Rubbing Elbows, Making Art

Christian Siriano
is frustrated.

On the day before
the world saw him win the fourth season of Project
Runway, the 22-year-old has been commissioned to
design an outfit for Extra host Dayna Devon. He
hasn't the slightest idea who she is -- or at least
pretends he doesn't. "Do you know who she is?" he asks me,
in his typically dramatic way. “What does she
look like? What channel is her show on?"

He slumps down in
a plum-colored easy chair in his apartment on
Manhattan’s Lower East Side and reaches for the
TV’s remote control. After two minutes of
channel surfing, he’s failed to locate Devon. He
gives up, settling for TMZ. "I think she just had a baby.
She wants something conservative. What am I going to
do, send her out in this?” he asks, grabbing
and violently shaking a two-tone ruffle dress on a nearby
garment rack, a facsimile of a piece he sent down the runway
at Bryant Park one month earlier. The look had visibly
impressed judges Nina Garcia, Michael Kors, and
Siriano’s celebrity crush, guest judge Victoria
Beckham. "You don’t come to me for conservative,
honey."

One of 15
contestants on Bravo’s latest search for
America’s next great fashion designer, Siriano
was easily the most compelling, even though he
polarized viewers with his overflowing confidence and his
propensity to critique his peers, sometimes harshly.
(In one of many memorably nasty --and unsolicited --
comments, he told fellow competitor Sweet P that one
of the outfits she designed was suitable for a "tranny ice
queen.")

But as the season
progressed Siriano showed he had the raw talent to back
up his attitude, winning the most challenges (three) and
ultimately defeating Ralph Lauren designer Jillian
Lewis and Rami Kashou, who had already dressed the
likes of Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton. And with his
unvarnished wit and obsession with his hair, which he
frequently flatironed, not to mention his amusing
catchphrases -- "hot mess," "tranny mess," and, most
famously, "fierce" -- delivered with Valley Girl
inflections, he won a ton of fans.