Isaac Mizrahi’s Online Archive Sale—Starting Today—Allows You to Own a Piece of Fashion History
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 Parsons School of design. In 1987, after stints with 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. Having won awards, designed costumes, a line for Target, and starred on film and television, Mizrahi 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 pre-shopping the archive with Zendaya and Law Roach, where newness is to be found, and his 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?’
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