No doubt Isaac Mizrahi is excited about the release of the newly restored “Unzipped,” the 1995 documentary chronicling a moment in time when he was one of the fashion world’s hottest designers.
However, Mizrahi admits he’s not that eager to watch it. “I have to say I hate looking back,” he tells me. “I hate this whole process, a little bit of looking back.”
What’s so wrong with taking a trip down memory lane?
“I looked so cute, and I look so shitty now,” the 64-year-old Mizrahi says. “I was so agile, and I’m not as agile anymore. My knees hurt. My back hurts. Even my hair. I had such cute dark hair. Oh, well. But it’s not just vanity. It’s more just about the experience of your life. Thirty years! Man, that is crazy.”
Directed by Mizarahi’s then-boyfriend Douglas Keeves, “Unzipped” chronicles the designer’s planning and execution of the show for his fall 1994 collection.
The film, which Miramax bought after it was a Sundance hit in 1995, includes appearances by Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss, the late André Leon Talley and Eartha Kitt along with a bevy of other fashion insiders and glitterati.
The film runs at only 73 minutes. “We didn’t intend to make it that short,” Mizrahi remembers. “We wanted it to be longer. There were about 10 minutes of Faye Dunaway that got out because we couldn’t get the rights to run footage from ‘Mommy Dearest.’”
What?!
“She came to a fitting. She was doing a TV pilot, and she needed a lot of suits,” Mizrahi remembers. “We had her for a day and a half, a fitting that was endless. Being the big gay that I am, I was enthralled by every word out of her mouth. One really hilarious thing that I do remember about Faye Dunaway was that she would look in the mirror, and when she liked something, she’d go, ‘Oh, that’s very Faye. Very Faye.’ Talking about herself in the third person was so fantastic. And I do that now. If I like what I look like, I go, ‘Oh, it’s very Faye.’ It’s like I think of myself as Faye Dunaway.”
I ask Mizrahi what he would tell himself if he could go back three decades. Without missing a beat, he says, “You’re not that fat. Swear to God, that’s what I would tell myself. I used to wear these crazy Fred Mertz kind of high-waisted pleated pants that I made myself because I was so fucking crazy that my waist was big. I was so stupid, and I look stupid, I don’t look chic. I look stupid, and I was perfectly fine. I was not fat. But I was a really fat kid, so I lost 75 pounds in high school. I’m never going to get over that. You never do.”
Mizrahi makes no secret about being on a GLP-1. “I love it,” he coos. “I’m in my 60s, darling and I recently just got so big. I’m usually very good at keeping it under control, but it’s incredible and the rest of your health benefits, it’s incredible.”
At the height of releasing his eponymous collection, he dressed the A-list, including Sarah Jessica Parker, Nicole Kidman and Natalie Portman. After closing shop in 1998, he released various collections under different monikers or designed for other brands altogether. He also launched a show business career with a cabaret act. Most recently, he appeared in “Marty Supreme” as Gwyneth Paltrow’s press agent.
Mizrahi is now the creative director at Target and continues to sell a collection on QVC.
When talking about fashion today, Mizrahi lets out a big sigh. “I don’t know if those giant spectacles they have in Paris and Milan are necessarily supposed to be influential in the way people dress six months later,” he says. “That is why that speech in ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ about cerulean blue makes me want to kill somebody because that is so not the way things work. They want you to believe that’s the way it works. I want to shout that from the rooftops, ‘It never has worked that way — never!’” What those spectacles do is they bolster the image of brand names so that they can sell a ton of perfume and handbags and shoes.”
When we talked, it was just a few days after The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced it was no longer moving forward with its planned retrospective for John Galliano that would’ve run from May 9, 2027, to Jan. 9, 2028 and served as the theme of next year’s Met Gala. Galliano, who would have been only the third living fashion designer to be feted by the Met following Yves Saint Laurent in 1983 and Rei Kawakubo in 2017, released a statement on Instagram announcing his decision to pull the retrospective amid backlash over his past racist outbursts.
Galliano makes a brief appearance in “Unzipped” at dinner with Mizrahi, Talley and others in Paris. Mizrahi calls Galliano a “genius,” but also says, “When they announced [the Galliano Met Gala], I thought to myself, ‘Wow, who’s going to that?’ I’m not even talking about Jews or donors of the museum. I’m thinking about a celebrity showing up. I don’t know who would show up on that red carpet. No one is going to say, ‘I love John.’ Who’s going to say that?”
Next up could for Mizrahi could be a producer’s hat. He’s developing a television series about the life of legendary and very controversial paparazzi photographer Ron Galella with producer Christine Vachon. “We’re doing it with the Ron Galella estate,” he says. “It’s very exciting. We’re in the first, first, first stages, so we haven’t even pitched it or anything yet. But it’s really such a great idea, only because of what it means culturally to our country.”
“Unzipped” is now showing at the Film Forum in New York City. It will open in Los Angeles at Laemmle Royal and Laemmle Glendale on Oct. 9, followed by a nationwide rollout.
