So Young, So Restless : Dynamo Whiz Kid Isaac Mizrahi’s Brash Designs Have Wowed Everyone From Chanel to Sandra Bernhard

NEW YORK —  “I ask myself when I design every collection, ‘What will change style forever?’ That’s the task I’ve set: Expressing myself and influencing the world.”

You have to be young to get away with a comment like that. Or you have to be Isaac Mizrahi, who is not only young but audacious and apparently on the verge of something big.

Some people know him as the whiz kid who turned a tooled Western saddle into a leather bustier. Others think of him as the hipster who dresses Spike, Liza and Sandra Bernhard.

Either way, when the 30-year-old from Brooklyn, N.Y., is honored here Monday night by the Council of Fashion Designers of America, the industry will officially condone his flashy, brashy style.

More than condone it, they will applaud it, and him, as the hope of American fashion. And they have their reasons.

He is one of the few home-grown talents to crack Europe’s crusty inner circle. His clothes have popped off the pages of British Vogue and sold in tony shops from England to Italy.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art here has been collecting his work since his first runway show four years ago. His label squeezes in among the most coveted in fashion history: Madame Worth, Balenciaga, Yves Saint Laurent.

But for sheer snob appeal, the coup de grace came about a year ago when Chanel, Paris, gave Mizrahi its blessing and its bucks. The French luxury company is now an investor. With so much going so right, why is this man chain-smoking?

At a desk the size of a dining table, with a view of gritty Wooster Street outside his SoHo window, the young maestro can hardly sit still. Eyes like coals, lips as elastic as a cartoon character’s, hair a dark shock of curls, you would notice him in any crowd. Besides, he’s over 6 feet tall and no string bean.

“An astrologer told me I’d have a fashion house, and it would be very important to women,” he begins. No need for panic so far.

But then: “My muses get very upset with me if I worry about money. They say it’s counterproductive.” Wherever those two thoughts meet, there must be a hefty stack of bills waiting. But no one ever said success comes cheap.

In this case, however, it did come early. People who don’t give a fig about fashion may recognize Mizrahi from his first incarnation as an actor. In “Fame,” he played an auditioning student. The movie mirrored his own life at the time; he was studying acting at New York’s High School of Performing Arts. If nothing else, that set his sights on the stars, the spotlight and center stage. Today he can hardly mention his friends, or tell a story, without including someone famous.

Take Sandra Bernhard. She called him after he said she was beautiful on “Attitudes,” a fashion-for-TV show. “I wanted to see about wearing something of his,” she says. And she did wear a pair of his hot pants for an MTV special. Now they’re friends, and he’s designing her costumes for a Broadway show she hopes to open this spring.

Bernhard says they’re two of a kind: “He draws from the culture, as I do. His twist on classical is right for me. He has a modern point of view. And he’s a family man, he’s old-fashioned, as I am.” Last year, they spent Hanukkah at his mother’s house in Brooklyn.

Bernhard has attended Mizrahi’s fashion shows. He says he can hear her from backstage, screaming every time she likes what comes down the runway. Spike Lee has been there too. Mizrahi supplied some of the costumes for “Jungle Fever.” Madonna came once, although so far Mizrahi hasn’t outfitted her for anything. And while Liza Minnelli rarely goes to his shows, she is a regular in his studio. He makes a lot of her stage clothes.

The celebrity counterculture action only enhances his daredevil image. “He is a bit on the edge, a little offbeat,” says Rose Marie Bravo, I. Magnin’s chief executive. “At our store his customers are the avant-garde women, more confident and original than some.”

The first indication that his extreme ideas would earn a permanent place on the fashion map came in 1989 when Mizrahi hoisted a tartan-plaid kilt into a strapless minidress. A sequined evening parka from that same collection set a trend around the world. His sherbet-colored blazers and top coats filtered all the way through the food chain two years ago. And then there was that evening dress he showed with Hush Puppies. “W-a-a-y dressed down,” as he says.

Mizrahi may have dreamed of Hollywood in high school, but he also dabbled in design. He and his neighbor, Sarah Haddad Cheney, a friend of his parents, started a fashion business, IS New York. He made women’s clothes, she sold them to stores.

His parents weren’t surprised. Mizrahi’s father manufactured children’s clothes. And when other boys were learning to dance like John Travolta, Mizrahi was asking for a sewing machine, a dress form and an airbrush to paint T-shirts. His parents let him have his way. “To give a child tools, to bring out the child’s potential. That’s the most important thing,” says his mother, Sarah.

After high school, he enrolled in Parsons School of Design. From there things moved quickly. Between classes he worked for Perry Ellis, the late designer known for his quirky spin on American classics.

“ ‘Get the kid over here to see this,’ Perry used to say,” recalls Kalman Ruttenstein, Bloomingdale’s fashion director. When Ruttenstein first met Mizrahi, he says, “I figured he was a kid with some talent if he was one of Perry’s assistants. A couple years later he called me and asked if I’d go see his own first collection. And I bought it for the store.” Mizrahi was 25.

“At Parsons, everyone thought he was incredibly talented,” recalls designer Marc Jacobs, an early bloomer himself. He was two years behind Mizrahi in school and now designs the Ellis line. “It’s one thing to have great ideas, it’s another thing to make them come together,” he adds.

The next giant step led Mizrahi from Ellis into the office of Calvin Klein. But at that point, the winning streak shattered.

He was Klein’s assistant. And, “he was frustrated,” says Nina Santisi. She is now his press director, but they first met when they worked at Ellis. “He’d say his ideas got diluted, his designs were disregarded. He asked me, if he started his own business, would I consider working for him. I said, ‘Frankly, I don’t think you can afford me.’ ”

Mizrahi left Klein soon after that conversation and didn’t work for several months.

“That was a low point,” he says in a rare moment of quiet.

“But it became a high point.”

He’s rolling again.

“It was so liberating not to take taxis or buy everything in sight. I read a lot. Reading is a vacation for me.” His taste runs to the romantic. Thomas Mann’s “Magic Mountain,” a story set in a Swiss sanitarium, recently inspired him to name his resort collection “spa.”

After Klein, Mizrahi was out of work and short of confidence, but one person was sure he could bounce back: his old partner, Haddad Cheney.

“He came to me and said, ‘Sarah, I need to be on my own. Can you help me?’ ” says Haddad Cheney, who says she takes a motherly approach to her current job as his CEO. (Sixty people now work for Mizrahi.)

“I tried to get backing,” she says, “then we decided we had to put out a collection on our own.”

After two successful seasons, she got investment money from her cousin’s husband, Haim Dabah, president of Gitano, the $800-million jeans business. Jack Dushey, a businessman Haddad Cheney knew, also bought in.

“I saw an incredible talent that needed a way to move on,” says Dabah. “In the beginning, our financial commitment was small.” But Mizrahi, who still owns the largest share, has proved to be an astute businessman who stays within his budget and knows which ideas the fashion world is ready for. And so, the investment has grown.

For a struggling young designer, such sturdy backing was an answered prayer--but not the end of his worries. Other problems still need to be addressed. The young company has yet to turn a profit--not unusual in the high-end fashion business. And while Mizrahi has won the praise of the critics and the loyalty of some better specialty stores, his collections can be oddly incomplete from a retailer’s standpoint. There isn’t always a skirt to go with the jacket, for instance. And so far, he has hardly put a dent in the boutique business, at least not in Los Angeles.

Haddad Cheney describes theirs as a small business with a big reputation. Sales for 1991 reached about $8 million wholesale. The women’s label is carried from Browns in London to Barneys in New York to Neiman Marcus, Bullock’s, Beverly Center, and I. Magnin in Los Angeles, and at this point no one seems too worried about profits.

“Isaac will one day make a great deal of money,” predicts Dabah. “We don’t need to rush. None of the investors needs to make a living on this business.”

Still, expansion is definitely on everyone’s mind. “There’ll be sheets and perfume and all of it,” Mizrahi says. But the company refuses to get into the licensing game. Notorious for making and then breaking a designer’s reputation, the ‘70s trend of selling a name to manufacturers and giving up quality control in exchange is an absolute “no” in Mizrahi’s offices. Everything is designed in-house; most of it is produced by New York contractors.

Besides his women’s line, he launched a women’s accessories division last fall. And his menswear, the weakest link in the chain, has continued to grow slowly since its debut in fall, 1989.

Even Dabah has his doubts about the menswear line: “My wife bought me a coat. It’s wonderful, but. . . . The menswear isn’t commercially successful. Isaac will continue it in a small way until he finds the right niche.”

“The reception to the menswear has been cool to say the least,” concedes Robert Best, Mizrahi’s design assistant. “Some people consider the clothes too girlish because, traditionally, only women have worn soft colors or a plaid overcoat.”

Still, at Studio boutique in Santa Monica, the only small shop in town that carries Mizrahi’s label, just two of 12 jackets were left at sale time, says Studio’s Tom Gillman. Prices start at about $650 for sport jacket and $1,000 for a suit.

But for all its praise and press attention, the women’s wear has its problems too. Mizrahi is better known for show-stopper items than for complete daytime wardrobes.

“We want to make sure there’s a jacket, a full and a slim-cut pant, and a skirt in every group,” says Vice President Jennifer Peck, hired away from Ralph Lauren last fall. “To develop a steady customer, we need to be sure they come to Mizrahi not just for that great evening piece, but for basics.”

Holding competitive prices is another concern. Mizrahi is known for expensive ideas--custom-made lace beaded with horse heads, for example--and luxury fabrics. Prices for his daytime suits run about $1,000; most evening outfits are $1,000 or more. He plans to introduce some lower-priced basics, such as $500 blazers, for fall ’93.

To date, no women’s boutiques in Los Angeles have added his label to their permanent list.

“I went to look at the line, (but) I didn’t find it that interesting,” says Maxfield’s Tommy Perse. “The feeling I get about Mizrahi is, his clothes are for American department stores.”

Mizrahi takes the long view. Before every show he asks himself what’s the worst that could happen. “If they don’t like what I do, I’ll live with it,” he says. “I’ll close my doors for a season or two.”

Somehow, that doesn’t seem likely.