Isaac Mizrahi, who violated multiple stars’ privacy (and one star’s cleavage) during E!’s Golden Globes preshow, has every right to touch Amanda Peet. He’s fitting her—and Patrick Wilson, Jill Clayburgh, and Tony Roberts—for the revival of Neil Simon’s 1963 classic Barefoot in the Park, in which Peet and Wilson play a chic newlywed odd couple facing some comic marital woes. Though quite voluble on the subject of these fittings, Mizrahi had less to say about Scarlett Johansson’s pique at being groped by him on the red carpet: “I’ll have to think about it and call you back, but I won’t be calling you back, sorry.”
“It’s funny. I was known early on in my career to have been this kind of postmodern sixties revivalist. So this is my big chance to re-create that period. This is a little party dress [worn by Peet, photo 2]. She’s giving a little cocktail and then going out to dinner with her mother [played by Clayburgh, photo 1], so she has to look a certain way, and the upstairs neighbor’s coming [played by Tony Roberts, photo 3], so she wants to impress him. She’s a middle-class girl who is now on a tight budget. In those days, style was everywhere and quite accessible. My parents were rather stylish, middle-class as they were. The suit [photo 4] has to be a very, very specific cut that’s from that period. We shopped around and found clothes that were exactly from that year, and then had them cut in fabrics to fit Mr. Wilson. I must tell you, the hardest part was the men—the most painstaking. Tailoring costs a lot of money, and you don’t want to get it wrong. But it was such a pleasure—a great, slow, steady kind of pleasure.”
-Isaac Mizrahi, Interviewed by Boris Kachka