Liz's Whiz.(Liz Claiborne's Isaac Mizrahi)

Byline: Photographed by Patrick Demarchelier

Isaac Mizrahi is the new player at Liz Claiborne. And when it comes to giving American women inspiring and inexpensive workwear, the two are making sweet music. Lynn Yaeger reports.

The wintry sun is ridiculously bright, and a delicious salty breeze is wafting through the Brentwood Country Mart in Santa Monica, where Isaac Mizrahi is unveiling his inaugural collection for Liz Claiborne, a dizzying array of lime-green anoraks and caffeinated florals, tattersall raincoats, and polka-dot cardis. His audience, a gaggle of sleekly groomed L.A. women, wears jeans and tees; but by the look of their wrists, dangling Cartier tank watches, and waists, encircled with HermA[umlaut]s "H" belts, they can afford to spend a lot more than $100, which is on the higher end for Mizrahi's efforts, on their clothes. So why are they glued to the floor?

Maybe it's because the stock market is soaring and plunging as scarily as the roads in the Hollywood Hills, and even the most prosperous among us are a little skittish about our purchases. Or maybe it's because Mizrahi, who has done everything from winning the 1990 CFDA Designer of the Year Award to starring in a documentary ( Unzipped ) to practically inventing the idea of dressing high-low with his phenomenally successful line for Target (they've now parted ways in light of the Liz venture), is just so much fun to hang with.

You might think that Isaac doing Liz would end up being a watered-down version of both brandsLiz, the famously wearable friend of the eighties working woman, once a beloved brand but diminished in more recent days, and Mizrahi, with his iron-clad optimism and love of clear American colors and uncluttered shapes. But Mizrahi's signatures shine through in this new line: not just his audaciously baggy khaki Katharine Hepburnish trousers straight out of The Philadelphia Story but a full-skirted gray-and-white checked shirtwaist that would have suited Joan Crawford, especially in her early films (which Mizrahi loves), when she played a plucky shopgirl triumphing against long odds. And he's clearly having a good time, offering clunky bling and chunky handbags that feature a logo that looks like a genetically altered clover or two sets of Mickey Mouse ears but turns out to be the LC emblem, deconstructed and reimagined.

It all couldn't be more happy-go-lucky, but how will it play for today's working woman? Mizrahi's sensibilitybright hues, fun shapes, sartorial laughter in the dark as an antidote to tough timesis either total genius or a gross miscalculation. Do we want to be this jaunty, this jolly, right now? The clothes may depart, at times radically, from the conventional notion of what you're expected to wear to work, but perhaps the very idea of suitability, once confined to depressing dress-for-success ensembles with creepy stock ties and the inevitable sneaker-pump quick-change, are at long last consigned to the scrap heap. The good news is these sad suits have been replaced by a fascinating roster of clothing, offered by designersnot just Mizrahi but people like Vera Wang and Tory Burchhell-bent on infusing less expensive garments with charm and grace and expanding the notion of what's appropriate between the hours of nine and five.

At any rate, the people at the trunk show in L.A. don't seem to have to dress any particular way to get their jobs done, which is why, when one woman approaches Mizrahi's puffy pink ballet skirt with attached crinoline and expresses an intention to team it with boots, no one even wonders, "And where were you thinking of wearing that, missy?"