I.M.

by Isaac Mizrahi

  Then Madonna noticed Sandra. The nightly entourage got much bigger and harder to navigate. Madonna was of course the subject of reams and reams of gossip, but she never really had a political profile. Not before she met Sandy. This was in the early 1990s, and I will go on record to say Madonna learned a lot from Sandy about having a public voice. How to be edgy, sarcastic, even angry, while funny enough to balance it. She observed Sandra’s personality, knew it was time for this kind of brilliant cynicism, knew how to bring it into the mainstream, make it her own.

  Sandra and Madonna became close, and the politics of my friendship with Sandra shifted. What this new arrangement lacked in intimacy it made up for in glamour. Being out with Madonna was different. There were bodyguards now. Whether it was dinner at Barocco or a burlesque at Gaiety Theatre (one of the last gay strip clubs in Times Square), we were followed by a security detail. Once I met Madonna with Jean Paul Gaultier in Paris, and after dinner in Pigalle, she wanted to take a walk. There was no such thing as a casual stroll with Madonna, and we were flanked on all sides by her guards. Once in New York, after the only one-on-one dinner we ever had, she came to my apartment to see a book I mentioned, and when we said good night, there were fans waiting outside my door on the seventeenth floor of London Terrace.

  My friendship with Sandra ebbed and flowed, but we remained close for a long time. The question of having a child together came up a few times, but I wasn’t ready. It was early in the time of gays having kids and my mother wondered aloud how a child with two gay parents might fare in the world. Also, she was quick to point out that I was too busy, too caught up in my career to be a father. At the time that was true. When I look at some of my friends who had kids who really shouldn’t have, I’m convinced I probably would have done well at the task. But when I think of my own confidence issues, the moment-by-moment emotional spirals I still experience, I think I made the right choice not passing those genes on. Sandra and I have maintained a friendship from afar since those days, but the few times I met her beautiful daughter, Cicely, I did regret missing the chance to have a child with someone I love as much as Sandra.

  * * *

  In 1989 I went to BAM to see a show, a gala performance of L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, which Mark Morris created in Belgium the year before. I had a huge reaction to that show that night—visceral, intellectual. I agreed with every idea and aspect of it musically, theatrically. It was a melding of ideas that didn’t seem “postmodern” or clunky. It was a conglomeration of images—ancient Greek friezes, Bugs Bunny, Balanchine, a conga line, entrances and exits taken right out of a silent film—all resolved, seamless, and totally original, all the things I wanted to be evident in my own work. I laughed at the jokes, I wept in parts. The beautiful dancers never seemed to push an emotion, make faces, or smile without a very good, organic reason. They weren’t dancers. They were people, performers who danced like angels. I literally fell in love with Mark watching that show, and I didn’t even know what he looked like. When the curtain came down all of us in the audience leapt out of our seats, screaming. And afterwards I was a wreck. I had to walk around the block a few times so as not to encounter anyone or engage in small talk that would break the deep emotional spell that had been cast.

  That night at the gala dinner Mark and I were introduced and—trite as it sounds—I could feel an intense chemical pull. Something opposite. Synchronized temperaments. The artist Jennifer Bartlett once referred to us as Odette/Odile—the white and black swans from Swan Lake. We even have similar builds, and to this day we wear the same size. He looked like a Victorian doll to me, with those shimmering blue eyes and shoulder-length ringlets—only missing a big, taffeta bow atop his head. I got home that evening floating from the experience of seeing the show, meeting him, in love with him and not sure when I would see him again.

  About a month later Anna Wintour threw an intimate dinner for about fifteen at one of Ian Schrager’s new hotels in Midtown. Manolo was there. So were Julian Schnabel and Anh Duong. And Mark was there, and I was seated directly across from him. In fact I got the distinct impression that Anna was trying to set us up. At one point she turned to him and said, “You know, Maaahk, Isaac makes beautiful dance costumes. You should get him to make some for you.” To which Mark replied, “Oh, I only work with artists.” In haste I said, “And I only work with thin dancers,” a reference to the criticism emerging that he and his company of dancers were fat. (By ballet dancer standards, which had taken over at that time. I didn’t agree, but it was the only rejoinder I could think of.) And so began our great friendship.

  We made a date for dinner, and it was unclear whether the intentions were romantic. We went to my favorite place in TriBeCa, Barocco, and after the first ten minutes my whole opinion of him reversed. I thought he was imperious and condescending, which at that stage, made him more attractive. He spoke of music in a totally pedantic way, as though no one but he had any connection to the subject whatsoever. He spoke of Bach as though they had known each other and had conferred on the phone minutes earlier. He said unequivocal things about music, things that made the hair on my neck stand on end. I didn’t disagree with his opinions, but I hated that he left absolutely no room for any other thought on the subject. That night, it was clear that we were not destined to be lovers, but not wanting to leave any stone unturned we made an attempt at a good-night kiss. After that any sexual feelings were put aside, and eventually Mark made it clear, as only he can, that there was no chance of us becoming a couple. “I have a policy,” he said. “One genius per family.” For years I wondered whether I should have tried again. I felt a terrible sense that I’d missed something, a terrible sadness that we weren’t together in that way. But I also sensed that the relationship, which was flourishing, might be sullied—even ended—if sex were a part of it. I was—I am—in love with him, in a way one loves Jesus, a chaste love of the spirit.

  A few months later, much to my astonishment, he called and asked me to make a costume for him. It was for a solo he was creating to Gershwin’s Three Preludes. It would require a costume for him and a duplicate for Baryshnikov, whom I knew and had already worked with, who would be dancing the part in rep at the same time. I stood in my kitchen on the phone, pinching myself, thinking of the great opportunity to collaborate with this marvelous artist, but also being overcome by a weird, deep, almost protective love for him.

  On top of his other qualities Mark is a damn fun guy. The revelry gene is so remote in me now I sometimes question its existence. I had my crazy youthful escapades, but by the time I met Mark I had so many social obligations to my business and my family, I had little patience for late nights or parties. But the happiness, the true irreverence of Mark and his company brought it out in me again. It harkened back to the fun I had in my past, and I felt young with him. Two of the best parties I ever gave were for Mark and his company. One in Edinburgh at the Balmoral Hotel and the other at Chez Panisse in Berkeley. Both of those cities I will forever remember as happy places.

  One of my favorite collaborations with Mark was on a show he directed called Platée, a baroque opera that opened at the Edinburgh Festival and later at Covent Garden in London. Meetings began three years prior with Mark and the great set designer Adrianne Lobel, who conceived of the “swamp” where most of the opera takes place as a terrarium, with plastic plants, a huge bubble-jet photo background of a swamp, and an orange “plastic” water dish that dominated stage left and had a functioning fountain that spouted at key moments in the show.

  Designing costumes for the stage presents a whole other set of criteria that is opposite to those of fashion. In fashion you try to create fresh new things in order to sell them, and if you don’t, you can’t stay in business. Costumes don’t have to sell. They don’t function like street clothes, they function physically on a whole other level; the difference in construction comes from the difference between how the body moves on the street and the hyperextended way it moves on the stage. For a designer
working under the constraints of fashion, costume design can be a wonderful release. And in the case of this opera, the costumes needed to be dazzling, funny, colorful—basically, a designer’s dream: swamp creatures, gods and goddesses. Working at the Covent Garden workrooms on Floral Street in London with all the craftspeople, wig masters, tailors, milliners, shoemakers—perfectionists all—added another layer of great satisfaction.

  Our collaboration is a fixture in my life. I think of Mark’s dance center as a home. I know the dancers and administrators in his company not merely as artists, but in some cases, as good friends. And my friendship with Mark thrives. He’s a beacon of honesty and light in a chaotic world. No compromise for him, no politesse, nothing that takes him away from his vision. That honesty prevails in our friendship, too. And after all these years of knowing him and working together in an atmosphere I’d describe as an aesthetic romance, I like to think our best collaborations, the shank of our friendship, still lies in the future.

  Knowing people like Mark, like Sandra, observing the way these two artists work, fills me with inspiration. There’s a truth their work speaks to, an integrity that making clothes, fulfilling as that is, can’t compare with. Working with those people, watching them, makes it clear that the greatest joys of my life have been—and are yet to be—played out onstage.

  28

  There’s something really intimate that goes on between a photographer and a subject. I always say there’s nothing sexier than a man pointing his big camera at you and shooting. I’ve had at least three photographer boyfriends that I can think of off the top of my head, and I’m sure there are more if I really put my mind to remembering. Let’s say I’m easy for a man with a camera.

  One day in 1995 I walked into my showroom to be photographed for GQ by a handsome guy named Douglas Keeve. He looked like a tall, brooding version of Fred MacMurray, looming over me with his Leica. I wasn’t sure what he saw in the viewfinder or why he liked me, but his attentions were obvious. I flirted, and it wasn’t my imagination that he was flirting back. He brought something out in me. He made me feel attractive because he was delighted with me as a subject, and I was able to open up. We had a rapport. The pictures he took that day were less remarkable than the attraction, which was real.

  So many of the men I’d met before Douglas were only eligible until you scratched the surface and found out they weren’t smart, or they had some sort of irreconcilable sexual fetish that—try as I might—I couldn’t get into, or they were emotionally unavailable in one way or another. Men who seemed right for me to date were either boring or nasty or smelled bad or were even, in one case, a white-collar criminal. Also I found that the men who wanted a relationship didn’t want to have sex, and vice versa. Gay stereotype? Yes. But it was true among a lot of the men I encountered at that time. Love and sex seemed to be two completely separate issues. I remember when I went out with Mark, after the second or third date he turned to me and said, “I can’t have sex with you because I know your last name and I like you.”

  But Douglas seemed ready to integrate. I met him for our first date on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Greenwich. We couldn’t decide where to go, so we walked and walked all the way to TriBeCa, then back uptown, ending up at my apartment in Chelsea. We had a lot of fun on that date and for a while thereafter. But soon I could sense a darkness between us, a shadow cast over him, like a storm cloud, which was in turn cast over me. It was impossible to cheer him up. That, of course, made him even more attractive. I took on the responsibility for that sadness, and it became my mission to make him happy and when I couldn’t I took it very personally. Whether or not he blamed me for it was a detail. I naturally assumed that I was the source of his unhappiness. After all, love was supposed to inspire you, and I obviously didn’t do that for Douglas.

  Still, I thought this was the way it was. I thought it’s what all those couples meant when they said being together is “such hard work.”

  * * *

  A perfect example of dreading the future, white-knuckling through the present, then looking back fondly was a birthday party Douglas and Elizabeth Saltzman organized for my thirtieth birthday. Maira took photographs from the night and made a small, beautiful book for me with the pictures. To look at those pictures you’d think it was the greatest night of my life, but living through it was another story entirely. I’m not the kind of person who is able to let go and have fun when I’m supposed to, and I especially hate being fêted. The dinner took place at Barocco and was full of big personalities who had no business being in the same room together. It’s hard to integrate different factions of friends. Friends I made in high school should be kept separate from friends I made in adulthood, and my West Coast friends don’t have to like my East Coast or European ones. And my mother is someone I’m always nervous to expose in any context.

  The seating arrangement was a big puzzle: I thought it best to seat my mother close by me and Sarah Haddad, and Nina Santisi and her sisters Elissa and Laura made a nice adjacency. Ted and Janine from high school should be seated together. Annica Andersson and my cutters and sewing staff actually requested a separate table. Sprinkled among these: Anna Wintour and Grace Coddington. Sandra, Mark, Tibor, and Maira. It was a total of about seventy-five of my closest friends and associates. There have been bigger parties, more important occasions, but nothing like this, where every person I knew was brought together in the same room. I’d glance over and there was Douglas talking to Janine, who was filling him in about my life as a fat teenage actor. On the other side of the room, my mother was talking to Anna, telling her god knows what about my childhood that I would so rather Anna not know. In yet another corner, there was Sandra, seconds away from making a scene about something. Toasts were made and there were mentions of puppet shows and female impersonations, things that felt too tender for public consumption in any context.

  Making sure everyone feels noticed over the course of an evening is always hard work; that night it was like rolling a boulder up a hill. An ironic combination of feeling unworthy of attention and an obligation to pay a lot of attention to the big personalities in attendance. One moment I was self-deprecating and vulnerable, the next I was acting like a spoiled child, moping about how everything was wrong. And of course the biggest challenge was facing Douglas at the end of the night, intent on not hurting his feelings and pretending everything was wonderful and how happy I was. But try as I might, I just couldn’t hold it in any longer, and when we got home I exploded. That was the beginning of our end. Some relationships are remembered for specific experiences around things like travel, or food, or a collaboration. My memory of Douglas is centered around breaking up, a process that dominated our time together more than the process of being together.

  I should have realized how poorly suited we were. Our personalities added to the other’s insecurities which, like dough with too much yeast, grew and grew, even after being punched down. My body dysmorphia was fed by the lean perfection of his physique, and his lack of professional confidence was heightened by my compulsive drive. To put it mildly, our neuroses fit hand in glove. He would descend into a mood and go for days without saying a word; meanwhile I talked a lot. Our fights, which were many, consisted of me unloading yammering, shouting, and him sitting there, silently, smoldering, to the point where I would beg him to say something, anything.

  Even in light of all that, I was committed to being with Douglas, and I thought he was committed to me. I was willing to overlook everything so long as we were civil to each other and looked good together. I think that’s a big component for young people in relationships—the appearance of things on the outside. Once I was involved with Douglas, I dreaded the idea of admitting I’d made a mistake. I couldn’t bear the idea of people thinking I’d failed at love. He wasn’t my first boyfriend, but it was the first time coming forth as a couple in my adult life, and I was already in my thirties—late, by some standards. Love wasn’t the motivating factor at that point; being in a committe
d relationship was. In the meantime, Douglas and I remained a couple for about three years in our unhappiness.

  I was asked to make a video that would run before a presentation of my second CFDA award. Even during the period of our unraveling, it seemed natural to ask Douglas to collaborate on it, since his interest had begun to shift from still photography to filmmaking. It was a short piece—nothing more than a bunch of gags—but it was met with big laughs, something that didn’t happen in the fashion crowd too often. The audience loved it, and the mood between Douglas and me brightened temporarily as a result. It also cemented our profile as a modern gay couple whose lives were intertwined.

  * * *

  There are different accounts about the genesis of the idea for the movie Unzipped, but one glance at my studio in those days and you’d immediately think to set up a movie camera. You’d have to be living under a rock not to be struck by the potential. It was a very funny, glamourous place—a constant feast of models, movie stars, editors, friends. Nina, Douglas, and I decided we had nothing to lose and jumped in. Douglas started shooting. I was nervous about wrecking my relationship with him, but I submitted after several conversations with my shrink, who suggested that the smooth collaboration on the CFDA video the year before boded well for this bigger collaboration. I thought it might even help the cause of Douglas and me.

  Over the course of the next year, Unzipped took a lot of my focus. It was annoying, embarrassing, arduous, and yet I knew how important it would be in the scope of things. One psychic even went so far as to say it would be the thing I would most be remembered for. I knew there had never been anything like it, and I knew it would be great. It became the focus of my life, yet working on it was difficult, especially in public. These days you’re nothing without a reality crew following you around everywhere, especially in the fashion world. Since Unzipped, there are more published backstage photos of fashion shows than there are runway shots, and at least three fashion documentaries a year. In 1995, way before the advent of reality TV, big camera crews were completely frowned upon. They were seen as déclassé by the fashion cognoscenti, who were still dominated by old world thinkers like John Fairchild and the WASP socialites of the day, who remained unyielding in their snobbery. Filming in a public location was considered vulgar and I feared for my image. Especially in Paris, a place I felt so ambivalent about, where the cameras and crew instantly reduced me to the ugly American tourist I made fun of.