The first season of Bravo’s Project Runway may have left some viewers with the impression that its champion, Jay McCarroll, is a one-man circus of charming neuroses, the sort of cuddly character you might want to fret over. It was a pleasant surprise, then, to find Jay out on the town last week seeming cool and relaxed. It was only nine days before he would present his first ready-to-wear collection in Bryant Park, but he was content that he’d put in a hard day’s work and happy to be out drinking. He said that he had scarcely watched the show’s current season and gave voice to a hunch that its mission had changed: “I ran into one of the producers and asked her how the third season was going, and she said, ‘It’s great! Everyone’s really attractive!’ ” He rolled his eyes. “Then I watched it, and I’m like, Who the fuck’s attractive?”
Don’t ask me: A compulsive viewer of PR in its first two instantiations, I’ve found it difficult to get into the current season; as Liv, a bartender at my local bar, recently put it, “It used to be about the clothes, and now it’s just like every other reality show.” Thus, I didn’t take it too hard when Bravo denied me access to the taping of the Project Runway finale, today’s 9 a.m. offering at the Bryant Park tents. When PR’s PR girl admonished me for getting there “late,” I countered that this was a fashion show like any other and that I’d shown up at 9:25 and was therefore actually early. Making this point got me no traction whatsoever, but it was an extremely satisfying argument to mount. I consoled myself with the knowledge that I was getting the same treatment as Alexandra Vidal, one of the stars of PR’s first season, who spent the duration of the show in the lobby while sulking into her phone with great style.
You shouldn’t mope, Alexandra: What transpired inside was an entertainment spectacle, not a fashion event. PR has certainly raised the public profile of the garment trade among, as Simon Doonan would put it, “the slags on the street,” and coated Michael Kors with some stardust that can’t be bad for business, but the world of high fashion seems to regard the show itself as a cross between a guilty pleasure and a marketing opportunity. It’s in the same position as America’s Next Top Model. “Some of the people in the fashion industry front and say they don’t watch the show,” ANTM’s runway coach, J. Alexander, said of his own popular hit. “But they all do. They know too much about it.”
Back at the tents, Jay McCarroll was, of course, a welcome guest of the TV program that launched his career and, at the show’s conclusion, casually bolted into the lobby. His own show was now just seven hours off, but he was mellow and unhurried enough to predict that Jeffrey, whoever that is, is going to win.
