Yes, exactly. Boy, if I have to hear that word one more time in my life. One of the funny things they did say on one of the very last episodes that I was on was that a lot of great costume designers have become great fashion designers as well. So I kind of like to have my feet in both worlds. Sometimes I just do costumes, sometimes I just do fashion, and sometimes I blend the two. I think we definitely blend the two on Mad Fashion, but we definitely are along the fashion world because that is what people call me up and ask me to make for them.
You have an unusual habit of signing Stevie Nicks on every outfit you do somewhere. What’s the meaning behind the Stevie Nicks signature?
[Laughs] That’s a very funny thing they wanted to capture. It’s a funny kind of superstition that I guess started about 20 years ago. I had a photo of Stevie Nicks in my workshop that we put on the ceiling above our work area and we always just had this joke that Stevie Nicks was looking down on us and blessing everything that we did. So one day I wrote her name inside of something I made because I was having a particularly difficult time with it and I was like, “Oh, I hope Stevie helps me with this thing,” and we just started doing it. We started writing her name inside of everything that I’ve made for the last 20 years. And I’m a huge fan of hers, and in fact in two weeks I’m going to see her and I’ve got tickets in the front row center — finally.
Between Project Runway and Mad Fashion, you are now a reality TV maven. Do you get groupies? Do you get hit on all the time now?
Just walking down the street every day I get stopped by people all day long. People want to just say hello or tell me how much they liked me on television or how much they liked the human hair, of course, that I had in my finale collection. And also, now everybody comes up to me and says, “Oh I can’t wait for your show.” So it’s nice, everybody’s very nice and very fun, and people want to take my picture and all that kind of stuff. So it’s something that is an everyday part of my life now. I don’t know what I would do without it. [Laughs]
Has it affected your dating? Are you married? Single?
It’s kind of funny, because the way that I met my boyfriend was because he saw me on Project Runway and sent me an email. And I answered it, and we met, and we’ve been together ever since: four years.
Congratulations. A lot of people would send an email to somebody they saw on TV, and it would go nowhere.
I know. Not that I’m bragging or anything, because I was shocked, but I literally got hundreds of emails from people during my time on Project Runway asking me out on dates. I had no idea that people would even care. And his was the only one that I answered, out of all of them.
Your design team seems equally queer. Is anybody on the team actually straight?
Oh, yeah, well wait, I want to hear your opinion. What do you think of everybody?
I loved it. We were watching, and I was like, “Matt is clearly gay, Alex is clearly gay. Izzy looks like she’s a lesbian,” I’m assuming the young girl is straight. I just kept watching and trying to peg everybody, and I was just like, “I don’t care, the whole team just seems superqueer and I love it.”
Oh, Izzy is totally straight.
No way, really?
Izzy is ... a gay man trapped in a woman’s body. Because she’s worked in theater her entire life, so all her friends are gay. She has a total gay man sensibility, but she’s not a lesbian at all. She loves men; she’s just kind of one of the gay guys just like everybody else. But she’s really, incredibly talented and really fun to be around obviously.
What do you hope viewers will take away from Mad Fashion when it premieres?
I guess my main thing, or one of the main reasons I wanted to do the show, was to show that reality television doesn’t have to star people who are just nasty for a living. I want people to have fun watching the show because we’re having fun. And that’s really why we’re doing it.
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