This past July, Leslie Jones was preparing to make the leap from Saturday Night Live cast member to legit movie actress, costarring alongside comedy’s biggest names in the hotly anticipated Ghostbusters. Jones should have been elated. Instead, she was stressed out. Not only was she under a daily siege of highly pub- licized, baldly racist attacks by social media trolls, but about two weeks before the movie’s premiere—the single most photographed night of her career—she had nothing to wear, and no prospects in sight. In desperation and disgust, Jones took to Twitter, calling out designers for not offering to help. Surfing above the hate mail came a reply: two “waving hand” emojis from Christian Siriano—his way of saying, “Come over here, girl. I’d love to celebrity dresses you.” (Her response: “yaaaaaassssss.”) At the premiere, Jones stepped onto the ectoplasm-green carpet in a regal, off-the-shoulder red Siriano. The designer Instagrammed her photo with the hashtag #prettywoman. Jones raves, “We are now friends for life! I love this man. He saw the beauty in me, in every woman.”
Fourteen days later, at the Democratic National Convention, Michelle Obama—the best thing to happen to American fashion since the Singer sewing machine—strode onstage to de- liver the most stirring speech of her political life in a simple, cobalt-blue full-skirted dress. Its designer? Christian Siriano.
Finally. It has taken nine long years for the arbiters of fashion to give in to the indisputable reality that Christian Siriano—the hair-gelled, finger-snapping alum not of Parsons or FIT but of Project Runway, season four—has the talent, focus, and obviously the perseverance to be a viable and, for a rapidly growing circle of wom- en, welcome force in American fashion.
It’s not as if Siriano has lacked for recognition. But fame, especially for a reality TV star, does not equal respect (see: Kardashians, Hiltons, Bachelorettes, et al.), and in an industry in which sharp- eyed insiders often compete for the self-satisfaction of anointing unknown talent, Siriano’s instant, unmistakably mass appeal following his Runway win was long cause for disdain. You can’t claim credit for “discovering” someone millions of viewers already chose. It didn’t help that the show’s sly editing had shaped Siriano into a cartoonish persona complete with crowd-pleasing catch-phrases like “Fierce!” and “Hot tranny mess!” (Runway host Tim Gunn nicknamed him “Woody Woodpecker.”)
Siriano grew up in Annapolis, Maryland, the son of two teachers who divorced when he was five. He loved musical theater, and studied ballet alongside his older sister until he became more taken with the costumes than dance itself. By age 13, he was designing clothes, a passion that intensified in high school at Baltimore School of the Arts. After being rejected by FIT, he moved to London, earning a degree in fashion design at American InterContinental University while interning at Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen. In New York after graduation, he made wedding red carpet dresses for private clients and briefly interned at Marc Jacobs. A friend told him about Runway. “I figured, I had no money; I just needed a job, so why not audition?,” he says. “People did warn me about the stigma attached to reality shows, but winning got me on Oprah, and Amy Poehler played me on Saturday Night Live. That was fun. But I also realized quickly that this wouldn’t last, so I decided early on to figure this thing out for myself.”
When Siriano, then 21, “walked in to audition, my first reaction was, ‘He’s just out of design school, not fully baked, so why are we seeing him?’ ” Gunn recalls. “He was in the room for half a minute when I turned to the judges and said, ‘I’ve been teaching for 30 years and have never met a fashion prodigy until today.’ If I had any worries, it was that Christian came equipped with such confidence he could have turned into an egomaniacal diva.” On that count, Gunn is “delighted but not surprised to be wrong.”
At Siriano’s no-nonsense, sketch-lined workrooms in New York City’s Chelsea, the designs-in-progress are neither directional nor needle-moving. But what they lack in editorial urgency is made up for in an effusive love of color, an obsessive workmanship, and a knack for the kind of camera-ready glamour that elevated Grace Kelly to a screen goddess—all in line with the designer’s ultimate goal of, as he puts it, becoming someone “all women can trust in when they want to be beautiful.” Recent red-carpet arrivals indicate that stars as varied as Jennifer Lopez, Kerry Washington, Lady Gaga, Coco Rocha, Ariana Grande, Tina Fey, Shailene Woodley, Sia, and Angela Bassett are believers. As are Neiman Marcus shoppers, who snap up his petal-appliquéd and floral-printed gowns for $3,000-plus.
