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"  Sixteen years ago, when the documentary Unzipped came out and introduced audiences to a gregarious, frazzled, and irrepressible fashion designer named Isaac Mizrahi as he prepared his fall 1994 collection, most people still thought of &amp;quot;reality television&amp;quot; as what happened on the nightly news\u2014there were no Housewives, no Kardashians, no Snooki. The concept of viewing the humiliating and mundane aspects of a person&amp;#039;s daily existence was by no means commonplace, nor was the idea of fashion as a spectator sport, but Mizrahi had a feeling the culture was headed in that direction: The film culminated with a fashion show in which the designer provided his supermodels\u2014Kate, Linda, Cindy, Shalom, and Naomi among them\u2014nothing but a sheer scrim to change behind between runway turns. Both the audience and the camera witnessed the entire fracas of fashion in action, not simply the polished and choreographed spectacle of the catwalk. &amp;quot;I thought, What&amp;#039;s so great about what goes on in front of the stage?&amp;quot; Mizrahi recalls, sipping iced coffee in his studio overlooking Fifth Avenue on a bright fall afternoon. &amp;quot;What really is the story is what&amp;#039;s going on behind the scenes.&amp;quot; It was a novel idea at the time. &amp;quot;Hollywood didn&amp;#039;t know what to make of it! I remember having a meeting with one of the agents at CAA, and he was like, `What?&amp;#039; He actually said, `Are you talking about a wet-T-shirt video?&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; In the intervening years, of course, we&amp;#039;ve grown accustomed to watching the inner workings of the lives of others, and of those in the fashion industry in particular. Fashion has become entertainment, which is not bad for Mizrahi, who has long considered himself to be as much in show business as in design. An actor since his days at the High School of Performing Arts in Manhattan, the Brooklyn native has had a one-man show off Broadway and has directed and costumed an opera in St. Louis and hosted talk shows on both the Style and Oxygen networks. &amp;quot;To say that I&amp;#039;m a fashion person or that I only relate to the subject of fashion? It&amp;#039;s the exact opposite,&amp;quot; Mizrahi says. &amp;quot;I love fashion, so I keep it fresh by doing other things.&amp;quot; In his Bravo reality series The Fashion Show: Ultimate Collection (season two aired in November), Mizrahi plays the encouraging nurturer to the designer contestants who compete in groups, as &amp;quot;houses,&amp;quot; rather than individually, \u00E0 la Project Runway. He&amp;#039;s the Tim Gunn to his leading lady Iman&amp;#039;s more arch and urbane Heidi Klum. Mizrahi says he was never a fan of Runway, his show&amp;#039;s predecessor on the network; &amp;quot;I guess all those years I didn&amp;#039;t watch it because it was something about my industry. I prefer to watch other things, like The Biggest Loser, and I watch all of the Housewives. New York for sure has the best style. On some of those other ones, like the OC or Atlanta\u2014oh my God! That much plastic surgery? That much bleached hair? All right, who are you but a hooker? And I love a hooker.&amp;quot; The prevailing aesthetic when Mizrahi graduated from Parsons School of Design in 1983 was just the opposite: austere and cerebral. &amp;quot;Like Geoffrey Beene,&amp;quot; Mizrahi says. &amp;quot;His clothes were very smart. You really had to look at them a couple of times to understand what was going on, this insane depth.&amp;quot; Mizrahi, whose office is decorated with artist Jenny Ping&amp;#039;s drawings of lizards dressed in ballet costumes and a large Julia Sherman painting of a field of circles in sorbet colors, was drawn to a more playful spirit: &amp;quot;What about girls? What about poodles? What about ice cream?&amp;quot; Mizrahi gave us frothy tulle ball-gown skirts with mock-turtleneck bodysuits, tartan pantsuits\u2014uptown classics with a wink. He meant them, too; he didn&amp;#039;t intend to make satire out of the pink and the polka-dotted. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s nothing less sexy than air quotes around something,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s like taking the smell away and expecting to be aroused.&amp;quot; Mizrahi struck a nerve with his first show in 1987; by 1992, Chanel was backing his business, only to pull out after six years for inconsistent sales\u2014taking away Mizrahi&amp;#039;s right to design under his own name for five years in the bargain. When that time was up, he became the first fashion designer to partner with Target in 2003, a collaboration that was so successful it has been repeated by everyone from Proenza Schouler to Rodarte in years since, though few insiders saw that coming at the time. &amp;quot;People were like, `Oh my God, you&amp;#039;re signing a deal with Target?! What&amp;#039;s that going to do to us?&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; Mizrahi recalls. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s gonna keep you alive, bitch!&amp;quot; The designer is prone to this kind of finger-snapping hyperbole, but his realization that high fashion needed to become more democratic to remain relevant has been borne out in secondary lines at H&amp;amp;amp;Ms and Walmarts across the country. Still, Mizrahi insists that his own mass-market ventures\u2014the Target deal; his position as creative director of Liz Claiborne New York, a job he&amp;#039;s had since 2008; his own year-old line for QVC&amp;#039;s IsaacMizrahiLive!\u2014are not about financial survival, however: They are about fun. &amp;quot;The impulse is `Don&amp;#039;t bore me&amp;#039;\u2014that&amp;#039;s why anybody does anything,&amp;quot; he says. Today, you can buy almost anything\u2014at any price\u2014with some variant of the Isaac Mizrahi label and his signature joie de vivre. Since 2009, he has sold his luxe Isaac Mizrahi New York collection\u2014for spring, there are garden-party sheaths cloaked in nude tulle with crisp white collars and jackets embellished with ghostly trompe l&amp;#039;oeil buttons, bows, and pockets meant to look like the work of an old Xerox machine\u2014at his eponymous boutique off Madison Avenue. On QVC, he peddles everything from $60 handbags to melamine mixing bowls. He pulls a trio of these in cheery coral, gold, and purple off a shelf in his office and gasps at them: &amp;quot;Look how pretty! I love all the stuff we do for QVC&amp;quot;\u2014toggle coats, Christmas ornaments, silverware. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s all different stuff,&amp;quot; Mizrahi says, grinning. &amp;quot;We did amazingly well with cheesecake.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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