The Triangle

Issue date: 3/6/09 Section: Arts & Entertainment

Media Credit: Dave Hernandez

Heidi lets you know whether "you're in or you're out." After weeks of insane challenges, only one designer is still in, but after that, the audience is left in the dark as to what happens to the next great American designer. In his documentary, "Eleven Minutes," Jay McCarroll, the winner of "Project Runway: Season 1," allows the audience the rare opportunity to see what happens when the show ends and it's time to get down to business.

"Eleven Minutes" follows McCarroll through the year leading up to his return to the tents at Bryant Park for Fashion Week and demonstrates what "Project Runway" sometimes masks - that fashion design is a complicated web that involves more than just a designer with a creative vision.

Two years after winning "Project Runway," McCarroll has his designs, but faces the challenge of "how to pay for it" and how to get his vision to the fashion community. The cameramen follow him as he works with his publicist, his assistants, the shoes designer, the jewelry designer, the hair designer and more to bring to life a vision that will culminate in an 11 minute show.

"[I] wanted to show that there's a lot more, a lot more people, than you would think" McCarroll described, involving the process of getting from "point A to point B."

This is exactly what he does and it certainly presents a different perspective of McCarroll as a designer and the fashion industry than "Project Runway" created.

The collection designed in the span of the film is inspired by Archigram, an architecture group from the 1960s, who designed avant-garde structures that dealt with the idea of transportation. Entitled "Transport," the collection includes both men and women fashions and features McCarroll's signature color progression.

Not only do you see the research and the sketches, but the narrative walks through the process of choosing what to retail, where to get invitations, who to invite - which goes beyond the one person with the creative vision.

The editors cut 250 hours of footage into one hour and 45 minutes, which is only a small slice of that year.

After the show is finished, the work still continues because whether the critics like the show, something must be sold to the consumer.

A large "part [of the movie] was me trying to figure out how to sell it," McCarroll said. The struggle with that was that, "[I] was doing what [I] thought would be sellable" but paradoxically, "it's very personal how you dress," and therefore, difficult to dictate what people should buy.

Despite the hype and perceptions people make about McCarroll based on his behavior on reality television, "Eleven Minutes" shows him to be a focused and talented designer.

Recently, he has been teaching drawing and portfolio at Philadelphia University as well as running his online store and designing a line of textile prints.

What McCarroll thinks is interesting about the line of fabric is that "people can then buy [my] fabric and make what they want out of it as opposed to [me] having to dictate," McCarroll described, which is an interesting and somewhat backwards approach to fashion design.

"Eleven Minutes" is now playing at the Ritz at the Bourse (400 Ranstead St.). For more information, visit www.elevenminutes-jaymccarroll.com.

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