The Isaac Mizrahi Unzipped rerelease lands in cinemas this autumn with a 4K restoration, and the timing could hardly be more layered: Mizrahi is simultaneously beginning a new life as Target’s first creative director at large. The film that arguably invented the fashion documentary is back, and so, in a different register entirely, is its subject.
The restoration was completed by the Sundance Institute and UCLA Film & Television Archive, and the result runs to 73 minutes of Douglas Keeve’s intimate, frequently funny portrait of Mizrahi building his Fall 1994 collection. Distribution is handled by Janus Films, the company founded in 1956 that first brought Bergman, Kurosawa, and Fellini to American art-house audiences. For Unzipped, that is either a perfectly calibrated home or a mild piece of cultural branding. Probably both.
The Film That Made Fashion Feel Like Cinema
The Isaac Mizrahi Unzipped rerelease opens specifically at Film Forum in New York on 25 September, before expanding to theatres nationwide, with Variety reporting the rollout. The original film premiered at Sundance in January 1995, where it won the Audience Award for U.S. Documentary (tied, as it happens, with Ballot Measure 9), was distributed by Miramax Films, and reached U.S. cinemas on 11 August 1995. Its U.S. box office finished at $2.5 million, which, for a 73-minute documentary about a single fashion collection, was a genuine cultural event.
The film features Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, and Kate Moss, which tells you something about the era’s particular gravitational pull. Keeve, who was Mizrahi’s romantic partner during filming, caught something the industry rarely lets cameras near: the mess, the doubt, the specific electricity of a collection coming together under pressure. The supermodels are the marquee names, but the film’s engine is Mizrahi’s restlessness.
‘It was a very good moment in fashion,’ Mizrahi told Vogue‘s Nicole Phelps, who describes the film as her ‘gateway drug to fashion.’ ‘It was photogenic. You know, the camera really loved this subject.’ That is a generous and slightly deflecting read, because what the camera really loved was Mizrahi. He is extravagantly watchable in the way that very few people are, and the film knew it.
Mizrahi is characteristically clear-eyed about the film’s impact on his own trajectory. ‘So as to Unzipped and it changing my life, you know, I don’t really feel it changed my life,’ he says. He points elsewhere for his actual turning points: leaving yeshiva for the Performing Arts High School, and landing a job at Perry Ellis. ‘I have to tell you, my dear, that was an incredibly inspiring place and it would’ve changed anybody.’ Whatever you make of the modesty, the self-analysis is brisk and unsentimental in a way the fashion world rarely produces.
From Supermodels to Target Aisles
The Isaac Mizrahi Unzipped rerelease arrives alongside a corporate announcement that would have been difficult to script as irony: Mizrahi, the designer who once embodied the shimmering excess of early-90s New York fashion, is now Target’s creative director at large. The appointment was announced on 15 June 2026, and it is not, technically, his first trip to Minneapolis. Mizrahi first collaborated with Target back in 2003, making this something of a homecoming rather than a departure.
In the role, Mizrahi will mentor Target’s design teams, advise on product innovation, and help develop new partnerships. He will work alongside Gena Fox, the retailer’s Senior Vice President of Design. Cara Sylvester, Target’s executive vice president and chief merchandising officer, framed the appointment in terms that are hard to argue with: ‘Isaac has always believed, as we do, that great design should be accessible to everyone.’
The accessible-design pitch is standard issue for a mass retailer, and Mizrahi is smart enough to know that. But he has also spent three decades doing exactly what the press release says: making things that look considered without requiring a credit line to acquire them. If the gap between Unzipped‘s supermodel-strewn world and a Target floor plan feels wide, Mizrahi himself seems unbothered by the distance. He has always moved between registers, from Perry Ellis apprentice to documentary subject to television presenter to retail collaborator, and treated each one as the main event.
The theatre run will tell us whether a 30-year-old fashion documentary can hold a room in 2025. The Target chapter will take longer to judge. Both bets are live simultaneously, which, for Mizrahi, seems exactly right.
