Interview with Jay McCarroll from 'Eleven Minutes'

Friday

20Feb2009

Interview with Jay McCarroll from 'Eleven Minutes'

Friday, February 20, 2009 at 1:03PM

If Jay McCarroll is somehow a victim of his own fame, he won't admit it. The first winner of the Emmy-nominated Project Runway hasn't broken the fashion world wide open, and he says that's an impossible goal to achieve in just a handful of years.

But the outspoken McCarroll, who did not take his six-figure winnings from the show, is still trying to push towards that finish line, constantly working and re-working his line of designs. Eleven Minutes directors Michael Selditch and Robert Tate spent many months with McCarroll as he prepared for his brief walk under the bright lights of New York's Fashion Week, showing us exactly how the newcomer prepared for his first independent show...without the helping hand of Heidi Klum and company.

Big Picture: Even though the runway show itself is short, it's nearly a year putting it all together, stitch by stitch. And in your situation, you don't have a team surrounding you that you can delegate things to. It's such an individual effort -

Jay McCarroll: And doing all sorts of things, trying to juggle it all, and have it make sense.

But it really is like playing in the Super Bowl without having weeks of practice and weeks of games to prepare. Your season is this one event.

And it's not a four hour game, it's eleven minutes. I think we drove that point home - It's eleven minutes. Yeah, it's very in the moment. It's like theatre, but at least in theatre, you have a run of production and you have that next night to fix things. Whereas in a fashion show, if it's screwed up forever. It's frozen in time.

But unlike theatre, I think, the world of fashion tends to be pretty catty.

No. Unless you're Katie Holmes. Or "Kate Cruise," if you will (laughs).

Did you encounter a lot of that reaction, though, because of the "shortcut" of Project Runway?

Oh yeah. I mean, a lot of people were supportive, but I was on the last day of Fashion Week. They just threw me into a time slot. Fashion Week starts on Monday, and by the end of the week, people are exhausted. They've seen 200 shows and they don't care.

So I think in the beginning of the week, people are very hopeful, but if they're seeing the same trends, they're hyper-critical by the end of the week. They don't care. They'll say, "It was ugly." And people are competitive, so they might be saying it sucks. But I don't care. I don't do it for that.

But Runway has had some perks. I mean, people outside the industry know who you are, and you've probably hob-nobbed -

Like at a party with Molly Ringwald...

Did you have any clue that that stuff could be out there for you as a result of a show buried, as it was, on a low-rated cable channel at the time?

Yeah, there was no season before mine, so it really could've been the shittiest show on television. Because when you think about it, it's just, "Let's put eclectic weirdos in a room together to sew." Who'd want to watch that?

And it seems now that Project Runway has become about something else. It's become about characters and catchphrases, and you'll follow the show for a while and designers who clearly have no business being in the final four or five are still hanging around because they increase dramatic tension.

Hallelujah for you voicing that; I thought I was the only one! It really hit a plateau with [Christian Soriano's] win and his "Fierce," "Hot Mess" nonsense. I think the first season, and not just because I was a part of it, had a real energy and felt special, new, and organic. I know it was heartfelt.

And by the time they got to season four, it was, "I'm on here to be somebody." I've heard murmurs of Christian saying, "I know these people are using me and I'm gonna use them," that kind of stuff behind the scenes, and I think it's become that.

I was just happy to be getting an opportunity or to be staying in a nice hotel room, and that was it. I wasn't demanding money, I wasn't thinking I was anybody, and it's lost some of that - genu...genuinosity? The genuininity? (laughs) The antidisingenuousness! - because it became a formula and we all became accustomed to what the formula was.

But now there are a handful of winners, all of whom have an advantage over somebody working out of his or her garage in Wisconsin, but it seems like the industry doesn't know where to put them. It doesn't want to splash their designs all over the place, but it doesn't want to blackball anyone, either.

They don't know how to deal with us because we're a new breed of designer. I mean, we're all talented. Most of us studied fashion, studied abroad in fashion, worked for someone in fashion, so it's not like we were taught fashion on a television show. And yeah, the not succeeding...it's only been four years that Project Runway has been on the air. Take a look at Michael Kohrs: He's been around for 20 years, but he wasn't a household name until Project Runway. It took him 15 years to build a business.

That's the thing about reality television. It's not real. You can't build an empire in six months. But I think over the next ten years, you'll see great work out of the group of us.

And maybe you won't (laughs)...

Colin Boyd |

Permalink | in

Documentary,

Interviews |

Print Article |

Email Article |

Reader Comments

There are no comments for this journal entry. To create a new comment, use the form below.

Post a New Comment

Enter your information below to add a new comment.

My response is on my own website »

Author:

Author Email (optional):

Author URL (optional):

Post:

↓ | ↑

Some HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>