On 'Isaac,' Food Tips and Stars, but Fashion Is King

By LOLA OGUNNAIKE

IT'S not often that Isaac Mizrahi, the quick-witted fashion designer turned television personality, is left speechless, but so he was one recent afternoon on the set of his new show, "Isaac."

Curled on an electric-orange lounge chair, Mr. Mizrahi was interviewing the actress Sela Ward and playing an innocuous game of fill-in-the-blank with her. "Southern woman never do blank," he asked Ms. Ward, a Mississippian. Demurely but without hesitation, she replied, "Southern women never grunt while having sex." Her curveball of a response "made me sweat a little bit," Mr. Mizrahi said after the taping. "I was not expecting that at all. I thought this girl is all prim and proper on the outside, but she's a wild woman on the inside."

Since he shuttered his faltering ready-to-wear business nearly seven years ago, Mr. Mizrahi has tried everything from theater to mass market design. His wallet-friendly line at Target aims to bring style to the masses with $24.99 tule skirts and $14.99 striped shower curtains. For a Birkin-bag-clutching clientele, he designs couture pieces for Bergdorf Goodman. Now he is heavily focused on television, readying "Isaac," his daily hourlong talk show, for a Dec. 5 premiere on the Style cable channel.

The other afternoon he raced about his West 30's loft space in Manhattan taping several segments before a small, giddy studio audience and a resident band, the Ben Waltzer quartet. He learned how to make ice cream, he interviewed Ms. Ward and the actress Jaime Pressly, and he oversaw a makeover. But fashion is king. During the "Sketch and Answer" portion of the show he fielded questions and offered advice, illustrating his suggestions on a sketch pad.

"Can I wear leg warmers over boots?" one woman asked.

Another inquired, "How do I wear flats without making my legs look stubby?"

"No" was the answer on the leg warmers and boots, and as for the flats, "yes" when paired with a mini-skirt or an ankle-grazing skirt.

"You've got to create a long continuous line," he explained.

The loft space doubles as his design studio. During the taping two women could be seen in the background diligently sewing. But he has no plans to put up partitions. Rather, in this day and age, he sees the two enterprises - design and television - working as one. "Synergistically - I hate that word; it's so 90's - but each of these projects feeds one another," Mr. Mizrahi said in an interview. "I don't know how the clothes can exist without the show, and I don't know how the show can exist without the clothes."

And soon the Style channel may wonder how it can exist without Mr. Mizrahi. "Isaac" will be on three times a day, five days a week. "He's going to be the face of the network," said Ted Harbert, president and chief executive of both the Style and the E! networks. "We're putting it on his shoulders, because he can take the weight. He's magic with people. People either want to hug him or laugh with him."

Mr. Mizrahi's on-camera style is more gabby best friend than serious interviewer, more Hanna-Barbera than Barbara Walters. His interview questions for Ms. Ward ranged from the soft ("Did you grow up knowing you were gorgeous?") to the silly ("Tell me about your husband, is he cute?").

Occasionally he offered up a zinger: "You're so pretty, have you had any work done?" (No, she answered.) But for the most part he minded his manners, rarely probing for anything that would give a celebrity's handler an anxiety attack.

Spontaneity is the key, Mr. Mizrahi said afterward. "One of the things that I'm very hellbent on doing is not pre-interviewing the hell out of subjects," he said. "On a lot of shows you can feel that the guest is being set up to tell the cute story. I'm like, 'Let's not and say we did.' "

An astrology buff, Mr. Mizrahi often asks his guests about their zodiac signs. (He's a Libra with a Virgo ascendant.) Ms. Ward said she was a Cancer. This was telling to Mr. Mizrahi. "It meant that I would have to sit up and get closer, because I can't hear Cancers," he said. "They tend to speak very lowly, and usually they need a little coaxing."

His large hands flitter about like wayward kites when he speaks, and like any designer worth his weight in fabric, he is given to grand pronouncements that are often underlined and italicized. Subtlety has never been his thing. When the fashion world was besotted with grunge and heroin chic in the 90's, Mr. Mizrahi offered bold colors: sky-blue faux furs, bright yellow pea coats, pink dresses shimmering like rock candy.

Raised in the heart of Brooklyn, the son of a children's clothing manufacturer and a stay-at-home mother, Mr. Mizrahi watched an inordinate amount of television growing up. To this day, he said, he is unable to fall asleep without the TV on. The Food Network is his favorite, he revealed, before offering a 10-minute testimonial to the genius of the chef Emeril Lagasse. He was not being ironic.

As a child, Mr. Mizrahi said, he dreamed of being a raconteur: the über-dinner guest sprinkling bon mots over red wine and beef Bolognese. "My biggest goal and biggest ambition in life was to be a great conversationalist," he said. "I care about clothes and design, but more than anything I care about being this unscripted personality."

Mr. Mizrahi attended the High School of Performing Arts and flirted with the idea of acting before deciding on fashion design. After apprenticing under Calvin Klein, he branched out on his own in 1987 and quickly became the manic darling of the fashion industry. His shows became must-attend events, featuring Naomi, Linda, Kate and other supermodels with no need for surnames. In 1995 the documentary "Unzipped" introduced Mr. Mizrahi, fabulous warts and all, to a mainstream audience. By his early 30's he'd won three Council of Fashion Designers of America awards, the industry's equivalent of the Oscar.

But he would ultimately prove better at selling himself than his clothes. While he made cameos in films like "Men in Black" and on television series like "Spin City," opined about the style influence of Katharine Hepburn on "Nightline" and walked away with the top prize on "Celebrity Jeopardy," his frocks were often relegated to the sales racks. His main financial backer, Chanel, pulled the plug in 1998. A photo of Mr. Mizrahi bounding down a runway ran on the front page of The New York Times under the headline: "Mizrahi, Designer Most Likely to Succeed, Doesn't."

Running a company became a "drag," he admitted, but he said that the perception that he failed in business was false. "I was given the opportunity to not have the rug pulled; they were like, 'If you only lose X amount of money a year, you can stay in business indefinitely,' " he said. He did not want to be a successful loser, he said. "I made the decision at the time to stop and do something else."

A one-man show, "LES MIZrahi," soon opened off Broadway, to good notices. Then came a weekly half-hour kaffeeklatsch on the Oxygen channel; it ran for three years.

"The shows were very gratifying, and I loved them, but I thought that at some point I'd better state my real intention to the world, which was to do this hourlong show," he said. "If you're Diana Ross in 1970, or whenever it was she split from the Supremes, she had to say at some point: 'O.K., I am no longer the Supremes; I am Diana Ross. This is who I am.' "

Marisa Gardini, Mr. Mizrahi's business partner, said that he had always dreamt of a talk show. "We have been working toward this point for years," she said.

The three psychics with whom he regularly consults believe his new series will be a success, Mr. Mizrahi said. "Really good to amazingly good" was how he described their responses. A few weeks ago he was "screaming and freaking out every minute," he said, terrified that he had made a colossal mistake, that everything from the space to the concept was all wrong. With each passing day he grows more comfortable in his orange lounge chair, he said, more sure of what he's doing.

"I don't know if it's going to work," Mr. Mizrahi said. "It might flop, but I can't imagine that it will because the intention is very pure. It's so who I am."