Work It

An interview with Jay McCarroll

by Lauren F. Friedman

As the Season One winner of Project Runway, Jay McCarroll was grade A entertainment: snide and witty, cutting and crass, all catty asides and biting one-liners.

In person, McCarroll is an affable, frequently distracted chatterbox. He stops midsentence to comment on an old lady in red leather pants ("Gotta love it") and goes off on tangents about the plight of endangered honeybees ("I'm so sad for them!") and mica rocks (he collects them).

But in Eleven Minutes — the documentary that picks up in February 2006, two years after his TV win — McCarroll spends seven months working with feverish determination toward one goal: an 11-minute show for New York Fashion Week — the length of which he compares to "a long shit" — that could make or break his entire career. "I wanted to do [Eleven Minutes] to show the whole process. You don't really get to see that on Project Runway," McCarroll says. "I wanted to show it ... warts and all, soup to nuts."

While Project Runway shows aspiring designers realizing their ideas in the form of one garment per challenge, Eleven Minutes reveals the less-than-glamorous side of manufacturing and financing a whole collection. "You can just make a painting and you're, like, 'It's done,'" McCarroll says, a tinge of envy in his voice. "Can you imagine making a small version of the same painting? An extra-large version of the same painting? And then having to make 300 of that? And then having to sell it?"

McCarroll expresses frustration with critics who think he squandered the opportunity handed to him by Project Runway. "The minute I was done with that show, the cord was cut and I was done," he says in Eleven Minutes. The documentary demonstrates that, in the fashion world, money and means don't fall from the sky, even for reality TV stars. "I don't know where people think you make money," he says now. "Is everyone Stella McCartney? No. Is your father a fucking Beatle?"

McCarroll left New York for Philadelphia two years ago. He's now busy with a fabric line, his online boutique and his students at Philadelphia University. "The New York fashion industry is very selective and very difficult and cutthroat, and it's hard to be me in that world," McCarroll says. "I wasn't raised to be a nasty bitch."

(lauren.friedman@citypaper.net)

See Cindy Fuchs' review of Eleven Minutes.