Isaac Mizrahi on Fashion

Yesterday, Stephen Colbert interviewed Isaac Mizrahi about his show at the Jewish Museum in NYC, "Isaac Mizrahi: An Unruly History."

Here is Mizrahi speaking with Colbert about his upbringing in a Jewish family: "You know, the Jews kind of run the garment business in New York." With the outsourcing of the garment industry to locations of cheap labor, I would have thought that this paradigm was different. I find interesting his perception of continued Jewish involvement in the garment industry.

Mizrahi initially attended Yeshivah in Flatbush, but the story of his family's immigration may suggest reasons for his ability to forge his own path outside the religious Jewish community. According to a 2011 New York Times interview, Mizrahi's mother was born in New York to immigrant parents from Aleppo, Syria. "She finished college, which was very strange for girls of that background, and married my father very late, around 35 years old." Although we have not yet focused on patterns of non-Ashkenazi immigration in the course yet, I would imagine that the factors in Mizrahi's mother's life as a first-generation American, as a college graduate, and as a "late" married woman might have provided her son the safe environment to pursue secular education and to enter the world of fashion.