Out Gunned.

Out Magazine put big old mess Marc Jacobs on the cover, but as in life, it's what's inside that counts. First, an interview with Tim Gunn.


So you didn't grow up fixated on fashion?
I was fixated on architecture and interiors, which of course had everybody worried. I had a really butch father — so butch I thought maybe he was a closet case. He was an FBI agent and a sports lover, and the only sport I could even participate in was swimming, because it was nice and clean and you didn’t sweat.

On politics:
Who on Capitol Hill needs Tim Gunn's Guide to Style most?
Laura Bush. Oh, my God!

On Project Runway:
You have no influence over the judges?
None. It keeps me an honest man. I have no interaction with them at all, but that doesn't mean they don't drive me to total despair.
And how do they do that?
How do the judges drive me to total despair? By smoking crack! By making decisions I can't fathom.


On his show:
You're quick to point out that Guide to Style isn't a typical makeover show.
I'm not a fashion Svengali. I don't throw clothes at you and tell you if you wear these things, all your fashion foibles will go away. I'm a fashion therapist.

On his personal life:
How's your romantic life?
I haven’t been in a relationship since 1982. God, that sounds pathetic. But I was so severely hurt that I’ve never, ever gotten over it. I was so madly and desperately in love that I didn’t see the end coming. It was a routine night on the couch watching television, and he turned to me and just said, 'I don’t have the patience for you. I can’t do this anymore.' After nine years. I still remember leaving his apartment, driving down Rock Creek Parkway in Washington, D.C., thinking, Maybe I’ll just drive right off the bridge.


Then they followed up with their favorite PR alums by making them pose for a dorky picture. Emmett says they had to "make it work" with tin foil, whatever that means.

Starting Your Week with Delicious Dish.

New York Magazine has an eye-opening article about what happens to Bravo reality show contestants after their 15 minutes are up. We were really happy to read this because it contains stuff that we'd been hearing for a while but didn't have the right to publish ourselves. Bravo doesn't come off that great here and Heidi has a real bitchquote at the end.

Some choice bits (but you really need to read the whole thing):

Jay:
“I haven’t been living anywhere for two years,” he says. “I sleep at other people’s houses. I sleep here if I’m drunk.”

“I have a fucking gazillion e-mails from all over the world from people asking, Why isn’t your stuff out there?” says Jay. “Yet financially, I have no way to get them a product because I got pushed out of a boat and into the ocean, as if, Oh, you can survive now.”

(Photo: Jessica Wynne)

Andrae:
"Today, he still sews the odd custom dress for $1,500, and he teaches too, but he makes a fair chunk of his money doing gigs that exploit his reality-show fame, like hosting events at gay bars in Pittsburgh. He knows this won’t last. “I tell everyone I’m not a star,” he says. “I’m a brown dwarf.”

Austin:
"Austin Scarlett, the young Quentin Crisp from the first season of Project Runway, says he was approached about a role on Heather Graham’s short-lived sitcom, Emily’s Reasons Why Not. Today he wonders if he should have mulled it over. “Because I don’t think you should turn down work that much,” he says. “That’s one of my continuing struggles, being considered a reality-TV, you know, star.” I ask if he’s ever done TV gigs he’s come to regret. “Yeeeeeeeees,” he says. “Battle of the Network Reality Stars.” Shortly afterward, he appeared on a reality reunion show on Bravo, too. “I felt so cheap and tawdry,” he says. “They gave me $500, and I was like, Keep the money. It was just part of my confusion, grasping for the next thing.”

Nick:
“When they asked me why I wanted to be on Project Runway,” says Nick Verreos, 40, who made the fetching Barbie dress from Season Two (it sold for $1,700 on projectrunway.com), “I said I wanted to use it as a trampoline. Because I knew I was doing fierce stuff, but nobody was noticing.”

Santino:
“No one wanted to interview Chloe,” Santino says. “I’m sure I did like 500 percent more interviews. That’s what I won.”

"I crack myself up by saying, It’s lucky that I turn things down so that Nick has stuff to do,” says Santino."

“Between Heidi and Michael Kors and Nina Garcia, the judges were like a three-headed monster,” he says. “They all basically have the same point of view. I mean, have one avant-garde person who has an art-as-fashion approach, rather than fashion-as-commerce approach.” Then, of course, he made an almost perversely beautiful collection for Fashion Week, and the judges said there wasn’t enough of him in it. “And it’s like, Really?” he asks. “Gee, that’s funny, because I made this shit!”

Laura:
"When Laura, hugely popular with fans, failed to notify the network she’d signed a contract to host a style show on MSN.com, they called and demanded an explanation. “And I said, ‘So what do you have to offer me?’ ” she says. (She’s now in talks with Bravo about doing something for its Website and iVillage.)"

UPDATE: "Is Jay McCarroll Homeless? He Sure Said So (and So Did His Publicist)." Read it here.

Ripping the Collections: Chloe, Part Two

The good news: We almost-love everything in the second half of her collection!
Tha bad news: That means this is going to be a really boring post!

Gorgeous. Our second-favorite look in the whole collection.

Love the lace peeking out from the hem, the unusually placed seams, the keyhole, the color, the proportion. Near-perfect look.

The only slight criticism we have is that the bust doesn't seem as well-fitted as it should be.

Like bordering on love.

We wish she had spread out some of these more subdued looking pieces instead of slamming us with all that pink and gold all at once.

The only thing we don't respond well to is that shrug, which has a flimsy, fussy quality to it. And is it us or does that thing look... crooked somehow?

Another like bordering on love. This is a good example of why we don't particularly like the color story in this collection. The colors are all too...what's the word? Well, the word that comes to mind is "unsophisticated." They're so crayola, so basic.

We do like this design, but the fit on this thing is all kinds of wonky. It almost looks like she's wearing something a size larger than she is. And we do like the cutout in the back but we think she went a little too far with it.

We still don't love her prints, but we like this better than that green and pink one.

It's another fairly basic dress, but it's pretty, the trim bumps it up, and like almost everything else in the collection, it's well-made and well-fitted.

We do hate her styling choices, though. Every model has the same lop-sided hairstyle.

Again, we wish she had rethought the order of the looks because it's odd that she would have two similar dresses walking down the runway one after the other.

We go back and forth on this one, mainly because of our unlove for the print, but the shrug makes the look here.

Grace, you fabulous Amazon. We LOVE this one. Absolutely gorge.

See, THIS is a more sophisticated blue than that crayon blue she had earlier. We wish she had done the entire collection in shades like this instead of the blinding pinks, golds and blues.

The proportions on this look are perfect and the beautiful placement of the seams and cutout on the back take what could have been a basic dress and bumped it up to something unusual, striking and beautiful.

Despite the previously stated problems we had with this collection, all in all, it was dramatic and memorable and demonstrated a high level of craftsmanship as well as an expert's understanding of how to make fabric look beautiful on a woman's body. Was it for everyone? Clearly not, but in our view it was the unmistakable winner of season 2. Whether you agree with the judges or not, the fact of the matter is, Chloe had the best post-show career of any contestant. She's going places and isn't that what the whole competition's about?

Tomorrow: The stunning collection of Kara Janx.


[Photos: FirstView]


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Ripping the Collections: Chloe, Part One

We're actually a little nervous about this one. We've set ourselves up as Chloe's Defenders and we hope we're up to the task.

Judging by online feedback, most people didn't think this collection deserved the win or that it won by default because the other collections weren't good enough. We can't speak to the latter but as to the former, we absolutely believe she deserved it.

The clothes aren't what we could call off-the-rack wearable and that may be part of the reason why people reacted negatively to them because up until that point, everything we'd seen from Chloe was totally off-the-rack-wearable. This collection required a little more interpreting than her previous work.

For all the talk of this looking like '80s clothing we say "Check the runways." This sort of look has been roaring down the runways and onto the fashion mag pages for the last year or two. Big, shiny, away from the body - all of it was on trend, which is why we think Nina loved it so much. Unlike the other two collections, it was very much of the moment.

Let's start the show.

We'll start off by saying our main problem with the collection came down to her fabric choices and color story. This is Exhibit A.

The look is a masterpiece of construction as far as we're concerned. Had it not been done in a shiny pink, we think a lot more people would have loved it. We love it except for the puffy sleeves, which could have been toned down a skosh. Although it is a "wow" piece.

As we said, it wasn't just the colors but the fabrics she chose that hurt the collection, in our opinion. Exhibit B. Her prints were just not very pretty.

This is a fairly basic dress and we can't help thinking that if it had been in a print that popped a little more, it would have had more of an impact.

And we just don't like the styling on this model.

Exhibit B.1. This is basic to the point of boring.

The straps are nice and whatever little business she's got going on in the back bumps it up a little, but for the most part this was a boring dress in an underwhelming print.

We agree with Nina that this was too matchy-match. We like the heavily structured, stiff aspect of it but we can't help thinking it would have been a better look without the jacket.

We're also not crazy about the pleated ruffles along the hem. Too heavy.

Geez, now it sounds like we hated the collection too. We promise we'll get to the parts that we loved soon.

Okay, maybe not too soon. We hated this look. The fabric is awful and once again, she's going for a too-monochromatic, matchy-match look.

We might have been able to overlook it, except for the utterly bizarre skirt on this thing, which makes her look like a drunk celebutante getting out of a limo. If it's not flattering on a size 2, who is it going to flatter?

Okay, this we loved. It's still got that structured look and maybe it's still a little too monochromatic, but it's more sophisticated than the previous couple of looks.

Love the cut on the jacket, the lace top, the tuxedo stripe on the pants. There's a lotta look going on here, so we could have done without the upturned cuffs in the sleeves, which tend to be a little distracting on top of everything else.

This is actually really cute, sofa fabric and all. We love the pockets and the fullness of the skirt.

But we HATE the bust on this thing. It's so tiny and restrictive! Even if the skirt was a little more streamlined, the proportions would have been off, but because the skirt's so full, it just accentuates how small the bust is.

We promise we'll get to the more fabulous stuff tomorrow, kittens!


[Photos: FirstView]


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Congratulations Chloe!

We will (of course) have PLENTY of things to say in the coming days, especially when it comes to ripping the collections, but we just wanted to hew to PRGay tradition by starting off with the requisite congrats.

We know a lot of people don't agree with Chloe's win (Tim included, apparently), but we're prepared to defend it. As we said, we'll be ripping the collections thoroughly, but as a way of summing it up, she won because she really demonstrated to the judges both that she knows what she's doing as a businesswoman and she knows what to do to make fabric look great on a woman's body.

By her own admission, this was a "fantasy collection," so even though quite a bit of it was more over-the-top than we're used to seeing from her, it functioned as a sort of personal as well as professional statement for her. "I know what I'm doing and I LOVE what I'm doing."

Sure, you could argue that her clothes looked like upholstery or like a prom with a Dynasty theme and there were certainly plenty of things we had problems with - didn't love her "color story" and didn't love the prints she chose - but of the three collections, hers was the strongest, the most well-executed (PERFECTLY, in fact) and the most cohesive. Couple that with a demonstrated business sense, and the choice of the judges was clear.

And they were right. Chloe is arguably the most successful out of the three winners so far and her career trajectory since the finale aired has been nothing but a steady upward climb. She worked her ass off to get where she is and she'll continue to work her ass off to get where she wants to be. If we wore hats, we would tip them right now.

You go, tiny girl.





[Screencaps: projectrungay.blogspot.com]


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FWD: Simply Chloe Dao on QVC

"The worst part about winning is that people expect you to become this amazing accomplished designer right away. Everyone has really high expectations, but they forget we [Project Runway contestants] are all young and small designers."

Fashion Wire Daily talks to Season 2 winner Chloe about her upcoming line for QVC, Simply Chloe Dao.

"The "Simply Chloe Dao" line will debut on May 10 and the collection, which includes an interpretation of the silk tank dress from the reality show's final challenge, will feature modern silhouettes at reasonable price points. The prices range from $75, for the silk dress, to $30 for a stretch ribbed tank."