“Look at you in linen,” designer Isaac Mizrahi said to a young fan he was meeting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on a Thursday in August, to see the Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion exhibition. “And I’m dressed like Uncle Fester,” continued Mizrahi, who was wearing dark clothes. Mizrahi, 62, showed his first collection about 30 years before Max Alexander, the eight-year-old boy who met him at the museum, was born.
Mizrahi, a fashion world fixture who has sold clothes to the masses on QVC, has some 196,000 followers on Instagram; Max, an aspiring fashion designer who just started third grade, has three million. Like many children his age, Max is playful and excitable. “Hi, Max,” he said, looking at his reflection in a glass panel.
While walking past mannequins dressed in elaborate ensembles, he observed aloud, “There are no heads.” But unlike many children his age, Max – with support from his father, Jack Kolodny, 50, and mother, Sherri Madison, 48, who was with him at the museum – has managed to take an interest in fashion design and a knack for sewing surprisingly far. Read more: Shopping for luxury fragrances? Why not ask a teenage boy for advice? On Tuesday (Sept 10), the penultimate day of New York Fashion Week, he showed items he has made at an event at the Conrad New York Downtown hotel (Max’s day at the Met was one of several engagements he had during a summer trip to New York before that event).
Mizrahi can relate to Max, he said, bec.