![]() ![]() But it’s what happened after he won Project Runway in 2008 that makes him an anomaly: Siriano became a bona fide fashion designer – the first and only success story from a show now entering its 15th season. Project Runway, which bills itself as “a search for the next big fashion designer”, turned Siriano into a household name, lampooned by Amy Poehler on Saturday Night Live, and featured in a cameo on Ugly Betty. Rhapsody in blue: Michelle Obama at the Democratic convention. ![]() Sarafa’s aesthetic might be all his own, but his language comes straight from season four of the popular American reality show, Project Runway, when Siriano – then 21 – claimed top prize, along the way dropping “fierce” and “hot mess” and “hot tranny mess” with absurd frequency. Siriano, who is so plugged into social media that he once designed a dress composed of Tweets, is seizing his moment.Ī few days after meeting Siriano at his New York studio I see the influence of his younger self in a random publicist’s pitch in my inbox, subject line: “Young Designer Debuts Edgy New Line.” My hand hovers over the delete button, but I keep reading: “Ready to set the fashion world on fire with his new clothing line HOT ME$$, fierce designer Matt Sarafa has an aesthetic all his own and is a rising talent to keep an eye on.” It’s classic PR guff, but oddly familiar guff. ![]() It may also have been a subtle dig at the bigger fashion houses that have found themselves out of synch with the times, unable to kick the habit of sending skinny white girls down the runway, and grasping for relevance in an era of social media that has exposed fashion’s shibboleths to unwelcome scrutiny. A subsequent New York Times story heralded him as a designer who had built his career on “catering to women regardless of age or size”, characterising the first lady’s choice as a rebuff to Trump’s misogyny. It was a moment in which you could feel fashion’s centre of gravity shift in Siriano’s direction. Mom is a size 16 and my sister is a size 0, so I never thought that wasn't normal Twenty-five million people were watching the first lady on TV that night, and many millions more would see her speech the following day in news clips and online. Photograph: Christopher Lane/The ObserverĪt the Democratic convention in July, Michelle Obama stepped on to the stage to give her barnstorming speech, wearing an elegant Siriano-designed cobalt blue number – the second dress she’d worn by the designer in the space of a month (the first was for a funeral for police officers killed in Dallas). In the hot seat: Siriano in his New York showroom. For the actor it was a rare bright spot at a time when she was being deluged by a series of hateful, often racist, tweets that briefly drove her to abandon Twitter altogether. He had barely two weeks in which to do so. “Hmmm, that will change and I remember everything.”Ĭhange it did, thanks to Siriano, who immediately jumped in with an offer to design Jones a red-carpet gown. “It’s so funny how there are no designers wanting to help me with a premiere dress for the movie,” Jones had written. But then, one afternoon in June, he was browsing Twitter when he spotted a Tweet from Ghostbusters actor Leslie Jones. It was part of the curse that comes with winning a reality show when you are a brash 21-year-old with nothing to lose, and until this summer it seemed doubtful that Siriano would ever be able to shake it off. ![]() For a long time, the fashion designer Christian Siriano has been known to the wider American public for a series of expressions – catchphrases you could call them – that he hasn’t actually used for about eight years. ![]()
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