Editor’s Note:  Introducing The Etceterist, the byline for the new style-world infiltrator for wowOwow.com, who will post deliciously anonymous weekly musings vis-à-vis the glamorous goings-on in the worlds of fashion and culture. Who is The Etceterist? Some may guess, but we prefer to stay silent, except to pronounce that there is no more inside insider in the worlds of art, beauty, society and culture. 

Tuesday, October 7, marks the day that Penguin Books publishes Isaac Mizrahi’s How to Have Style, and the designer begins a tour of the United States to promote this much-anticipated encyclopedic volume that tells us how to achieve that look we’ve always wanted and desired. Here Isaac chats with the Etceterist about the book, fashion and today’s economy, and the question someone eventually had to ask: Is fashion still Jewish?

Etceterist: Hi, I. Happy [Jewish] New Year.

Isaac Mizrahi: What’s new?

ETC: Celebrating my Jewish new year very peculiarly, I guess. I have been reading Marilyn Bender’s The Beautiful People published in 1968. Remember it?

IM: I certainly do.

ETC: It is quite an insider’s examination of the marriage of fashion and society in the ’60s. Of course the subtext, given the high number of Jewish people in the fashion and retail community certainly back then, is that this marriage was an intermarriage of faiths, Jewish and Christian, but mostly, at least when you read about the greatest fashion fans, the intellectual followers of fashion, everyone seems to have been Jewish.

IM: Fashion isn’t Jewish anymore. And it also isn’t white, thank god. Remember what it used to be like? You couldn’t exactly be Venus Williams or a Spice Girl and be in capital S Society. You know who opened up society more than anyone?

ETC: Who?

IM: Anna Wintour. She made fashion not about rich people, but about talented people. It isn’t a race, it isn’t a religion, it is a meritocracy and Anna started giving dinners for people like that, especially The Costume Institute fundraiser every spring.

ETC: I just flashed on a Costume Institute party circa 1985 before Anna. Cher dripping in shiny Bob Mackie at the Met standing alone against a pillar, not mingling.

IM: No kidding, not mingling, not back in those days.

ETC: I am not sure what happened to the avant-garde followers of fashion in the United States, the patrons of designers like Geoffrey Beene. I guess they wear Prada? Vera Wang?

IM: Everything looks like Geoffrey Beene now, his look has just gentrified. Proenza Schouler clothes look like Geoffrey Beene. Some of my clothes look like Geoffrey Beene and a lot of Marc Jacobs’s clothes look like Geoffrey Beene.

ETC: How is it feeling to be a fashion designer in today’s tough economy?

IM: Listen, I started my business in the spring of 1987 and then look what happened that fall. The thing that you have to remember is that tough times like this, or back then, provide great challenges and opportunities for creative people. Think also of the designers who emerged in the ’30s like Adrian. Or the French women in WWII? Fashion is protest. Remember their wedgies and chubbies, riding their bicycles, thumbing their noses, so to speak, at the Nazis?

ETC: In addition to your ready-to-wear and made-to-order, you also have just designed your first collection, very, very affordably priced, for the Liz Claiborne label. I hear it is just great. Tell me about it.

IM: Can’t talk about it until 2009, but I am very pleased.

ETC: How about the book? What is your travel schedule?

IM: Tuesday the 7th at 6 PM I am at Barnes & Noble at Fifth Avenue and 46th Street in New York. Friday, October 10th, I am at Barnes & Noble in Stamford, CT, at 6 PM. On the 15th of October at 7 PM I will be at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena. Thursday the 16th it is off to San Francisco and an appearance at Rakestraw Books at 7 PM. Tuesday October 21st I will be at the Borders on Michigan Avenue in Chicago at 7 PM. Wednesday the 22nd I will be in Minneapolis at the Mall of America in Bloomington at 6 PM. Then Tuesday the 28th in Atlanta at the Borders on Peachtree Road at 7 PM. And then to Dallas on the 29th to Legacy Books at 7 PM.

ETC: Do you like to travel?

IM: I hate to travel.

ETC: How do you do it, then?

IM: [laughs] I bring blankie. My Loro Piano blanket.

ETC: So the book has over 400 full-color photographs and really isn’t about dictatorial makeovers but, instead, problem solving. Things like how to find your own style, and how to become a collector rather than a shopper. So what is the secret of how to have style?

IM: Inspiration. Inspiration equals style. And the book, I hope, explains it all to you.