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With shows like Project Runway and Top Chef, the Bravo cable channel skillfully packages the fantasy that gifted amateurs can break into the big time. But make no mistake: It is a fantasy.
JAY MCCARROLL, baby-faced and hoodieclad, works in the sort of space you'd expect from a fellow who dreams in fabric. It's outfitted with four sewing machines and oceans of material arranged in brilliant spectral sequence; his spring 2007 collection hangs on a rack in the corner, anchored by a quilt skirt so audaciously outsize it could easily double as a bedspread. But bedding itself is missing from this studio, as is a kitchen and a shower, which matters more in this case than it ordinarily would: Though he's the first-season winner of Project Runway ·, Jay, 32, is still homeless in New York.
"I haven't been living anywhere for two years," he says. "I sleep at other people's houses. I sleep here if I'm drunk."
Jay was one of the Bravo network's first guinea pigs in the competition reality genre, a brightly imaginative new form that mixes the more mundane conceits of The Real World and Survivor with contests involving genuine skill. In exchange for afew weeks of reality-style exploitation, contestants have a chance to show the world what they can do-with a sewing machine, with a pair of scissors, in a kitchen, in an undecorated room-and in the aftermath find their careers in full bloom. But the shows, it turns out, are the easy part. "I have a fucking gazillion e-mails from all over the world from people asking, Why isn't your stuff out there?' says Jay. "Yet financially, I have no way to get them a product because I got pushed out of a boat and into the ocean, as if, Oh, you can survive now."
This isn't what one would assume, of course. One would assume he'd be a money magnet after his star turn. Certainly Jay assumed as much. "You don't think I took the fucking bus to New York the day after I won the show, thinking someone was going to come up to me on the street and say, You're awesome, here's money?" he asks. "I thought that for two years. But I've given up...