Isaac Mizrahi has been named Target’s creative director at large, a newly created role for the retailer that’s a homecoming of sorts for the designer. Mizrahi was the first major fashion designer Target collaborated with, starting back in 2002, creating a high-low fashion playbook that has since become commonplace.
“You don’t have to spend $8,000 on a sweater for it to be amazing. A good sweater can be $45,” says Mizrahi. “And I feel like Target invented that — we did that. So it’s fertile ground now for me to continue to prove that. It’s a bigger world now, but I feel like now it’s time for Target to claim that original stake.”
In his role, Mizrahi will serve as an advisor across Target’s in-house design teams, mentor young talent, and also play a role in storytelling and marketing for the retailer. He won’t be designing himself, but he sees his job as one to inspire, to push, and to drive a cohesive design code across Target’s departments, starting primarily with fashion and home, but extending to all of the retailer’s in-house brands, in categories like food and wellness.
“Isaac is going to look at our product, provide a point of view, and actually push us creatively,” says Cara Sylvester, Target’s chief merchandising officer. “He’s going to bring an external perspective on trends, creativity, and culture to really help us push the thinking in that product creation phase.” Already, Sylvester adds, Mizrahi has spent time in Target’s HQ home of Minneapolis (which he calls a “very soulful place”), getting a feel for its design process and teams. Mizrahi will work closely with Gena Fox, Target’s SVP of design, who was promoted to the role in May.
Target is tapping a seasoned fashion designer at a time when, as Mizrahi points out, other mass retailers have begun seeking out more elevated design hires. Mizrahi at Target is the latest in a trend that has seen names like John Galliano teaming with Zara, Zac Posen posting up in a full-time creative role at Gap Inc, and Francesco Risso and Clare Waight Keller signing contracts with Fast Retailing’s GU and Uniqlo, respectively. These appointments make the designer-retailer relationship more official than a one-off collaboration, though those are still plentiful. And they’re mutually beneficial: the designer locks in work that makes them visible to a mass audience and the retailer gets access to the designer’s fashion credentials.
Making design more accessible is something that Mizrahi says he’s always been drawn to. “The first 15 years of my company were the ready-to-wear, couture kind of thing. My biggest doors were Bergdorf Goodman and Neiman Marcus. And then from there it sort of morphed, and I decided that the right thing was to try to democratize it,” says Mizrahi. “Why did it need to be something that could only be available in those stores?” He remembers one customer who told him, after the Target partnership, that they’d no longer buy his clothes. “I thought, ‘Whoa.’ But that was one out of a thousand. And then high-low dressing really worked in my favor. Since then, you have a million of these collaborations. And merchants understand that competition is much, much higher.”
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