The Brooklyn-born fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi is seldom at rest. On Monday nights, he hosts “Isaac Mizrahi Live!” on QVC, presenting his ready-to-wear designs. He is a judge for the fifth season of Lifetime’s “Project Runway All Stars.” He is also working on a memoir and trying to pull together a theatrical show based on Ingmar Bergman’s 1960 comic fantasy film, “The Devil’s Eye.”

But what’s been consuming most of his time lately is “Isaac Mizrahi: An Unruly History,” a survey of his career so far that opens on Friday at the Jewish Museum.

Despite his multihyphenate life, and a five-year run making clothes for Target, Mr. Mizrahi may still be best known for the 1995 documentary “Unzipped,” which followed the development of his fall 1994 collection, with appearances by Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss. (His clothing line of that era, backed by Chanel, folded in 1998.)

In a recent interview, Mr. Mizrahi, 54, spoke of his approach to work, his view of himself as a storyteller and what it was like to comb through his archives with the show’s curators. Here are excerpts from the conversation.

Q. The Jewish Museum show looks back at the first 30 years of your career. Thirty years from now, what would you like to see in a future retrospective?

A. I’d like to see a performance of some sort. I plan to get more into the entertainment arts, because that’s where I come from, you know.

This is like a journey, and that’s part of where I come from. “Journey” — don’t use that word. It’s not a journey. It’s a line. It’s a story.

A voyage?

Please don’t use the word “journey.”

Has the work you do changed in that time? Have you?

The older I get, the more neurotic I become about my work. Like seriously, crazily neurotic, almost to the point where I can’t do it, I swear. But also the pleasure I take in doing it, finally, is greater.

So is this a larger moment for you to take a breath and enjoy a success?

No, it’s a larger moment for me to freak out.

What’s the status of your memoir?

I think it’s probably going to be published in 2017. The more I write on it, the more I discover how long it takes to write something good.

In 2000, you performed an autobiographical one-man show called “Les MIZrahi.” What did you take away from that?

I took away a great sense of pleasure. I’m not predisposed to that. I’m not a hedonist. But I did get a lot of pleasure from that period in my life. It was always interesting. Never boring. And you work so hard onstage, you sweat and you lose weight.

How does your stage experience, including costuming for Broadway and directing musicals and opera, connect to your design work?

Directing is really instinctual. You’re watching and watching and correcting, and putting this big picture together. Voice and diction affect it as much as acting. And costumes. Sometimes the best show in the world can stink because the sound design stinks. So every single part of that has to be right.

When I made a fashion show, I made the clothes, I made this manifesto about what women should wear, and then I directed the women on the runway. Everything is about telling a story.

Your early designs were packed with references to popular culture and other disparate sources. Was that influenced by the appropriation artists of that time?

Somehow it was fabulous for artists to do it, and for designers to do it was just not O.K. Because it was copying. And I was like, “No, it’s not copying if you refer to something that was 50 years ago — or yesterday — in this irreverent, funny way.” If you really think it through and make it somehow a wink.

One of your appropriations was a “Desert Storm” dress. Was that inspired by the 1991 announcement that the gulf war was starting?

The only thing I could think of that whole night was “Oh my God, someone designed a new camouflage.” Someone recolored camouflage for the desert. That’s so funny! War makes jobs for dressmakers.

The success of your first runway show set you on a fast track for a number of years. Was it hard to find inspiration on deadline?

If you’re young and kind of virile and you’re supposed to be inspired, you get inspired. It’s like having sex or something: You find the energy because you’re inspired. You love it. You get into it.

You made three new couture coats for the exhibition. Why coats?

A coat is something that you keep wearing. It sticks around. And it pretty much has a classic shape.

It took me so long to make these three coats, because I needed them to be interesting. Something that I thought would kind of sit well in a museum. But also not be like art. Because it’s not art. It’s clothes.

But there is an art here, right?

For sure. Are you kidding me? Absolutely. It inspires art, you know, but it’s not art. I’m sorry. You wear it, and hopefully, like, give it to your daughter or something, or throw it away. You don’t keep it on a wall and put it in a museum for the rest of its life. Except there’s a few of my things in the Met, or at another costume collection.

The other day in a pharmacy I saw a box of Band-Aids that you designed.

It’s harder for me to make fragile, expensive, beautiful things, and much easier for me to think of, like, funny Band-Aids. I don’t think there’s a distinction. I don’t think there’s anything better about a $20,000 coat than there is about a 25-cent Band-Aid. I mean it. I am not kidding. (I’m trying to convince myself.)