*The Isaac Mizrahi Pictures: New York City 1989–1993* records a formative period in the New York fashion world through Nick Waplington’s sustained access to Isaac Mizrahi’s studio and runway preparations. Between 1989 and 1993, Waplington photographed fitting sessions in the weeks before Mizrahi’s twice-yearly shows, attending to the labor, improvisation, and controlled tension that precede the public appearance of a collection. The book’s subject is therefore not fashion as finished spectacle alone, but fashion as a working environment.

Waplington’s informal vérité approach meets Mizrahi’s highly composed couture sensibility. That contrast gives the photographs their particular charge: the images move between close observation and theatrical presentation, between the private rhythms of the studio and the concentrated display of the runway. The presence of supermodels including Cindy Crawford, Christy Turlington, and Naomi Campbell places the work within a recognizable period of fashion history, while the photographs retain an immediate, unguarded quality.

The book broadens its account of New York style by setting uptown fashion against downtown nightlife. Waplington also photographed the city’s 1990s “club kid” culture, including nights at the Pyramid Club and Save the Robots. This juxtaposition is central to the project’s meaning: couture and subculture appear not as separate worlds, but as adjoining forms of performance, invention, and self-fashioning.

Published by Damiani in 2016, the English-language hardcover comprises 160 pages. For collectors, its interest lies in the sustained collaboration between a fashion designer and a photographer, and in the way the sequence connects backstage process, runway image, and nocturnal New York. It is a focused record of a particular creative milieu, observed from close range rather than reconstructed retrospectively.