*Unzipped*
reviewed by Cynthia Fuchs


     "Everybody's excited about fashion. We've got models. We've got a
show. We've got pizzazz." So says fashion photographer Douglas Keeve, and
he should know. Since his first feature documentary, *Unzipped*, won the
Audience Award at this year's Sundance Festival, he's way-pizzazzed
(apparently even signed to direct a movie starring Rob Schneider....
ouch). Focused on a season in the life of designer Isaac Mizrahi (Keeve's
former lover), *Unzipped* is fast, smart, and campy, an engagingly
self-conscious look at existence on the Planet Fashion. 

     The narrative is total Hollywood, perfect, thrilling, and great to
look at. It begins with Mizrahi's decision to pick up the pieces after his
Spring 94 collection was badly reviewed. Grainy-black-and-white New York
streets give way to gorgeously washed-out interiors (also
black-and-white), the angles are alternately tight and wide: this is an
intimate film about surfaces, about a business that's absurd and restless,
insular and far-reaching. Determined to come back, Mazrahi stands by his
tchotchke-cluttered desk and explains: "Here's my Process. I get
inspiration somewhere.. from an image, a gesture...I think, is this
worthy? Usually it is, because I can't think of anything else." 

     Tracking the steps to his "triumphant" Fall collection, the movie
acts out the Process. A title-insert reads "Nanook," Mizrahi is watching
*Nanook of the North* on video, the image is dim, the sound is indistinct.
But the idea has kicked in and he can't stop talking. Eskimos. Furs. Fur
jumpsuits, for when you walk the dog. Cut to title: "Fur things first."
Structured as a series of such offbeat, seductive moves, *Unzipped*
parallels its subject's heady devotion to U.S. pop culture: we see him
meet and mimic the endlessly-writhing Eartha Kitt (her poodles, he
proclaims, are *the* essential accessory), give just due to Jackie
Kennedy's and Marlo Thomas' fashion sense, even sing *The Mary Tyler Moore
Show* theme on cue, and shyly, as if he's overcome with Mary Richardsness. 

     The film entangles any and all sources so they make an appealing
sense (believe it: there's a connection between from Bette Davis as Baby
Jane to Loretta Young's immaculate frostbite in *Call of the Wild*).
Mizrahi talks about his childhood, gets career advice from his mother
Sarah, poses with his models, including Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford,
and a scene-stealing Linda Evangelista: "Do you have something against
white women?" she asks, when told that she's stuck wearing flats for yet
another finale (meanwhile she's working that documentary-camera: what a
Look). 

     The show, it's all about the show, its affectations, its tones and
textures, its self- absorbed performers, its constructed and conditioned
desires. Mizrahi, winner of numerous fashion awards as well as the 1995
AIDS Action Leadership Award, is obviously an entertaining subject. His
witty rhapsodizing and fretting (the fabric is wrong! the shoes are late!)
sound nearly scripted, they're so dramatic, so finely wrought. And this is
perhaps the film's greatest insight, his role as the "the show," and what
it can mean, off runways, in layouts, on the street. Because Mizrahi's
life is so carefully and emphatically staged, the literal show is finally
what's most "real'' in the movie, the place where passions and mechanics
collide (it plays like a climax, the backstage rush and the familiar
flashbulbs out front). 

     Keeve describes his project as more impressionistic than literal: "I
couldn't care less about the truth." And yet there is a kind of truth
here, loosely structured, elusive, subjective. In fact, one of the movie's
most politically acute and inspiring (non)revelations is its least showy:
its low-key assumption of Mizrahi's gayness. While it's plainly important
to his sensibility and success, his sexuality is never a particular issue,
and certainly never a problem. In other words, what's uncovered by
*Unzipped* is a reality that makes some sense. 


Cynthia Fuchs teaches film/media studies and is coordinator of the queer
studies project at George Mason University.

Copyright by Cynthia Fuchs.  All rights reserved.
Please do not reprint this review without the permission of the author.

This review originally appeared in the Philadelphia _City Paper_.