Project Runway winners are meant to head to the top. First season champ Jay McCarroll, however, may have hit rock bottom.
Page Six reports that the Pennsylvania native has hit some hard times since taking home the blue ribbon on Bravo’s design show.
Two years after winning the first season of “Project Runway,” designer Jay McCarroll is homeless. “I sleep at other people’s houses . . . I got pushed out of a boat and into the ocean, as if, oh, you can survive now.”
How, we wonder, did McCarroll spend his $100,000 winnings? Too many oversized sunglasses, perhaps?
McCarroll isn’t the only hard-up homo. Andrae Gonzalo of season two “fame” apparently works it hosting gay parties in Pittsburgh. That’s the pitts.
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cjc
Project Runway contestants are simply used for ratings; and the contestants simply use Project Runway for exposure/15 minutes of fame. Just like every other “reality” TV program.
afrolito
He should have never won in the first place. Did they really think he had a future with those craptacular designs?
apollonia666
He didn’t take the $100K, because he didn’t want to do the “mentorship” at Banana Republic.
GranDiva
Actually, he didn’t take the $100K because it came with too many strings attached. He didn’t avail himself of the Banana Republic “mentorship” because it really wasn’t of much use to him. They were offering to hook him up with some manufacturing and marketing connections at a time when he didn’t have a lot in the way of stuff to mass-produce.
GranDiva
Or, actually, yeah, the Banana Republic aesthetic was not something he was into. He’s told different stories about the whole situation at different times.
Woof
He looks like the gay Darth Mal in that picture.
codymurp
Yeah Jay didn’t take the 100k and Andrae Gonzalo teaches at FIDM in Los Angeles…take this article down – it’s ridiculously inaccurate.
apollonia666
Ah, GranDiva, I thought the mentorship *was* the strings attached to the $100K. Anyway, can’t say that I blame him.
schnaussmaus
Yeah, it is inaccurate. He has a line of clothing coming out this fall. http://www.jaymccarroll.com/
GranDiva
In point of fact, here’s a pair of clips from the New York article that the Post quoted:
The trouble is, celebrity came easily to Jay. Business did not. On the show, Jay was wicked and entertaining and cheerfully provocative, but he hardly had the means, savvy, or professional temperament to navigate the New York fashion world. (His first voice-mail message to me, ever: Hey Jen, this is Jay McCarroll … Um, I am free tonight and all day tomorrow to do this bullshit. Fucking call me, would you?) “A week after I won the show, I met with two ladies from Banana Republic at the top of the Soho House, which is like, big time,†he says. “And they were like, ‘Oh, we can give you numbers for factories to get your clothes produced.’ But that was totally not anything like what I needed. What I needed was someone to sit down with me and say, Here’s how you start a fashion label.â€
More than any former Bravo contestant, it’s Jay who has fought the bitterest fight for his intellectual property, though it wasn’t with Bravo itself. After he won the first season of Project Runway, he discovered that the Weinstein Company would forever own a 10 percent stake in his brand—and he didn’t yet even have a brand—if he chose to take their $100,000 prize. He turned it down. The company has since dropped the clause. But the fight left Jay without any money, and it left Bravo with an embittered winner—and one whose orientation wasn’t necessarily all that commercial to begin with. “I think the problem Bravo has,†says [Top Chef’s Tom] Colicchio, “is that they lose credibility when Jay doesn’t do anything.â€