“One of the big questions still is what to put in museums,” the designer Isaac Mizrahi said in conversation with Lynn Yaeger, a contributing editor at Vogue, at a preview of his retrospective at the Jewish Museum in New York (Isaac Mizrahi: an Unruly History). “What needs to go in museums is what is not boring”—and boring Mizrahi certainly is not.
The Brooklyn-born designer is known primarily for his work in fashion, although he says his current focus is on the performing arts and entertainment. In 1987, he débuted his Isaac Mizrahi New York line, which ran until 1998. He had his first runway show a year later, which wowed with surprising punches of colour. His career has included a line for the popular retailer Target, television appearances on the fashion reality show Project Runway and the series Sex and the City, as well as directing (and, of course, designing the costumes for) productions of The Magic Flute and A Little Night Music at the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis. Next up? A possible TV programme (he’s keeping mum on the details) and a memoir he hopes to publish in 2017.
An Unruly History, organised by Chee Pearlman in collaboration of Mizrahi, is the first show on the designer. “I can hardly believe it, I’m floating on this cloud,” he said. It opens with what Mizrahi called good-naturedly “a new work, damn it”: an arrangement, along a large wall, of colour-coded fabric samples he’s obsessively collected since the 1980s (Swatches, 1987-present), a brilliant display that speaks to the importance of material, texture and colour in his work. Inside, the galleries have been decked with white sheer scrim to neutralise the gothic-revival details of the Jewish Museum's interior, a nod to Mizrahi's use of the theatrical prop in his 1994 fall runway show, which in turn was the subject of the 1995 documentary on the designer, Unzipped.
Without being too overwhelming or didactic, the show captures different facets of his fashions on mannequins in open displays: highbrow/lowbrow mixes (a white cotton tee-shirt atop a silk ball-gown skirt); experimentation with materials (a formal skirt of silk that mimics elevator pad fabric); myriad cultural references (the Totem dress, inspired by Pacific northwest Native American art and worn on the cover of Time magazine in 1991 by Naomi Campbell); his focus on women’s everyday lives (a kooky but functional satin ballgown with a matching satin baby carrier); provocation (Desert Storm dress, with the new camouflage pattern developed for the 1990 war) and artistic influences (a dress based on a neon work by Dan Flavin, whose wedding outfit Mizrahi designed in 1992). The show also looks at his theatrical costumes, the most stunning of which is the Queen of the Night dress in deep blue silk dotted with silver stars, made for the 2014 production of the Magic Flute.
In spite of the luscious clothing, my favourite section of the show—“me too”, Mizrahi said—is a small gallery with around 100 of his fashion sketches. These include the storyboard for his fall 1992 collection, laid in a display case in the centre of the room. The sketches are vibrant and skilful. It’s also fun to see the names of the models who wore the designs on the sketches, like “Naomi” (Campbell) and “Carla” (Bruni).
Speaking with Yaeger, Mizrahi said the most emotional moment of organising the show—“I didn’t want to burst into tears, but I almost did,” he said—was when his sketches were laid out on a table, handled by gloved curators “like I was Leonardo", he recalled. "I thought, 'What the hell?'".
So what does it mean to Mizrahi that the show is at the Jewish Museum, when, as he pointed out, it could have been at the Cooper Hewitt, the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology or the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Well, first of all, the museum’s director Claudia Gould asked him to do it, and he “trusted her instinct”. He also felt the space was right. “But by the end of it, after three years of working on the show,” Mizrahi explained, “I kind of understand there’s a kind of inseparable ‘Jew-iness’ about me and about New York Fashion in general. It belongs in this museum. And it felt like I was at home with the place.”
Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that a skirt by Mizrahi was made of elevator pad fabric. In fact, it was made of silk to mimic the elevator pad fabric.
• Isaac Mizrahi: an Unruly History, The Jewish Museum, New York, until 7 August