Fashion Week ends in Manhattan this afternoon, giving the release of “Eleven Minutes” a very high timeliness quotient.
The movie opening today in theaters (and debuting simultaneously on the here! cable network) follows “Project Runway” winner Jay McCarroll through his first — and, so far, only — Bryant Park tent show during Fashion Week three years ago.
Director-producers Michael Seiditch and Rob Tate show the madness, the hype and the very hard work that goes into the unveiling of a new fashion line in front of the press and celebrities who assemble in tents behind the New York Public Library on 42nd St.
The title “Eleven Minutes” refers to what everything boils down to for a designer during Fashion Week — the average running time of the unveiling of a new and untested line of clothes.
McCarroll was in the special position of receiving a financial sponsorship for his show from an animal rights group (as part of its campaign against fur in American fashion). He was spared the added burden designers face in raising enormous amounts of money to produce the clothes and the glitzy tent show.
“Eleven Minutes” moves the flamboyant Pennsylvanian McCarroll from the artificial atmosphere of a TV reality competition to the real world of fashion promotion and commerce.
The Bryant Park show turned out to be a semi-flop — the big buyers didn’t want to buy much of McCarroll’s line — but it is gripping to see all of the backstage drama and intense labor that goes into an expensive one-time-only production that is immediately boiled down to a few pictures in newspapers and magazines (and a “slideshow” on Style.com).
Like it or not, fashion is a huge industry in this country and Seiditch and Tate are to be commended for giving us a lively insider’s view.
(The photo above is from the Fashion Week coverage in this week’s New York Magazine, specifically a terrific story by Mike Albo — “Petey and the Boys” — about the lifestyles of the male models who converge on the city for fashion work.)
