Mizrahi's Fling

SPOT LIGHT

'So many times I see ballets that are meant to look chic and they don't," laments Seventh Avenue wunderkind Isaac Mizrahi. Ever since his first collection in 1987, this recently anointed Council of Fashion Designers of America "Womenswear Designer of the Year" has been pulling on the purse strings of a Campeau'd-out retail industry and winning hysterical praise from a jaded fashion press with his fresh, elegant take on American mufti—silk-tie parkas, spangled sack dresses, silk-satin hot pants. Now choreographer Twyla Tharp has given the avuncular-looking twentyeight-year-old a chance to create perhaps the most elegantly dressed ballet ever.

Impressed by a strapless tartan sheath that sauntered down the designer's runway last fall, Tharp commissioned balletomane Mizrahi to outfit, eighteen American Ballet Theatre dancers for her new, Scottish-inspired piece, Brief Fling, opening ABT's national tour this month in San Francisco. In stark contrast to the gloriously c/e trop ballet duds of fashion-cum-costume designers Jean-Paul Gaultier and Christian Lacroix, Mizrahi swathed Tharp's "children's wear"—size troupe ("They're so small," he says, thinking of his own amazonian mannequins) in exquisitely simple outfits—Black Watch chiffon pants, heathery plaid sweaters worn, rehearsal-style, around the shoulders, and microkilts made out of haute cashmere. (Are they a hint of Mizrahi's first men's-wear line, which will appear in his next collection?) "A kilt is just the chic-est thing," pronounces the designer of the season. "I wanted Brief Fling to look real-life."

CHRISTA D'SOUZA