Unzipped Restored

From the 2025 Sundance Film Festival

While the haute couture shows were going on in Paris last week, I had the chance to see one of the greatest fashion presentations unfold on screen at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. The show - displaying Isaac Mizrahi’s autumn/winter ‘94 collection - was the highlight of a special screening of Unzipped, Douglas Keeve’s documentary which captured how the making of the New York designer’s ready-to-wear line was inspired by Robert J. Flaherty’s 1922 docudrama, Nanook of the North and Loretta Young’s frigid beauty in the 1935 Hollywood adventure western, Call of the Wild.

Then and there at Park City’s Egyptian Theater, where I watched Unzipped, I would have traded my khaki Canada Goose parka for one of the “floor-length fake beast coats” that stormed Mizrahi’s runway.

“This is FASHION,” I thought to myself as Naomi Campbell brought down the house in another number I would have loved to have had with me at Sundance, or anywhere else - namely, an aqua blue chubby. Naomi sported the cuddly jacket atop a white undershirt and a “huge hip-sitting ball skirt,” as WWD noted.

Along with Naomi all of the legendary supermodels - Amber Valletta, Carla Bruni, Christy, Cindy, Kate, Linda, Shalom, Veronica Webb and the extraordinary Yasmeen Ghauri - lit up the screen.

As Keeve portrayed, every super had to be coaxed to work Mizrahi’s runway because the designer put backstage front-of-house, veiling his fashion show prep area (where Kevyn Aucoin and Garren toiled) behind a scrim. The see-through concept united the star-studded audience with the supermodel cast as well as the designer’s tireless crew. Thanks to great lighting and chic undergarments there were no nudity issues.

The digitally restored print of Unzipped premiered to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the documentary receiving the 11th Audience Award at Sundance in January 1995. A year later Paula Heredia and Alan Oxman, who cut the film down to a sharp 73 minutes, were honored in the documentary category by American Cinema Editors.

The doc’s remarkable pace veers between the languid poetry of Mizrahi going about his everyday life in his West Village neighborhood, the hustle of completing his work at his Wooster Street, Soho studio and a riveting side narrative conveying the fantastical world in which he coexisted to dream up his painstakingly-made clothes. The film’s editors conjured this weaving together a mix of archival footage of movies and TV shows which guided Mizrahi’s hand - The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Red Shoes and Valley of the Dolls - with Keeve’s engrossing verité footage (he was always there) and the ongoing monologue Mizrahi delivered to camera. My eyes were glued to the screen because I felt as though I was inside the designer’s head.

As everyone who has seen Unzipped knows, Mizrahi and Keeve were deep into a relationship as they shot the documentary over two years. Their intimacy added up to a pulsing humanity that’s never been matched in the fashion documentary “subgenre” which Unzipped is said to have launched because Keeve’s masterpiece is considered the first one. Indeed all fashion entertainment we see now, from docs to streaming series - including Balenciaga on Hulu - owes something to it.

Prior to Unzipped’s making, Geoffrey Beene enlisted Tom Kalin to direct a short commemorating the 30th anniversary of his brand. Kalin’s cinematographer, Ellen Kuras (director of Kate Winslet’s Lee Miller biopic, Lee), masterminded Unzipped’s visual style (with Robert Leacock), mixing elegant black and white footage with flashes of saturated color that put the gasp-factor into Mizrahi’s modern American glamour.

Making the film ultimately ruptured Mizrahi and Keeve’s relationship. “There was no joy being at Sundance, even with the great success,” wrote Mizrahi in his memoir, IM (Flatiron Books), recalling the film’s January 1995 debut at the festival. “Too many awful things were said in the final days of editing, and we were clear with each other that it was over from that point.”

Reflecting on a subsequent gala screening of Unzipped at the 48th Cannes Film Festival in May 1995, which Mizrahi attended without Keeve, the designer wrote: “It was the most glamorous and amazing screening, with loads of big movie stars in attendance. And it was all about me. Yet there was no way to enjoy any of it. What came first, love or Unzipped?”

As I hung on every word and frame of Unzipped from my seat at the Egyptian - where Mizrahi did not appear - I felt that, aside from the intense personal relationship which shaped the film, huge ambition harbored by the former romantic partners also contributed to its status as a cinematic breakthrough.

Mizrahi was more than ready for his close up. He had already played a cameo of sorts, appearing briefly in Fame, Alan Parker’s 1980 musical paean to New York’s High School of Performing Arts, his alma mater. (Timothée Chalemet went there, too.)

Why was Unzipped not shortlisted for a documentary Oscar I thought watching an awards-worthy mantrum Mizrahi let rip midway through the film when, just as everything was going to plan for his collection, Nina Santisi, his right hand, delivers WWD to her boss and he discovers that - a month before his own show is to be held in mid April - Jean Paul Gaultier’s “trans-Siberian” collection showed “Eskimo Chic” a month earlier during Paris Fashion Week. The industry’s trade paper’s praise for the French designer’s handiwork is splashed across the cover. Mizrahi tosses it to the floor.

At this point my own emotions were running high and it had nothing to do with the altitude. I cried twice as Mizrahi endured the lead up to his show, knowing that he was following on from Gaultier, who was then a massive star.

My tears started during a sequence when as Mizrahi hits rock bottom, his fantastic mother, Sarah Mizrahi lifts him way up as she talks to him on the telephone. As I watched him walking along a slushy Manhattan street on a cold dark night, I was sobbing as I thought about my own experiences in the creative wilderness.

It wasn’t just Mizrahi’s clothes that I longed for as Unzipped reached a crescendo in its finale fashion show sequence. I yearned for a time when, rather than big data and Instagram, fashion was driven by a designer’s unbridled imagination not to mention thoughtful critical feedback like the sort Mizrahi gratefully accepted from esteemed magazine editors all through the movie.

Interview’s Ingrid Sischy, Allure’s creative director Polly Mellon (the subject of a forthcoming Keeve doc) and Vogue’s editor-at-large André Leon Talley - these people were towering cultural figures. They knew where everything in fashion came from and where it was going next. “Thank God Tim Blanks is still sitting in the front row,” I thought as my tears dried.

During the post-screening Q&A, Michael Alden - a producer of Unzipped - spoke about another great moment in the film - when Mizrahi journeys to Paris where, in the Louvre’s fashion archive, he unearths an ancient swatch of silk faux fur upon which he based the fluffy stuff from which he made his fabulous beast coats.

The trip came together in days, Alden admitted. Instead of paying an exorbitant price for the camera equipment, he lay down on the floor in the Paris rental office and refused to leave until he was granted a reasonable fee. Instead of handing over thousands for a permit for Keeve’s production vehicle to park outside the museum, Alden threw caution to the wind and paid for the tickets.

Keeve confessed that once he was inside the Louvre, the archive looked a little messy. So he cloaked the garment racks with drop cloths. His eye missed nothing and I can’t wait to see where it goes next.

Unzipped is available on DVD via Amazon.