I.M.

by Isaac Mizrahi

  The New York article, which was published sometime in 1988, made clear that I was gay. I spoke about it openly and was thrilled they had included the fact. Since I’d come out those years before I felt it was my duty to change whatever perception I could around the subject, if for no other reason than to make it easier for kids who were struggling as I had. But it was a very different time, and most established fashion designers weren’t out. It was a time when people were being outed against their will, and some actually thought it was bad taste to admit such a thing in so public a way. Within a few weeks I ran into my friend Paul Wilmot, whom I’d worked with at Calvin Klein, where he was head of PR and marketing. He put his hands on my shoulders consolingly and said about being outed, “Darling, I’m so sorry for you.…”

  I didn’t realize there was anything terribly scandalous going on, although I was aware of a few weeks of radio silence from Brooklyn. Of the zero time I spent thinking in advance of what I might say in an interview, I had already vowed to myself that if anyone was interested in asking me, I would proudly tell the truth about being gay even if it meant my downfall—which some people really thought was a risk at that time. Truthfully I was too busy to hide anything, especially anything I felt was as irrelevant to my work as my sexual preference. It was a moment I could feel something was changing, and eventually the change came to pass. I knew the world could not remain as homophobic as it was, and I was right.

  Four or five years later there was another cover of New York, a picture of k.d. lang with the headline “Lesbian Chic.” By chance I saw Paul Wilmot that week at a cocktail party, and I said to him, “See, darling? I was a lesbian way before k.d. lang.”

  * * *

  This should have been a heady time for me. If my life were a Hollywood musical, this would be the big splashy finale where I—played by Eleanor Powell—make it into the big time. Everything seemed to be going my way. It took the New York Times years to acknowledge a young designer and review them like one of the establishment, but by the time my third collection walked the runway, I was being reviewed by the main critic, Bernadine Morris, alongside the likes of Calvin Klein and Bill Blass. And I was at the top of every fashion page of every major newspaper worldwide.

  I was getting to know all the editors and writers as well as some of the more important fashion-business figures. I was oblivious, really, to the ideas of how to raise money, and though I worried about it constantly, I took no real actions to forge any financial partnership. The money Sarah and I put in was long gone, and we had interim financing from friends of Sarah’s, one of whom was Jack Dushey, the original owner of Studio 54, and the other was Haim Dabah, owner of Gitano jeans, to whom I had sold sketches as a teenager.

  Over the next few years my fashion shows became the shows to attend. There were masses of major fashion editorials every month. “Supermodel” was becoming an established word to describe the beautiful, powerful women who seemed to have “it”: the perfect combination of star power and the ability to recede enough for the clothes to take center stage. Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, and Naomi Campbell. Cindy Crawford and Claudia Schiffer were maybe even too super—too busy and handsomely paid—to be considered supermodels. I guess they were superdupermodels. It was a defining moment that was sometimes really scary because so much depended on supermodels’ participation. Naomi, beautiful and clever as she is, never really had a sense of urgency and was late most of the time. André Leon Talley, who made his presence in my world heavily felt for about two years, and thereafter would occasionally grace us with a visit backstage, would precede Naomi, proclaiming, “Naomi will, in fact, be here today!” I stood by, thinking about how I had cast her in all my favorite looks and of the hours of fittings I’d completed. Naomi is, in fact, coming! How lucky for me! I would bite my nails off waiting for her car, or for Christy’s flight to land. They flew all over the world on a daily basis. Twice a week to Paris or London or Milan, and sometimes even more exotic locations. Linda seemed to like my clothes a lot, especially my shoes, and was never shy about ordering things. When we asked her where to ship them she’d say: “Just send them to the Air France Concorde lounge, they’ll find me.”

  These girls knew what they were looking at. They knew everything that was going on in every corner of the fashion world, which I intentionally ignored. From the day I started working professionally in the fashion business, I developed a strong aversion to fashion magazines. There was no way for me to look at them without feeling either defeated, or overlooked, or competitive, or self-congratulatory. I preferred to ignore magazines and instead I relied on what I saw on the streets, coupled with information provided by my staff and these supergirls with their incredible senses of style. The more they liked what they saw in the fittings, the more I knew I was onto something.

  I used to joke that I could leave Veronica Webb in a room all by herself and she could conduct the fitting without me. Once I was pondering whether or not to include a stack of bracelets with an ensemble. “With the bracelets or without?” I asked.

  Veronica turned to me. “Can you sell the bracelets? Are they available for sale?”

  I said, “Yes.”

  “Then with bracelets!” she said.

  Veronica has been a great friend since she was first discovered. At the time I was working at Calvin Klein. It always seemed like she was smarter, more complicated, more interesting than most other models. To me, she was the perfect woman. That face and that body, of course—every woman should be so blessed. But also, she read books. She wrote articles. She attended art openings and the theatre. She had the sweetest apartment on University Place and a dachshund named Hercules. She was as discreet as she was flamboyant. And she gave of her time so generously and believed in me—encouragement I needed. We have almost exactly the same taste—almost exactly the same style aspirations. We’re both skeptical, we both like irony and silver linings. We both like color. I used to hear her voice in my head, advising me when I was sketching, and before I could ask myself, What would Veronica do?, the imaginary Veronica would whisper, “Make that one purple. Show that dress on Carla Bruni. Sketch that with a flat riding boot.” She was my way into women, and I observed her very closely, bordering on stalking, like I was observing a facet of my own personality attached to a face and body I wish I had. She’d fly back and forth from Europe to New York wearing clothes she’d style together flawlessly, effortlessly. A short, pleated, empire-waist dress of mine with Doc Martens boots from Chanel and a vintage 1950s rhinestone cowboy jacket. She’d put things together better than literally any stylist. Linda also had a wicked sense of humor and could really put clothes together, but in Linda there was a haughtiness I couldn’t pierce. Veronica had a human side. She was able to observe others while they were observing her, which some of the other girls just couldn’t do.

  I was traveling all over the world, too, and I had nothing but great prospects for the future. Ironically, after my first three collections, I started to feel engulfed and overtaken. When I look back on those early days in the fashion business, I think of them as some of the best days of my life—exhilarating, vital. But in actuality I was white-knuckling it. I was nervous to the point of hysterics at all times. The faster and harder the signs of success came, the more I worried, even lamented. I never felt deserving of such acclaim. And though I didn’t question my ability to have ideas for clothes or stage fabulous fashion shows, I knew I wasn’t good at business and money matters. I would lie awake nights wondering when everything would just cave in. My moods swung from extreme to extreme. I was king of New York one minute and captain of a rudderless, sinking ship the next. I kept wondering about my decision to give up show business. The truth became more evident as I got deeper into it: The garment business is every bit as, if not more, treacherous and tentative than show business. I’d heard from others that “you’re only as good as your last collection,” and that was ringing truer every day. What I thought was going to be a steady, secure climb was turning i
nto a rather slippery slope.

  24

  Insecurity really hangs around. “Success” didn’t magically render my past irrelevant. My mother succumbed to her afternoon “naps” in my childhood and I often give in to depression, too. I think of myself as an optimist—a trait, ironically, I also inherited from my mother. I eventually see the silver lining. But no matter how wonderful things are going a lot of dark thinking manages to take hold, and it’s been that way for as long as I can remember. I strive for an unattainable perfection while awaiting catastrophe. I’ve done a very good job sublimating this awful pessimism I live with. I’ve consulted with shrinks and psychics my whole life, in order to sufficiently dispel the black cloud that follows me around. It’s a kind of anxiety, which I think is pretty common among artists who can’t see the virtues of their own work. The more I succeed the more I worry about failure. And it’s not a bad thing. It might be said that—for better or worse—this bleakness is the greater half of the force that propels me forward.

  The harder I worked at making beautiful clothes for beautiful people, the more I saw myself as a fat, ugly person. In a way I think that was a blessing. It’s what made it possible to be objective about beauty—always serving it, standing on the outside of it looking in. I look at pictures of myself from that time and notice how thin I was. But I remember how fat I felt. And how fat I was able to make myself look. I wore unflattering clothes: crazy high-waisted pants that I made myself that would make anyone but Fred Astaire look fat, and a bandana as a headband. It was viewed as my quirky personal style, but friends, like Elizabeth Saltzman, asked me again and again why I dressed like “an old man.” It was a question I couldn’t answer. I refused to see myself as the subject of fashion—I could only see myself as the author of it. To a great extent I was freaked out about being noticed and this was my way of making a joke of myself before anyone else could. So I kept to myself and worked harder, tolerating no distractions. My blind ambition was such that I was able to deny any other part of my life that I couldn’t understand.

  In those early days I was adjusting to the intrusions on my privacy and my sense of fairness. Journalists who knew me personally and knew how much my mother was an inspiration to me were calling to interview her, which blurred the lines between my life and my business. It also fed my paranoia. Routine things any other businessman might have to submit to felt invasive and unjust. For instance: The first time I had to submit to a physical and a blood test from a bank that was basing a huge cash loan on the results, which was followed by two weeks of horror as I waited for the AIDS test to come back negative—all while under the scrutiny of a bank board, not to mention my entire company.

  I was also grappling with the loss of control that occurs any time you’re not making every single garment yourself. Buyers took me to task for early quality discrepancies, things I was even more aware of than they were but felt helpless to control. My mother would call and say, “I was at Bergdorf’s today and there was a dress with the buttons falling off.” That sort of thing was never helpful; it only made me feel more crazy.

  At the same time I was being written about in gossip columns for the first time, which was unnerving. One day Nina approached me holding the New York Post, giggling over an item about me being sighted at a gym the day before, a place I had never been, wearing a leopard-print spandex bodysuit. That was my first-ever mention on “Page Six” and the beginning of my understanding of how careless the gossip press was and how impossible it was to control. It took many years till I was able to appreciate it as a kind of entertaining joke, and to this day I’m still sensitive about appearing in columns.

  About a week before my third Spring collection I was invited to lunch by John Fairchild and even though I understood the implications of this lunch, I was up to my eyeballs in work and scared that if I took any time away from the collection I might not finish in time. Nina reiterated that this was more than an invitation; it was a kind of initiation into the fashion tribe, which I could not put off or pass on, so I accepted. Nan Kempner and Pat Buckley, two of the great socialites of the day, whom I had never met, were surprise guests for this, my first official John Fairchild lunch at the old Four Seasons restaurant. A month prior, at another dinner party, I was introduced to someone called Robert Couturier, another star in the style firmament, and we became fast friends. (He’s become a kind of brother over the years.) At one point, he walked into the restaurant that day and I excused myself politely in order to say hi, but when I returned to the table a few minutes later, Mrs. Kempner was fidgeting nervously with her cigarette, Mrs. Buckley’s mien had turned to ice, and Fairchild was giving me the gimlet eye. I couldn’t figure out what had happened.

  The fashion show the following week was a smash hit, received glowingly by everyone except Women’s Wear Daily. The tepid review ran on the cover with a headline that read: “Isaac Tries Too Hard.” At first I took the review at face value: They didn’t like the collection and that was that. Never one to linger over reviews, I let it go. (One of the biggest ironies about the movie Unzipped, a documentary about me made in 1996, is that it focuses the entire plot around my seeming obsession with reviews. In reality I only care about reviews as a means of selling things. I don’t think I ever read a criticism of my clothing that actually affected me one way or the other. But bad reviews can kill your business, something I was learning the hard way.) Nina and I pieced together the events of the preceding weeks and we figured out that Fairchild and the ladies had been offended at lunch, the headline, the slap-on-the wrist review conveying a strong message: Fairchild and his pals are omnipotent, paying attention to anyone else when in the royal presence will result in some kind of penalty.

  After a season or two, Fairchild came around and I made friends with Mrs. Buckley and Mrs. Kempner. But I couldn’t believe anyone would do such a thing, play with a career, evaluate someone’s work based on a personal whim like that.

  * * *

  If I had issues adjusting to the harshness of the limelight, my mother was in her full glory. She was the mother of the “bad boy of fashion.” In the Sephardic community the red carpet was rolled out for her everywhere she went. She would say, “You wouldn’t believe the way I’m treated. Like a queen!” It made me fume. The very same people who made my childhood so unbearable—and who had also made my mother’s life so hard those early years, forced to watch my torment—were now showering her with public admiration. Now that I was a star they were only too eager to claim me as one of them. The phone rang off the hook with offers from Sephardic companies who thought they had an advantage in licensing deals when in reality it was the opposite. When I went out in public, if someone stopped me and asked if I was Syrian-Jewish, I’d answer with a scowl.

  When my mother and I went out people would stop me and ask for autographs, which she ate up. She would say, “I always knew you’d be great. Someday you’re going to be invited to the White House and Buckingham Palace.” But her confidence did little to boost my own. The more she kvelled, the more my spirits plummeted. Her presence at my fashion shows only added to my worries. I was always terrified that she would unwittingly say something to the press that might explode in our faces.

  Once, early on, she made a remark in a joint interview we did that she didn’t realize would get reprinted. It was something about how she didn’t expect me to have such a broad success, which was said innocently. But the remark was pulled out of context and turned on its head, and she was made to seem unsupportive. Finally I was justified in my warnings to her about talking to the press, and I let her come to the conclusion that it was in her best interests (not to mention mine) that she be kept far away from it.

  I needn’t have worried about my mother so much, because everyone seemed to love her. She was in and out of my studio regularly, and when she came to fittings she immediately charmed everyone in the room, including celebrities, supermodels, artists. My staff doted on her every whim. If she wanted a piece from the collection, there were t
hree people who saw that the order was executed.

  That spring I was on the rue Cambon passing the great original Chanel store when I saw in the window the most fabulous cuff, covered with fake pearls, and thought how much my mother would adore it. I went in thinking, How expensive could this be? Twelve hundred? Fifteen hundred? When the saleslady priced it at thirty-five hundred dollars I thanked her and sheepishly backed away. A few weeks later I saw Christy Turlington at the Met ball wearing the same cuff. Christy always goes out of her way to be sweet. After hearing the story she whipped the cuff off her wrist and demanded I give it to my mother, whom she’d met a few times at my studio, saying, “Karl gave it to me and I will never wear it again. I would love to think of your mother having it!”

  My mother came to my fashion shows religiously. She wouldn’t miss one. She would plan her travel schedule around the dates, and she rewatches the shows on VHS tapes to this day. More than seeing herself as an advisor, she saw my interest in clothes as her genetic gift to me, like my full head of hair. She viewed my career ascent as an extension of her own life, above and beyond living vicariously through me. Around my fifth or sixth collection, she came backstage glowing and proclaimed, as though she were Diana Vreeland herself: “This time, dear boy, you left me in the dust!”