“Zippity-do-da,” by Charles Gandee, was originally published in the September 1995 issue of Vogue.
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It’s difficult to imagine Ralph Lauren luxuriating in a frothy bubble bath, coquettishly cradling a telephone receiver while chattering away with his mother about the scourge of copycat designers. Likewise, it’s difficult to picture Calvin Klein skipping merrily down a street in New York City with a funny hat on, singing the theme song to The Mary Tyler Moore Show—”Well, it’s you, girl, and you should know it.” It’s also difficult (actually, it’s impossible) to envision Oscar de la Renta—or Bill Blass or Geoffrey Beene—flinging himself into a rousing rendition of Susan Hayward’s infamous tirade in the 1967 camp classic Valley of the Dolls: “The only hit that comes out of a Helen Lawson show is Helen Lawson, and that’s me, baby. Remember.” And then giggling with delirious abandon.
But what’s truly beyond the pale of even the most fecund imagination is the notion that any one of these high-profile designers would risk his public persona by inviting a film crew along to capture him indulging in the kind of shenanigans that tend to get a guy noticed in a way that most guys would prefer not to get noticed.
In the fraternity of American fashion designers, Isaac Mizrahi is one of a kind. He’s funny and flamboyant, smart and sassy, nervy and, as he will be the first to say, “nelly.” Mizrahi has not only the chutzpah to reveal the rainbow that is his personality but the panache to revel in its many splendid colors—not all of which are flattering. It is precisely this take-me-as-I-am—or don’t—quality that makes Unzipped, the 73-minute documentary about a year in the life of the 33-year-old designer, such a joy.
And if there is one thing sorely missing from the contemporary, which is to say post-Funny Face, crop of films focused on the fashion industry, then that one thing is joy.
Certainly there was none in last year’s Ready to Wear, the bilious bomb of a film in which Robert Altman took aim at the fashion industry with an elephant gun—and missed. Nor is there much in the upcoming catwalk, a tedious travelogue, of sorts, that inadvertently casts Christy Turlington in the role of existential lost soul, a woman who wanders aimlessly through the world in the backseat of a limousine—her greatest pleasure in life, apparendy, watching Naomi Campbell frolic on a brocade-covered bed at the Paris Ritz. Among the more obvious problems of both Ready to Wear and catwalk is the conspicuous absence of a story. True, Altman had an agenda, but somehow, it’s not quite the same thing. And while Turlington may, in fact, be the fairest of them all, it would have been nice if in catwalk she had been given something to do besides shop for a Bugatti bag at Hermès and sit for a watercolor portrait by the evermore ethereal Francesco Clemente, who presents his faux-naive handiwork to his subject with the unforgettable line “This is what you’re going to look like in Heaven.”
Mercifully, Unzipped director Douglas Reeve makes no such pretentious promise about his portrait of Mizrahi. Instead, Keeve is content to show his subject in the here and now. The point is both critical and emphatically clear from the first frame of Unzipped, which shows a scruffy Mizrahi heading to his neighborhood newsstand in Greenwich Village at the crack of dawn on April 2,1993, to buy a copy of Women’s Wear Daily—containing a damning review of his fall ’93 collection. “Was this collection half-full or half-empty?” reads Mizrahi. “That was the obvious question after Isaac Mizrahi’s show Thursday night. What he dubbed a mix was more of a mess. His usually great color sense failed him. His fabric sense failed him. And certainly his sense of how a modern woman dresses after 8:00 P.M. failed him.” As a devastated Mizrahi skulks down the street like some kind of heartbreaking cross between Charlie Chaplin and Charlie Brown, Keeve cranks up the emotional volume with a selection from Debussy’s “Images”—and zooms in for a close-up. “It’s just the worst day of my life,” sighs Mizrahi, so close to tears that you have to curb the impulse to hand him a Kleenex. And then the screen goes black, and a line of white type appears: THIS IS THE STORY OF HOW THE NEXT COLLECTION GETS MADE. Kill Debussy. Cut to the opening credits. Cue in Sandra Bernhard crooning Sylvester’s 1978 disco anthem “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real).”
It is two minutes into Unzipped, and we have not only an empathetic character but also an engaging story: Will underdog Mizrahi’s next fall collection be a success?
In today’s climate of near fetishistic fascination with all things related to the runway, the preparation and presentation of a designer’s collection may be difficult to sustain 73 minutes’ worth of interest. Certainly it’s sufficient to sustain an ever-expanding roster of runway reports on the small screen: MTV’s House of Style, CNN’s Style with Elsa Klensch, VH 1’s Fashion Television, E! Entertainment Television’s Fashion Week. While all the purportedly “fabulous” components of fashion are in place in Unzipped, they are mot the foundation on which the film rests, It matters less, in fact, that Mizrahi is Isaac Mizrahi than that he is a guy—albeit an extraordinarily colorful guy—who when confronted with public humiliation pulls up his cashmere socks and rallies, the-sun-will-come-out-tomorrow-style.
In the wake of the WWD debacle, for example, Mizrahi is pert and perky, flitting around his SoHo design studio, chatting about his impending fall ’94 collection. “Here’s my process,” he says, as if he’s about to reveal some closely guarded professional secret. “I get inspired.” Flash forward to Mizrahi lolling in bed at home watching Nanook of the North, the 1922 documentary about Eskimos. “I can’t even believe how beautiful these Eskimos are,” swoons Mizrahi, swaddled in white linen sheets. “All I want to do is fur pants, but I know, like, if I do them, I’ll get stoned off of Seventh Avenue like some kind of wanton heretic or something. So there won’t be any fur pants coming down my runway. It’s about women not wanting to look like cows, I guess. And, in fact, there’s something very charming about cows.”
As such an intime scene suggests, Keeve enjoyed unlimited access to Mizrahi. The filmmaker and the fashion designer met in 1991, when Esquire commissioned Reeve to shoot a portrait of Mizrahi—who would later tell Out magazine, “I thought he was just another straight photographer who was flirting with me.” Keeve was not.
Although the ensuing four-year relationship between Keeve and Mizrahi did not survive the making of Unzipped, it did ensure that the film has the clarion ring of authenticity. Keeve not only knows Mizrahi well, he knows Mizrahi’s world as well—meaning that he got the scenery just right. He also got the cast of characters just right—those fashion-is-my-life hothouse flowers who seem to flourish pirouetting on the precipice of self-parody.
Not surprisingly, Keeve devoted plenty of celluloid to the millionaire mannequins so captivating to the public imagination. There’s Christy and Naomi and Kate and, of course, Linda, who deserves a Best Supporting Actress award for her wink-and-a-smile performance as the simpering supermodel from hell (“Isaac, why do you always give me the flat shoes and you give Naomi Campbell the high heels? Do you have something against white women?”). Also adding a bit of Stardust to the film is the curious cadre of luminaries Mizrahi trots out for a turn before the camera—Sandra Bernhard, Mark Morris, Liza Minnelli, Eartha Kitt, and, yes, Roseanne. And then, naturally, no documentary about the fashion world would be complete without the editors from Allure, Elle, and Vogue showing up to gush, “Heaven,” “Genius,” and, of course, the always appropriate “Fabulous.”
More compelling than this polychromatic parade of prize floats, however, is the appearance of Sarah Mizrahi. Tellingly, the designer’s doting mother receives more camera time than, say, Cindy Crawford, who lingers only long enough to get in one very good line: Shooing away an in-her-face photographer, a panicky Crawford cries, “You’re a little close here. Hello! My pores are not that small.”
Whether rhapsodically recalling “my Isaac’s” first fashion show—”I was hysterically sobbing”—or scolding her son for stealing from her purse 25 years ago to buy dress trimmings, Sarah Mizrahi provides insight into the chubby little boy from Brooklyn who grew up to be one of the most charismatic characters on Seventh Avenue. At one point in Unzipped, Mizrahi recalls a sort of primal fashion moment—a pair of mules his mother once adorned with daisies. To which his mother says, “And who knew he was looking at them? I mean, he was four years old, and he noticed the daisies on my mules.”
Actually, it’s easy to imagine because that little boy lives in Isaac Mizrahi, who still retains that wide-eyed sense of wonder. Which is not to say that, at times, he doesn’t transform himself into some kind of absurdist caricature of Diana Vreeland. “It’s almost impossible to have any style at all without the right dogs,” he declares at one point. And at another: “Darling, I’d kill for a swatch of that wallpaper.”
Mizrahi can also play the part of the temperamental prima donna who doles out insults and compliments on a whim. For example, when Nina Santisi, his right hand, hands him a copy of WWD with a front-page story detailing how Jean Paul Gaultier drew his inspiration for his fall ’94 collection—shown weeks before Mizrahi’s—from Nanook of the North, Mizrahi accuses the woman he earlier likened to Snow White of black-heartedness: “Don’t show it to me. You showed it to me! It’s like you took some kind of evil pleasure in it.”
As for Unzipped’s grand finale—Mizrahi’s fall ’94 collection? Yes. Of course, it’s a hit. And yes, of course, the morning after, we find Mizrahi back at the same Greenwich Village newsstand picking up WWD, this one proclaiming, “The man’s got a hit on his hands.” Which turns out to be quite prescient.