Free to Be... Isaac Mizrahi In less than a week, New York Fashion Week will officially roll into town, turning a wide swath of the city into a carnival of journalists, buyers, bloggers, label-obsessed shoppers and - most notably - anxious designers wondering if their latest collections will be greeted with praise ("he's a genius"), disdain ("well, that was interesting") or just a shrug of the shoulders ("um, where are we doing lunch?"). Isaac Mizrahi will not be among them. At 51, Mr. Mizrahi has moved on, after licensing his name and selling his company to Xcel Brands, evolving from fashion designer to "polymath - businessman, entertainer," said Joanna Coles, Cosmopolitan's editor in chief, who was a host of "Project Runway All Stars: After the Runway," a television show that included Mr. Mizrahi as one of its judges. "He is just this big, big personality with enormous outsize opinions about all things," she said. "Like - "Gooseberries? They're the most disgusting food! And he has a huge appetite for everything, which is one reason he's constantly on a diet. There is a rap against Mr. Mizrahi in the fashion industry: that, distracted by his interests in set design, acting and hosting talk and reality shows, he's been too unfocused to develop a signature style that might once have propelled him into the pantheon of great American designers. "People in the industry look askance at those who don't live and breathe fashion," said Robin Givhan, who won a Pulitzer for her fashion criticism for The Washington Post. It's like, you must suffer for your art, or you're not legit. And, suffice it to say, Mr. Mizrahi has had an uneasy relationship with commerce. Since leaving his apprenticeship at Calvin Klein and selling his first collection to Bergdorf Goodman in 1986, he has seen any number of booms and busts in his business. In June 1988, Anne-Marie Schiro wrote in The Times: "Remember the name Isaac Mizrahi. He is this year's hottest new designer," calling his first show "so professionally executed, so tasteful and imaginative that it catapulted him into the big time." Even after the 1995 documentary "Unzipped" (in which the film's director, Douglas Keeve, his boyfriend at the time, captured his sweetness along with the hissy fits and nail-biting angst surrounding the creation of his 1994 fall collection), when he became a bona fide star to a wider audience, his couture line reportedly had millions in sales, but it still couldn't turn a profit. Instead, he found great success in mass-market lines - at Target, at QVC and, with the sale of his identity, at Xcel Brands, which paid a reported $31.5 million in 2011. The terms of Mr. Mizrahi's agreement with Xcel prohibit him from talking about details, but try stopping Mr. Mizrahi from talking about anything. Friends say that he struggles personally with not being the intellectual force in fashion he once saw himself to be. He was reportedly very hurt when New York magazine's Approval Matrix page described him as having "twice the bitchiness of Michael Kors with half the wit (and professional success)." Linda Wells, the editor in chief of Allure, calls his design "colorful and frothy, and all that." "What he is not is edgy, and he doesn't want to be," Ms. Wells continued. It's not his personal approach to life, and not his approach to design. Mr. Mizrahi says he is delighted with the Xcel association, and no doubt is, at least on a financial level. Yet at lunch, at Cookshop in Chelsea, when the Xcel public-relations person joined us, I couldn't escape the sense that she was monitoring her most beloved naughty toddler. "The people I work with, they're really smart now," Mr. Mizrahi said. It's a different kind of collaboration, you know? I think I have style and confidence, but they know the market. So if I go into a meeting about shoes or handbags and I go: "What? No, excuse me?," they go: "Oh, really? Well, thank you very much, and here's a clean copy for your records." " Mr. Mizrahi beamed. The P.R. woman winced a little. With Xcel in charge of licensing everything from a new girl's line to watches, he is free to do, well, everything else. He's writing a television pilot (still very hush-hush) and doing something he's loved since he first belted out "Don't Rain on My Parade" as an 8-year-old: cabaret. He's been performing intermittently for years. The night I saw him, at the Westside Theater, he delivered raspy renditions of classics ("C'est Si Bon") and not-so-classics ("Ode to Xanax") and took audience questions. ("When's the last time you were in a gay bar?" Mr. Mizrahi: "Uh, Stonewall?"). His singing voice is closer to Harvey Fierstein than Michael Feinstein, but it hardly matters. He knows how to put on a show. "The thing that's so great about cabaret is that you really don't know what to expect," he told me later. Like, in theater, even the things that seem improvisational are planned. But very little is planned in cabaret. Which means that sometimes you stink. But even when you do, it's always fun. For someone who wears his neurosis and even prickliness proudly, "fun" still seems a word to live by. Mr. Mizrahi grew up the youngest boy in a Conservative Jewish family in Midwood, Brooklyn. There were tipoffs as to what he'd be doing with his life: the designs he sketched in his prayer books in Yeshiva, the outfits he made for puppet shows in his garage. His father gave him a sewing machine when he was 10. He still talks dreamily of what he wore to his bar mitzvah: "It was powder blue shantung, and I had these white patent-leather Pierre Cardin shoes. It had to have it made specially for me - my father had a suit factory, and I was a very fat kid. So I had to go and stand for fittings.