IN THE SOUND of Music, Maria von Trapp sang about bright copper kettles, warm woolen mittens and a few other of her favourite things. Were she around today, Maria might do more than hum a few bars and trek the Alps, heading instead for that things-friendly enclave of West Chester, Pennsylvania, where the right combination of personality and product can translate into success worth singing about.

That locale, QVC headquarters, is the latest destination of Isaac Mizrahi, the shopping network’s newest and most high-profile fashion recruit. The designer’s Isaac Mizrahi Live, slated to debut on December 4, will feature a wealth of his own favourite goodies, the first installment with a holiday slant. The far-flung lineup includes everything from handbags and berets to toggle coats and sequin T’s to cheesecake, in a launch price range of about $32 to $300. “If you feel passionate about something,” Mizrahi says, “they say, ‘Do it.’ Sometimes they cut 300 pieces and sometimes, 3 trillion.”

Mizrahi is expanding in what he calls a “pan-discipline” direction, his second multicategory gig, following the Target deal under which he designed a range of fashion and lifestyle products from 2003 to last year, until he left to join Liz Claiborne. “I feel like I have built a certain look, a language, a certain sense of colour and whatever,” Mizrahi explains, noting his use for Target of huge, photo-print flowers on hot-selling plates and bedding. “People looked at them and said, ‘Oh, just more popular culture that someone is representing.’ But if you look back, there were no bubble-jetted giant printed flowers until I did them in the collection, on the inside of the raincoat that was on the cover of W on Yasmeen Ghauri. I don’t remember anyone doing that before me, and it becomes part of the vernacular.”

Mizrahi is adamant that his role at QVC is far more than that of pithy camera-ready pitchman. He is involved in the design process from start to finish, and feels confident that every item produced under the partnership will radiate his upbeat aesthetic. “I create, that’s what I do. I’m an artist. I’m a designer,” he stresses, while making no apologies for his sizable aspirations. “Household name – that was the ‘70s. Now it’s brand name. As I build my brand, I think about Martha Stewart and her very upward trajectory. She has always been a great inspiration to me.

“What makes us trust Martha to talk about chickens and trees and window treatments? What makes us think that Oprah Winfrey would have (so successful) a book club? Like, ‘Hey, Oprah, what do you know about reading, just because you sit there and talk to people?’ Well, she knows a lot about books. She’s been talking to authors her whole life. So, it’s one thing (marketed) to the public leads to another. I’m just saying, maybe at the end of my trajectory, we’ll look back and go, ‘Oh, remember, before him, there was no X, Y, Z. Just as before Martha, there weren’t people who cooked and had TV shows and farms ... ”

Though numerous fashion personalities, including Bob Mackie, Marc Bouwer, Vivienne Tam, Erin Fetherston, Rachel Zoe and Lori Goldstein, have preceded Mizrahi into the QVC fold, his lineup is by far the most ambitious.

Mizrahi may be uniquely qualified among the major names in fashion to hook up with QVC as a springboard for his lifestyle aspirations. He was a trailblazer in both the fashion-entertainment fusion (Unzipped, among his various television pursuits) and, via Target, in the formerly taboo counterpoint of high and low. “I think I had the first (such) fashion show in the world,” he says. “I said that once — high-low — in an interview, and there was a snarky backlash. But maybe we weren’t the first; maybe it was in the background of things.”

Mizrahi can’t wait to hit the studio. But he stresses that, as excited as he is about QVC, he believes firmly in the great names of traditional retail. “The words ‘Neiman Marcus,’ the word ‘Macy’s,’ the word ‘Saks,’ the word ‘Bergdorf,’ those are meaningful words,” he says. “They are meaningful ideas, meaningful brands. Those have tons of amazing, monstrous history. They will find a way into the future, they will. Because of those words, their monstrous brand power.”

Which is not to say that he thinks the major retailers, or any other aspect of fashion, can continue unchanged. “There are always going to be people who have new ideas, who are controversial, and they’re always going to spur some kind of fashion reality,” Mizrahi says. “You will always notice people looking a certain way, because that is the zeitgeist, and everyone wants to look that way one day. That’s what fashion is. This is exactly what fashion does all the time. All it does is reinvent itself. Fashion without reinvention doesn’t exist.”