How does one listen to the whispers in a five year old’s mind which prompts him to be different? Isaac Mizrahi, the fashion designer, tells us in his memoir titled “I.M.” He tells the story from the beginning, “I wanted a Barbie doll, but a Barbie doll was the exact thing that would label a kid in those days as someone who was a freak. And the book talks about the fact that it was kind of weird sort of social disease or something that didn't even have a name for…. They couldn't bring themselves to even think of the idea of being gay… My mother looked the other way and allowed me to have it.”
Mizrahi very often found himself in Loehmann’s women’s fitting room, “I was always accompanying my mother there, and I did get this crazy kind of sense of the psychology of the way women think about clothes.”
When he was still a high school student, Mizrahi says, “I had this tiny collection with a friend of mine… We made clothes and sold them to boutiques in New York City. In this small atelier in my basement where I made sketches, and sometimes I made first prototypes, and I did a lot of sewing down there…it all started with my fascination with puppets. I started making puppets when I was 8 years old.
And I learned to sew making puppets… the first real foray into anything creative was the puppet shows and also this crazy female impersonation that I used to do. I wanted to imitate Streisand, Judy Garland…”
Feeling liberated
Mizrahi says it was difficult to tell his mother who he was but impossible to tell his father for he believed he could not have handled it, “…he went when I was about 20-years-old. And I had come out in a kind of half way… I was out to most of my friends and even my mom and my sisters. He didn’t know, and I was sort of guarding the secret a little bit from him. And I just couldn’t bring myself to tell him and then he passed. And the minute he passed I felt - kind of as much as I would miss him, as much as I loved him, I felt liberated.
I could not have fulfilled my agenda as an adult at all, my creative agenda or my psychosexual agenda, if my father was with us. I would be guarding that still to this day.”
Mizrahi avers, “I am an optimist and I think it's learned optimism. When I was a kid, you could barely talk about certain things. And now not only do we talk about them, but we literally act on them. And I think that's progress…
And so as I get older, I learn more and more optimism. I keep thinking it's really not about this moment. It's about the next moment and how we have that to look forward to…
