Ten years ago, Christian Siriano was casting his label’s first show at New York Fashion Week. But instead of going with the pale, willowy girls dominating catwalks at the time, Siriano — fresh off his win on the reality-TV competition “Project Runway” — stocked his debut with Victoria’s Secret bombshells and unknown models of color.
He didn’t know he was being such a maverick.
“I just thought that’s what you should have: a great mix of beautiful women from different cultures and different parts of the world,” the designer, 32, told The Post. “Remembering back to 2008, ’09, ’10, a lot of brands were interested in the very small, waify girl.”
Part of his resistance to that trend, he admits, came from not wanting to reinforce the message that only skinny women have a place in fashion — and it came from a place of concern. “There were always those girls that I was worried about,” he added, referencing the alarmingly frail gamines who would arrive at castings.
That desire to have a runway that more accurately reflects real life has made Siriano one of the most influential and disruptive forces working in fashion. Now, a decade after his debut, the rest of the industry is finally starting to catch up with him.
According to the Fashion Spot’s runway-diversity report, nearly 40 percent of models who walked last New York Fashion Week, in February, were nonwhite — up from 21 percent in 2015, the first year the site began keeping track of the numbers. Last Fashion Week also saw 27 plus-size models (up from 14 in 2015) and 33 trans models (up from just three in 2015).
Yet even in this more inclusive climate, Siriano stands out. While high-end designers rarely manufacture clothes above a size 14 (if that), Siriano’s line goes up to size 28 — and he’s critical of department stores that haven’t caught up. “It’s a bit strange that Neiman Marcus and Saks don’t have a huge size range — online you can only get up to a size 16,” he said.
‘It’s a bit strange that Neiman Marcus and Saks don’t have a huge size range.’
His muses include voluptuous icons like Christina Hendricks and Oprah. And his shows are more like parties than fashion presentations, with “Saturday Night Live” stars Leslie Jones whooping it up in the audience as plus-size beauties Ashley Graham and strut down the runway.
At Siriano’s show on Saturday, at Gotham Hall in Midtown, 12 “curve” or plus-size models walked. (The front row included Tiffany Haddish, Whoopi Golberg, model Coco Rocha — with her 3-year-old daughter — and Cynthia Nixon.)
“We have all seen brands who experiment with a token curvy girl on the runway, or a season where they use a few models of color,” Rocha told The Post. “For Christian it’s not a gimmick or a trend.”
Siriano grew up in Annapolis, Md., the son of two teachers who divorced when he was 5. Despite living in a “very buttoned-up” town, Siriano’s family was stylish and eccentric.
“My mom got married in a Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress,” he said of his first muse, his size-16, “curvy” mother. By the time he was 13, he was crafting dresses for her. But while his mom taught him about style, his older sister, a ballerina, showed him the fantasy of fashion.
“I would be backstage with her doing costumes and hair and makeup, and I would see these girls in their warm-up [clothes] putting on these tulle fairy dresses and transforming. I thought that was so romantic and amazing.”
After high school at the Baltimore School of the Arts, Siriano moved to London to study fashion, interning with legends Alexander McQueen and Vivienne Westwood, whose rebellious approach to design — and to their runway shows — influenced the budding designer.
“In Europe, the models were very small, skinny white girls,” said Siriano. “But McQueen was different. You had Naomi Campbell coming in and getting fittings — he created clothes for real women. And Westwood really loved diverse shows. She was like, the crazier the model, the better.”
Siriano quickly earned a reputation for dressing women the fashion industry usually ignores. (It helped that the industry gatekeepers ignored him, at first, too.) In 2008, he won “Project Runway,” collaborated with Payless, launched his line — to dismissive reviews — and nabbed his first celebrity client: Whoopi Goldberg.
Plenty of starlets, like Taylor Swift, followed. But dressing Goldberg, an unapologetic, middle-age, nonwhite comedian who didn’t wear a size 0, inspired other celebrities who didn’t quite conform to Hollywood’s narrow standards to turn to Siriano to make them look like glamazons.
“It was the same thing when I got my first request for Oprah, or Queen Latifah,” said Siriano. When “SNL” star Jones tweeted in 2016 that no designer would dress her for the premiere of her film “Ghostbusters,” Siriano responded with an emoji hand wave.
The result was a sexy, off-the-shoulder sheath in fire-engine red. He’s dressed her about a dozen times since.
“She’s so much fun. She makes you feel good, her fittings are a blast, and you never know what she’s going to say,” said Siriano. “She’s an amazing actress and awesome person . . . It shouldn’t be that hard for someone like her to find a pretty dress.”
In 2016, Siriano’s red-carpet work led to a collaboration with the plus-size chain Lane Bryant, and he was blown away by the brand’s spokeswomen — many of whom he had never seen at castings or go-sees for Fashion Week.
“Lane Bryant really changed everything with their ‘I’m No Angel’ campaign. Suddenly agencies were signing plus-size models and they were becoming available,” he said.
But Candice Huffine — who modeled for Siriano’s Lane Bryant campaign and has since walked in his shows (including Saturday’s) — gives the credit to the designer for pushing the industry forward.
Before working with Siriano, she said, “it was a struggle to be dressed in the high-fashion space. Many shoots were just lingerie, bodysuits or portraits because there were simply no designers to fill the racks to create a fashion story.”
In December, Huffine nabbed a cover shoot with ELLE Brazil.
Unlike many of his peers, Siriano produces samples in a variety of sizes, which means he can loan magazines clothes for a variety of body types.
“Yeah, it is more expensive to create samples in different sizes,” said Siriano. “But honestly, there are no rules saying that a sample has to be a certain size. No one said you can’t make your first sample in a size 8.”
And it isn’t just designers who are to blame for fashion’s size problem.
“Even if plus-sizes are available, not all retailers are buying them,” he said. “There’s so much that needs to be changed.”
But Siriano is confident that change will come, even if just for economic reasons.
“Fashion can be very closed-off because it’s obsessed with being seen as aspirational,” he added. “But most women just want to see the clothes on someone who looks a little closer to them. That’s what designers have to realize: Clothes can still be aspirational and fantasy, but they can be that on all these different types of people.”
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