It's Fashion Week in New York City. You're on the bill to showcase a brand new clothing line, made up of almost a hundred pieces of clothing and accessories of your own design. Cutthroat “fashionistas” will be scrutinizing your one shot at success. Sketches have to be drafted, a crack team of helpers assembled, fabric bought, fabric sewn, wigs glued together, shoes made, production staff hired, lighting designed, set decorated, models cast, models fitted, show promoted, advertisements made, fliers handed out, invitations written, invitations distributed, all in a short span of mere months, and all for a short span of eleven minutes.
If your journey is anything like Jay McCarroll's, get ready for the long haul. If you're not familiar with Jay, he's the winner of the first season of Bravo's Project Runway, a highly competitive reality series built around the fashion world. Jay's already a quasi-celebrity, and we get to be a fly on the wall during some of his magazine and TV interviews, as a lot of people are interested in seeing what Jay can do. If you know nothing of Jay, you'll know what you need to within the first twenty minutes: his life is fashion. So much so that he is willing to stake his reputation on a line of very imaginative clothing based off of what could best be described as futuristic hot-air balloons. The images that play over Jay describing his ultimate vision are pretty creepy. Creepy or not, he is not alone in this fantastic voyage of vogue; he and a handful of other fashion types pull together to make his show and vision a reality, all in hopes of selling the line to clothing vendors, so in turn, you and I can buy them, wear them, and creep out our neighbors.
Jay himself is great. He allows even the most layman of laymen to learn a thing or two. He works hard. Incredibly hard. He's easy to respect, therefore, easy to like and easy to watch. There's a saying: “a captain never works alongside his fashion team,” I think it is. When we see Jay tediously working on a sewing machine the night before the big show, we realize he doesn't subscribe to this. He's a workhorse. Jay and his team serve as great subject matter for any documentary filmmaker to study.
Their work ethic is so extreme that at times it felt like they would have been better behind the camera. No doubt this film was an undertaking, but it just wasn't done well, which makes me feel bad for Jay and his team. Out of the seven or so months that were filmed, there had to have been more interesting scenes than some that were shown. There are parts of the movie that drag because the filmmakers decided to linger on unexciting parts of the whole process. Most of the time, all was well, and the movie felt like one geared toward a more mainstream audience, inviting in the know-nothings of fashion along with the know-it-alls. Other parts, mostly toward the middle, were lacking. Instead of focusing more on the nail-biting tension between Jay and his publicist, we got to hear musings from the jewelry maker. Instead of hearing more from Jay's incredibly small production crew, with well-earned bags under their eyes, we see designers bickering over the color of invitations. The production team were infinitely more interesting and should have been showcased more than the jewelry woman who welded together scary necklaces that looked like something from Hellraiser
All of this for eleven minutes of models walking out on a catwalk, turning, and walking back. If this sounds boring, there's a good chance you will find Eleven Minutes boring. But the filmmakers did a good job finding and spotlighting a small group of artists who think of it as more than just models on a catwalk. At the heart of this film lies the dedication Jay and his crew have, and as much as I admire their dedication, and enjoy watching Jay effortlessly work into the night with needle and thread, this movie could have been a lot more than what it is. With an unclear sense of storytelling, it has an awful lot of wrinkles to iron out. Watch this only if you love fashion and fashion design, and want to know what it's like behind the scenes of New York Fashion Week.
DVD Bonus Features
Apart from a couple trailers, there are deleted scenes, and interviews with the two co-directors. A lot of the interview footage is very, very low-quality. The DVD creators seemed to put forth a moderate amount of effort for some pretty hard-to-watch interviews. There's also a very quick slideshow of Jay's sketches that are pretty interesting, but most of which are in the actual movie.
"Eleven Minutes" is on sale February 23, 2010 and is rated R. Documentary. Directed by Robert Tate, Michael Selditch. Starring Kelly Cutrone, Jay McCarroll.
