Power up your computer and clear some tabs: Starting today, Isaac Mizrahi is selling pieces from his extensive archive via an online sale that gives you the chance to own a piece of fashion history. These are one-of-a-kind samples made between 1987 and 2012.
The event that spurred the star of Unzipped to upload and unload this collection—the closure of his upstate storage facility—might be mundane, but Mizrahi brings a magic touch to all his endeavors, be they in fashion, literature, the theater, or e-tail.
Born in Brooklyn, the ebullient Mizrahi studied at the High School of Performing Arts (and appeared in Fame, which was based on his alma mater), before he enrolled at the Parsons School of Design. In 1987, after stints at Perry Ellis, Jeffrey Banks, and Calvin Klein, he launched his own business to great acclaim. “He was Le Miz. Le Wiz,” according to a 1989 Vogue profile on “fashion’s favorite son.” Mizrahi’s clothes were not only colorful, chic, and fun, but he seemed to have been chosen to carry the baton that had been passed among the great American designers—never mind that he was obsessed with his mother’s Balenciagas. Mizrahi’s knack was to imbue clothes that worked for women’s busy lives with just the right amount of fantasy and pop-culture relevance. After having won awards, designed costumes and a line for Target, and starred in film and on television, he took to the stage (he is currently on tour with his cabaret act) and picked up a pen to write a memoir, I.M.
“Design,” Mizrahi once told Vogue, “is half pleasure, half torture,” and one might imagine going through his archive might elicit the same emotions. “I was expecting a heavy dread,” he said on the phone, but instead found joy, lightness, and inspiration. Below, Mizrahi talks, with characteristic charm, about preshopping the archive with Zendaya and Law Roach, where newness is to be found, and where fashion stands in relation to art.
What motivated you to sell your archive?
I got a call from the storage space, and they said, “You better come and get your stuff because we’re closing.” So I went to wherever the hell they were, it was somewhere in upstate New York—and by the way, I mean I sent people—and they got a truck, it was a huge semi, and collected the racks and racks and racks of clothes. [It was like], “What do we do with this?”
So I went there: I was just expecting to see a bunch of clothes that were jammed together on racks, decomposing, de-coloring and all that stuff, and rather than being filled with a kind of dread—I was expecting a heavy dread—what I found were these incredible, beautifully preserved clothes, and I couldn’t believe it, and so I was filled with a kind of happiness. I did not feel heaviness or the need to get rid of them; I felt the need to reacquaint myself with them—and not for reasons of nostalgia or something, but just because I thought, Well, this is such a great moment.
How is the sale going to work?
This archive sale is going to roll out over the next few months. It’s not just on the launch date, but every two months there’s going to be another 300 pieces or 500 pieces or however quickly we can process the clothes. The price range is $300 to $7,000; the average price, I would say, is about $1,000. And a percentage of the proceeds will go to Pasadena Humane.
Was this a difficult process for you?
I think about it as an opportunity for me to kind of reinvent clothes that are otherwise just sitting in a storage space. I feel like it gives them a new life. We’ve had a few people come in already; I had a fitting with Zendaya, with Law Roach, and looking at this stuff on her gave a whole new meaning to the clothes. But also not just Zendaya. I had a fitting with a woman that I’d never met before, and seeing this dress on her that was so beautiful because of the new body—[she gave a new] proportion to a dress that was made for someone else 30 years ago or something. It feels great.
My friend Mindy bought this purple mink bathrobe. It was so different on her than it was on Kristen McMenamy or someone—I don’t remember who wore it. It’s a long coat, and on the model it was probably to the ankle, but on Mindy, it was literally to her feet, and it’s fabulous. It looked so modern and it looked so great, and it made me very happy.
What do you mean by “new body”?
Everybody has tits now, which is crazy and great. Back in the day, models [were flat-chested], and that was what you wanted. “If you have no tits, please come over here and we’ll dress you beautifully.” That’s what it was. But now, it’s amazing to see these dresses [with breasts] in them. For me that just feels new and hilarious and kind of gorgeous. Also, usually these things were made for very tall people like Shalom Harlow, who is six feet tall and had a waist that was literally 20 inches around or something. There’s something kind of exciting and beautiful about it in a completely different way—especially because I know what it was supposed to look like originally.
Are you really selling everything?
There is a really well-done edit that I did with curators Chee Pearlman and Kelly Taxter for my exhibition at the Jewish Museum that I will just save as a whole chunk, and I think some of it I’m going to give to the Met.
So really, no regrets?
There was this one piece in the first edit, and there was interest from somebody. I was trying to price it, and then I was like: Okay, guess what? There’s no way I can sell this. There’s no price that you could put on this that anybody would really understand.
Part of the sale makes me very happy. Other parts of it make me think a little bit, like, What am I doing selling this kilim coat? But then I go back to what my best friend Maira Kalman said, which is artists make things and you have to part with them and sell them. Maira makes paintings for books all the time, which to me are sacred. She has shows, and they go to a gallery and they sell them, and she never thinks about it. And she said, “Darling, please! If I kept every single thing that I made, I would have nothing but paper.” That filled me with a kind of inspiration both to lighten the burden a little bit and to see these things in a new light. And that’s exactly what this archive sale is about.
I wonder how much ownership people think they have of art that hangs on a wall versus fashion?
I think about that all the time. I was raised in a different time in fashion. I remember a strong influence in my life was John Fairchild, though when he was alive I was scared to death of him, but he was great. The thing that he pressed into my little brain, which was such a smart thing, and I loved him for it, was that fashion is not like fine art. It’s not supposed to be revered in that way. It’s almost like a kind of applied art…something that you use in your life until it is no longer useful.
The other people who really influenced me a great deal were Polly Mellen and André Leon Talley. They both had this way of really moving past fashion very quickly; it was like here today and then gone. The only way that you could sort of glorify what was new was to kind of turn your back on what was old.
Fashion is not art—it’s just not. Of course, you approach everything the way an artist approaches it, but it needs to be sold, it needs to be worn. If it’s not being worn, it’s not what it is supposed to be. So here I am defrosting all of these clothes after years and years, and they feel very relevant and very fresh.
My ears perked up when you said that nostalgia wasn’t a motivator, because we live in such a nostalgic era that I wonder if there is even room for the next?
When I was starting my company, I was obsessed with looking at my mother’s clothes from the ’60s, and looking at images of Twiggy and stuff—but I wasn’t trying to re-create them, I was just thinking about how relevant it was to say stuff about women. When I was doing my shows, they were really about this idea that I had about women’s lives and how they needed to represent a certain place, politically, socially, and socioeconomically. I thought that’s what it was supposed to be about; I think fashion is nothing if not about socioeconomic politics.
So you think we can find newness?
There is a lot of newness out there. I don’t follow fashion as closely as you. I follow some people who I think are smart at posting certain pictures, and so those are the runway images that I see, and sometimes it’s thrilling and sometimes it just looks overstated, overbearing, and cohesive. I think that’s a problem now. It’s like things that are cohesive are automatically designated good. If everybody looks alike, everybody’s really happy.
I think we’re in a place where it’s just irony upon irony, heaped upon irony. Jonathan Anderson at Loewe I think is a genius. Those chiffon dresses with the hoops underneath were so fucking smart. It didn’t look like Comme des Garçons, it just looked like somebody who’s really thinking. There’s a sense of play there and a sense of a body and a sense of flesh and a sense of the idea of a woman’s life or a person’s life, let’s say.
Newness comes from not just an artist trying to make something new, but also a generation of people who don’t know old things who take it and make it new. Even if they think they understand the reference, sometimes they don’t. And even if people are copying Naomi [Campbell]’s poses, they’re doing so in such a way that it is related to Naomi, but it’s also unrelated to Naomi because it’s come so far from that original context that it is new.
Do you have a feeling of Marie Kondo lightness?
I really do. We’ve taken the archive all apart and every single piece has been photographed, so I feel a lot better about parting with them. It’s been the greatest opportunity for me to go through and think, My goodness, all of this invention, but also for closure. God, I hate the word closure!
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
