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Living for beauty is a living hell sometimes. Just ask New York designer Isaac Mizrahi, who navigates a season in Hades so deftly in Douglas Keeve’s funny, staccato-paced documentary “Unzipped.”

The film is scheduled to open Aug. 11 in Los Angeles at Laemmle’s Royal Theater, but Barneys New York, Miramax and Hachette Filipacchi will host a benefit premiere tonight in Beverly Hills.

“Unzipped” charts the creation and presentation of Mizrahi’s fall 1994 collection, lingering over moments of frustration, pain and just plain silliness.

Keeve, a first-time filmmaker, couldn’t have chosen a more compelling character than the self-mocking Mizrahi, a designer whose clothes have been lauded by critics for their wit and distinctly American spirit. Alternately cherubic and brooding, Mizrahi seems to dream up an entire collection to the syncopated beat of quickly edited vignettes, all tidily grouped and introduced with subtitles (“Fur Things First,” “A Voyage and a Vision,” “Back to the Front” and “The Fur Flies”).

That’s the secret to the charm of “Unzipped”: months of hard, dull work is compressed into a lovely montage of Mizrahi sketching. The guy playing the piano and delivering a perfect Bette Davis patois on-screen really is a designer. But, as the film illustrates, being a designer today is as much about deconstructing pop culture, giving witty quotes and mounting a stage spectacle as it is about creating a new silhouette.

New York’s fashion scene is where Keeve spent 12 years as a fashion photographer. But he grew up in Santa Monica ignorant of the world of style.

“My mom used to buy my clothes on sale at Sears,” he said during a recent trip to Los Angeles to promote the film. “When I got into the fashion world and started meeting people like Isaac and Candy [Pratts, an editor at Vogue] and Polly [Mellen, an editor at Allure], I never knew people like that existed. I’m so enthralled with them.”

They’re a special breed, all right, at least in the film. Shown a preview of Mizrahi’s collection, Mellen squeals: “The ‘40s chubby is back! Thank God!”

One wonders how the ordinary filmgoer will relate to people who, as Keeve puts it, “are so out there they would kill for fashion.” But the film has been screened for just such audiences with apparent success.

Keeve himself didn’t become a slave of fashion until after he graduated from UCLA. But the tall, gangly blond still looks more like a skateboarder than a fashion insider. Yet it was his familiarity with Seventh Avenue that bred not contempt, but success.

“When you know something like the back of your hand, you’re not distracted by the environment and the people. I could concentrate on the story. Now, if I had to do a movie about the breeding of gerbils, um, I don’t know that I would do it justice. . . .”

The hard part, Keeve said, was financing the project. “We forayed out into this world of Hollywood like these dopes, thinking people were going to give us money. People would say to us, ‘That’s a fabulous idea. It’s going to be a great movie. And good luck to you!’ ”

Ultimately, “Unzipped” was funded by Hachette Filipacchi, publisher of Elle magazines. After the film was shown at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award, Miramax agreed to distribute it.

“It’s funny,” Keeve said. “When you have a project that’s a success, it’s like everybody jumps on the bandwagon. It makes you very bitter because you are nothing when you start out, then when you have a little bit of success everybody’s your best friend.”

Once word of the film got around, he said, “people at Vogue asked, ‘Why didn’t you come to us?’ We said: ‘We did.’ ”

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After director Robert Altman’s misfired 1994 farce “Ready to Wear,” the public may not be ready for another film on the topic. Like Altman, Keeve shows us fashion’s ridiculousness. But he also shows us the thrill of dressing up and being pretty--or at least fantasizing about it. When dark-eyed model Shalom twirls in a jelly-bean pink chiffon dress, the effect is breathtaking.

“Unzipped” also has, in Mizrahi, a hero worth rooting for. The sort of guy who just won’t take no for an answer.

Mizrahi’s vision for his fall ’94 show is to open on a backstage scene of models dressing, obscured ever so slightly by a scrim. Keeve tracks Mizrahi as he tries to persuade Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Kate Moss, Cindy Crawford and Christy Turlington to join in the fun. The designer’s face falls when one super-model after another rolls her eyes at the idea: You want me to do what?

A more serious blow to the fall collection illustrates the weird synchronicity that causes designers to come up with the same wacky idea at the same time. For their 1994 fall collections, both Mizrahi and French designer Jean Paul Gaultier somehow found inspiration in “Nanook of the North,” Robert Flaherty’s vintage documentary about an Eskimo family.

But what with the Paris collections preceding the New York collections by about a week, Gaultier gets there first. Mizrahi’s creative director, Nina Santisi hand-delivers the bad news via a copy of Women’s Wear Daily.

“Why did you show me this?” he moans. “Did you want to hurt me?”

As the climactic fashion show scene opens, celebrities such as Richard Gere and Ellen Barkin take their seats in the front row. The scrim has just the desired effect, and the show, which is one of the few parts of the film shot in color, is decidedly triumphant. Mizrahi heads to the newsstand the next morning, though, to see what the critics have to say.

It would be unfair to give away the ending, but Mizrahi admits: “I feel like Marlo Thomas.” So does the audience.