try my best, it was impossible for me to fully commit to the idea of being great friends with Liza. It would have been easy to be pulled into her orbit, she was so generous and smart in so many ways. Had I not been so extremely busy, perhaps our friendship could have flourished. But I surmised early on how much attention she needed, and friendship proved impossible. I’d have to give up a big part of my life, and I had no time to spare.

  About twelve years later Liza met David Gest, a music executive who stepped in and ran her life into disarray for a time. Soon after they married at the Marble Collegiate Church on Fifth Avenue and Twenty-ninth Street, with a reception and “concert” afterwards at Cipriani Wall Street. At the ceremony I sat next to Lorraine Bracco, the two of us holding hands through the madness. The guest list included everyone from Mickey Rooney to Elton John and Anthony Hopkins. Liza’s best man was Michael Jackson, and her matron of honor was none other than Elizabeth Taylor, who held up the ceremony for about an hour as we waited for her shoes, which she’d left at the hotel. I actually thought it was a ruse, a plan to halt the proceedings long enough for Liza to come to her senses. No one thought this wedding was a good idea. But on it went.

  If the vows weren’t crazy enough—David Gest swearing to love Liza; Liza swearing to take it “one day at a time”—the party was crazier than anyone could have dreamed. There were musical acts ranging from the Doobie Brothers to Andy Williams. I barely saw Liza that night to say hello, but I did watch her clothing changes—at least four that I can remember. There was one crazy dress after another, and I hoped no one mistook any of them for mine. Mad as it was, hideous as the outcome was, it was one of the more memorable nights of my life, and I still have a heart-shaped candy box embossed with Liza and David’s initials, which was given out at the end of the night. I sometimes think of how perplexed my heirs will be when they go through my ephemera fifty years from now and find that box.

  Later that year there was a reality show that VH1 had green-lighted about Liza’s life with David. A huge dinner was assembled at her apartment, catered by Sylvia’s Restaurant in Harlem, one of Liza’s favorite places, with a casual “living room concert” slated for after dinner. Sandra Bernhard and I were dates. We arrived at dinner along with other celebrities, movie stars, writers, and artists—everyone from Ray Charles to Dominick Dunne and Liz Smith. After dinner Luther Vandross did a number. Then Ray Charles accompanied Sandra singing “Come Rain or Come Shine.” Then Beyoncé Knowles did a number. (This was when she had a last name. She was just breaking away from Destiny’s Child, and I confess I still had not heard of her. I noted in my journal what huge star quality “this newcomer” had. I also noted the very questionable dresses they all had on, including Liza, which was the work of Beyoncé’s mother, Tina Knowles, who was making a dubious name for herself as a couturier.)

  Finally Liza appeared and began singing, and just as she was belting out the middle chorus of “But the World Goes ’Round,” some TV producer decided to shut the entire show down. Right in the middle of Liza’s big number, this nondescript man walked up to her, thanked her curtly, and literally directed the cameras to stop taping. David lost his cool and berated the executive there on the spot. With little traces of foam in the corners of his mouth he screamed: “The lady is in the middle of a number! Do you know who you just shut down?” It was the one supportive thing David Gest ever did for Liza, at least that I could see.

  Worse than anything was what he did to her apartment, where I had been many times and which I admired to no end. Halston had decorated it in the 1970s, and it was a vast minimal space of white marble, with Warhols of Judy, Vincente, and Liza side by side in the dining room. There was no furniture other than what was absolutely necessary. It was done in a simple, original, compelling way. Liza’s bedroom was huge and entirely carpeted and wallpapered in red velvet. When David moved in, he reversed the minimal grandeur of the place with all kinds of fake boiserie and faux antiques and stacked the walls with his gold records. More than any reality-show disaster, it made me so sad to think of that wonderful Halston interior, gone forever.

  23

  The Sunday before my first fashion show, my cousin Gail got married at the Pierre hotel. The wedding was a family event that I couldn’t miss, and coming as it did only nights before my first collection, suffice it to say, it was a total pain in the ass.

  In those days Bill Blass showed on Mondays at the Pierre, and he was in the next ballroom that Sunday making preparations for the following morning. My mother and I spotted him in the lobby, and my mother walked up and introduced herself.

  “My name is Sarah Mizrahi,” she said. Blass nodded. “And my son is Isaac Mizrahi. Have you heard of him?”

  My heart sank.

  “No,” Blass said. He was so polite.

  “You will very soon,” she said, not a hint of irony in her voice.

  Embarrassed as I was by my mother’s smack talk, it felt prescient in some way. Once I did become known, Mr. Blass was quick to remind me of that story any time we saw each other.

  There were times in my career when I would doubt myself—not my talent, but my abilities to make something out of my business. Many times after I started my label I felt really close to going out of business, which seemed to happen so frequently to so many young designers. I whined regularly to my mother on the telephone. Finally, one day she halted me midsentence and let a beat of dead air fill the receiver before saying in her sharpest voice, just shy of a scream: “You are not David Cameron. You are not Stephen Sprouse. You are Isaac Mizrahi!”

  I made up my mind after one of those conversations: One day that fall I came to work and said, “Let’s put on a fashion show.” A first fashion show is the be
ginning of everything. It was three times more laborious than any show I ever did after—not the actual physical labor—which was definitely challenging, but the intellectual effort. I was presenting the concept of who I was to the world. And who I wanted to become. It was my chance to introduce myself in a political and social way as much as in a design way. The venue, the models, the accessories, the music, were as important as the clothes. So, like Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney in a barn, Annica and I rolled up our sleeves and went to work. We did nothing else but make clothes that entire winter, except for the occasional sitting at Avedon or visit from Liza.

  * * *

  I worked for months on the color story for that collection. I ordered fabrics from all the mills, mostly Italian, I had worked with at Perry Ellis and Calvin Klein. I submitted swatches of everything from ribbons to candy wrappers, and pored over lab dips, which the houses sent me for approval before they dyed the fabrics. That whole Christmas break I edited and reedited those two pages of swatches till they were a pulsating, vibrant story of pure color. Once those pages were right, the whole thing was right. The colors were organized thus: On the warm end, the reds and oranges and pinks would work randomly together. On the cool end, all the blues and greens worked together. Yellow was the swing color that paired with everything. Mentions in the press after the collection were always about “neons” and “brights,” but in fact there were no neons and as many dark and pastel colors as there were bright ones.

  I asked Manolo Blahnik to make his own version of Hush Puppies. He burst out laughing, which was my first clue that I was on to something. (When he showed me the prototype a few weeks later, I knew it would create a sensation). All of the models I had worked with in my years as an assistant volunteered to do the show in exchange for clothing. I had some more established models like Dalma and Anna Bayle, two of the great runway stars at the time, and others who were just emerging, like Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington. (This was way before the word “supermodel” was listed in the OED.)

  The day of the show there were a few last-minute nail-biters. My favorite chiffon jumpsuit had to be remade because it had been mistakenly shortened to the calf. All the furs from the furrier were on a truck that seemed to be lost. There weren’t enough shoes to go around, and there was a long list of “shoe swaps” (meaning models would have to pass off shoes to each other after they walked the runway), which is every designer’s nightmare. A whole group of the girls coming from their last booking (the Giorgio di Sant’Angelo show) were very late to arrive and were still in the makeup and hair from the previous show, which took longer to remove than it did to apply the hair and makeup for my show. (This foreshadowed something that would happen every season for the rest of my life.)

  The guest list and the seating were being overseen by Nina Santisi, with whom I had developed a close friendship since my Perry Ellis days. She was instrumental in coordinating the invitations and creating the seating chart while she was still working as an editor at Glamour magazine. She eventually worked with me full time and became an even closer friend. She knew of my every move and gave me some of the best advice I ever got. Nina always veers to the high road. There was a fashion critic who wrote something not so praiseful about my second collection, the only dissenting voice, and it was Nina who talked me off the ledge. From then on that editor was placed in the front row, the best seat in the house, and we never heard anything but praise from that party again.

  On the big day, to my complete surprise, everyone we invited showed up to the slightly bigger loft I’d rented upstairs from my loft. I had erected a small U-shaped runway there, and the only thing separating the audience from the small, narrow models’ changing spot in the hall was a thin, black curtain. Carrie Donovan, fashion editor for the New York Times Magazine came. So did Bernadine Morris, the chief fashion critic from The New York Times. Polly Mellen and Jade Hobson from Vogue attended. John Fairchild and Patrick McCarthy who ran Women’s Wear Daily came, and with them Bridget Foley, who has since become an executive editor. My friends Manolo Blahnik and his business partner George Malkemus came with André Leon Talley to cheer me on. Wendy Goodman from New York magazine. Elsa Klensch, who reported on fashion for CNN. Dawn Mello from Bergdorf Goodman. Elizabeth Saltzman came with her mother, Ellin Saltzman, who ran Saks Fifth Avenue. Kal Ruttenstein from Bloomingdale’s. Even Grace Mirabella came. Somehow they all thought it an important enough show to go all the way to SoHo to attend.

  My mother came and sat in the front row. Until that moment she hadn’t fully grasped what was going on in all those months of preparation. I think she was in a daze for the entire twenty-minute show.

  As was I.

  The truth is, I had no idea what was going on in the front of the house. I was so focused on the clothes and the girls, checking my lists, making last-minute edits, tying hush puppies and sashes. Finally the music started and the lights came up and the first girls were on the runway, almost as though in a dream—a beautiful, meaningful dream. The idea was to introduce color as the main theme for the season—also for the rest of my career. So I began the show with about twenty passages of grey, camel, brown, navy, and black. Neutrals. Day clothes luxuriating in sportiness. I designed three versions of a blanket with sleeves—one in alpaca reversible to satin, one in double-faced wool knit edged in suede, and one in mink. In the following passages I showed things like business attire or luncheon suits being handled like lumberjack clothes one would wear in a cabin in Vermont. Dressy as you might look, you’re still very casual in a singularly American way.

  Midway through the show the music got pumped up and the lights got brighter, and out came Linda Evangelista, in a big, bright-orange coat shaped like a tribal robe, worn with a marigold-striped, wide-legged wool jersey, empire jumpsuit, and lipstick-red suede Hush Puppies. The ensemble was called “Orange Orange,” as in the Kool-Aid flavor. Next was a short, bright red, double-breasted swing coat on Christy Turlington, worn with bright-pink tights and rust suede hush puppies. That was called “Sally Tomato” for a character in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. After that it was only a story about color. Acid colors mixed with pastels and earth tones. Vermont cabin on acid. Dresses and jumpsuits and tea-length ball gowns that looked like sweatshirts, and parkas in a jumble of color, all worn with the elegant hush puppies.

  I was flying in an open airplane or going 150 miles an hour in a convertible—a feeling of great elation accompanied by terrible dread. Too late to change anything, loud music dictating the tone, models awaiting cues. The designs I’d been jealously guarding yanked from my hands and thrown into a magnificent disorder. By the end of that show I had a feeling of total exhaustion and a strange sense of bitterness. Before I made my appearance on the runway, Veronica Webb kissed me and whispered in my ear, “You’re the new king of New York.” I smiled at her, thinking she was saying something cute to ease the pain of my epic failure. It was a shock when I came out onto the runway and the crowd leapt to its feet in applause. I thought it was some sort of joke.

  * * *

  Sarah Haddad had a prescient dream the night before that show. She described it as a stampede of people running up the stairs to our little Greene Street studio. After that collection it did indeed feel like a mad rush of editors and buyers coming at me up those stairs. The day after the collection a huge photo and a rave review appeared on the cover of Women’s Wear Daily. Manolo and André Leon Talley took me to lunch at La Grenouille and toasted to my success as others in the restaurant looked on, pointing and gossiping. There was also a great review in the New York Times, the first line of which said something like “Remember the name Isaac Mizrahi.” And most of the national fashion pages had glowing reviews of the show. Like magic, in the course of one day, everything changed. Back-to-back appointments with every major retailer. Photo shoots for days.

  And they photographed me. I never thought about being a subject in that way. I hadn’t thought about a public persona because I was so busy working on the collection.
It never dawned on me to change anything about my appearance, to change the way I dressed, or to make something up for the sake of a bigger, better public image. I thought who I was, what I wore when caught off my guard, was much more interesting than anything I could have planned. Also I felt that my life, every thought I had, every gesture I made, was authentic. If someone were to find fault with that I could not hold myself responsible. There was no lying. No additions. No making things up.

  Vogue did a big story about my fall collection, styled by Polly Mellen and photographed by Irving Penn, another of my personal fashion gods. I got the cover of W a few times, including the month following the show. It was a picture of Dalma wearing the “Orange Orange” ensemble, with me lying at her feet. When I saw the picture I thought how fortuitous it was that I happened to be wearing a canary-yellow blazer and how great it looked with the colors of the ensemble being photographed. I saw myself as a kind of fashion elf. I kept my head down unless I was asked, but then I was not shy to express myself and explain my work. Within a week Wendy Goodman (who has become a dear friend) did a six-page story about the collection in New York magazine and that same year, New York did a career-making story about me with a long exposé-style interview. I was perceived as an iconoclast, and from that moment on I was dubbed “the bad boy of fashion,” something I was unable to shake, even well after my boyhood. I was “hip and cool” because my studio was downtown. But I’m not, nor have I ever been, hip and cool. At least not the way I see it. If I did collections inspired by homegirls or bag ladies it was not to be hip and cool. It was actually the opposite. It was to bring a kind of formal structure, a kind of glory to those subjects. The hip-and-cool thing was an expectation I had no intention of fulfilling.