Isaac Mizrahi: Isaac Does the Oscars

Who among the younger Hollywood crop does Mizrahi suspect might spearhead a fashion turnaround? "Drew Barrymore is really specific about what she wears and she will be fascinating," he predicts. "Another pacesetter with the way she dresses is Uma Thurman. She thinks about what she's going to look like. You want to talk movie damage? I don't think I've been as inspired by the way someone's looked since I saw Uma in Henry & June. God, it was just astounding."

With such actors as Molly Ringwald, Claire Danes and Donovan Leitch strutting their staff on couturier runways more and more, has Mizrahi wanted to recruit any celluloid types for his shows? He shakes his head no, but he just shot an ad campaign for his new, more affordable line of clothes that featured Natalie Portman, the 14 year old from The Professional and Heat. "I could say to her. 'Be big as this, be Shirley,'" he says, pulling out a still of Shirley MacLaine singing "I'm a Brass Band" in Sweet Charity. "and she could. Then I'd say. "Just walk in on your boyfriend and tell him you've found yourselves a fabulous flat for $800 a month!' and she'd do that. It was like Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face floating down the stairs in that gown going. 'Take the picture! Take the picture!'"

As an honorary chief of the world's fashion police, would Mizrahi care to slap citations on any particular Oscar offenders, young or old? What about Barbra Streisand's infamous see-through number back in 1969? "I loved that, because I think it's great when people have the balls to do something like that, even if it's horrible. They're living their fantasy. Sometimes Geena Davis, who I think is fabulous, looks like she made the dress she's wearing in therapy, but then sometimes she looks fantastic. She, like, scares people with what she's wearing sometimes, then other times, she's amazing. More power to her, I say, because she's having a ball. And it's her ball, right?"

Mizrahi loves shock effect overall. "I don't mind a scandal," he declares. "Scandal is great. Stars should absolutely be encouraged to go out and do crazy things. I just wish they'd handle scandal differently. Like Hugh Grant. When that scandal broke out, instead of doing the Leno show and going. 'Oh. my God. I did something so wrong,' I wish he'd have just come out and said, 'Give me a break. If it offends you, sorry, I'm so famous, I can fuck anybody I want, and because I can fuck anybody I want, I want to fuck this prostitute, because that's what I'm going through right now.' In the 1990s, I feel it's impossible to be one thing but to try and represent something entirely different. If you do that, you're going to end up being O.J. Simpson."

I marvel at how Isaac Mizrahi, the Brooklyn kid who's now incredibly debonair, has been using his outsized personality and charisma to draw attention to his work and himself. What was Unzipped, after all, but a fabulous commercial for his gifts as a designer and as potential date material for interested parties? I'm wondering what sort of flirtatious, seductive response he has gotten since the movie. "I'm such a dope, I don't notice it until someone else brings it to my attention," he admits. "Someone I know called and said. 'This friend of mine saw Unzipped and wants to meet you. He's 6'5", a therapist,' and so on. Well, I met him and it was fine, but it didn't go anywhere. There wasn't a spark. What I'm going through right now is that I get enough sex when I need it, but not everybody knows how to kiss me, you know? I look for something that's way beyond the content of perfect physique. In the business I'm in. I'm bombarded every second by perfect physiques, perfect faces. What I like is real tenderness. Kissing."

Just then my tape recorder switches over and the tiny microphone pops up of its own volition. "Just like an erection," 'Mizrahi marvels. "Well, a petit erection." Apropos of which, he recalls which movies truly formed and wrecked him as a Brooklyn kid. "I was an insomniac as a teenager," he says. "Movies were my friends, my companions. I never had any friends until I went to high school and then I had a million. That's when I fell in love with Carole Lombard, whom I cannot get over, because I just want to be so lightweight, like someone blew me out of a bubble. I used to be very obsessed with Elizabeth Taylor, too; it was a summer-long obsession, a Suddenly, Last Summer-long obsession. I used to wear lots of powder like her, lots of eye makeup and eyeliner..."

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