Isaac Mizrahi on the 'Unzipped' Restoration: 'I Hate Looking Back'

The restored "Unzipped" is now showing at Film Forum in New York, and its star admits he can barely stand to watch it. Isaac Mizrahi, 64, fronts Douglas Keeves's 1995 documentary, which Miramax bought after it became a hit at Sundance.

"I have to say I hate looking back," Mizrahi says. "I hate this whole process, a little bit of looking back."

His reasons are blunt. "I looked so cute, and I look so shitty now," he says. "I was so agile, and I'm not as agile anymore. My knees hurt. My back hurts. Even my hair. I had such cute dark hair. Oh, well. But it's not just vanity. It's more just about the experience of your life. Thirty years! Man, that is crazy."

Keeves, Mizrahi's boyfriend at the time, filmed the planning and execution of the designer's show for his fall 1994 collection. The 73-minute film captures Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss, the late André Leon Talley and Eartha Kitt, alongside a swarm of fashion insiders and glitterati.

The runtime came up short by accident. "We didn't intend to make it that short," Mizrahi remembers. "We wanted it to be longer. There were about 10 minutes of Faye Dunaway that got out because we couldn't get the rights to run footage from 'Mommy Dearest.'"

Dunaway had come in for a fitting while preparing a TV pilot. "She needed a lot of suits," Mizrahi recalls. "We had her for a day and a half, a fitting that was endless. Being the big gay that I am, I was enthralled by every word out of her mouth." Dunaway would study the mirror and, when pleased, pronounce: "Oh, that's very Faye. Very Faye." Mizrahi borrowed the habit. "If I like what I look like, I go, 'Oh, it's very Faye.' It's like I think of myself as Faye Dunaway."

Asked what he would tell himself if he could go back three decades, Mizrahi answers without missing a beat: "'You're not that fat!' Swear to God, that's what I would tell myself." He describes the high-waisted pleated pants he made for himself out of anxiety about his waist, and calls his younger self "stupid" for the worry. "I was not fat. But I was a really fat kid, so I lost 75 pounds in high school. I'm never going to get over that. You never do."

He is open about taking a GLP-1. "I love it," he says. "I'm in my 60s, darling and I recently just got so big. I'm usually very good at keeping it under control, but it's incredible and the rest of your health benefits, it's incredible."

The film preserves the peak of Mizrahi's eponymous label, when he dressed Sarah Jessica Parker, Nicole Kidman and Natalie Portman. He closed the company in 1998. Since then he has released collections under other monikers, designed for other brands, launched a cabaret act and appeared in "Marty Supreme" as Gwyneth Paltrow's press agent. He now serves as creative director at Target and continues to sell a collection on QVC.

Fashion's current spectacle economy draws a sigh. "I don't know if those giant spectacles they have in Paris and Milan are necessarily supposed to be influential in the way people dress six months later," he says. "That is why that speech in 'The Devil Wears Prada' about cerulean blue makes me want to kill somebody because that is so not the way things work. They want you to believe that's the way it works. I want to shout that from the rooftops, 'It never has worked that way — never!'" Those runway spectacles, he argues, exist to "bolster the image of brand names so that they can sell a ton of perfume and handbags and shoes."

The interview took place days after the Metropolitan Museum of Art scrapped its planned John Galliano retrospective, set to run from May 9, 2027, to Jan. 9, 2028, and to serve as next year's Met Gala theme. Galliano, who would have been only the third living designer honored by the Met after Yves Saint Laurent in 1983 and Rei Kawakubo in 2017, announced his withdrawal on Instagram amid backlash over his past racist outbursts.

Galliano appears briefly in "Unzipped" at a Paris dinner with Mizrahi, Talley and others. Mizrahi calls him a "genius," but he doubted the gala from the moment of the announcement. "When they announced [the Galliano Met Gala], I thought to myself, 'Wow, who's going to that?' I'm not even talking about Jews or donors of the museum. I'm thinking about a celebrity showing up. I don't know who would show up on that red carpet. No one is going to say, 'I love John.' Who's going to say that?"

Next may come a producer's hat. Mizrahi is developing a television series about the paparazzi photographer Ron Galella with producer Christine Vachon. "We're doing it with the Ron Galella estate," he says. "It's very exciting. We're in the first, first, first stages, so we haven't even pitched it or anything yet. But it's really such a great idea, only because of what it means culturally to our country."

"Unzipped" continues at Film Forum. It opens at Laemmle Royal and Laemmle Glendale in Los Angeles on Oct. 9, followed by a nationwide rollout.