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Rubbing Elbows, Making Art

Project Runway winner Christian Siriano captivated audiences across the country with his cutting bluntness and unquestionable talent. Love him or hate him, the young designer is certainly, to use his own word, "fierce."
An Advocate.com exclusive posted March 11, 2008
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.

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