11/29/2007
Project Runway: Jack Mackenroth Makes it Work
Congrats to Jack Mackenroth for making it work on Project Runway last night. While we were impressed by both Jack's candor about his HIV status and the ensemble he put together for Tiki Barber, we were also impressed and intrigued by the human transportation device he introduced in the show's first moments.
See after the jump...
It wasn't until later in the show when he ditched the "manbag" that we realized - oh, Christian's just helping him getting his workouts in. Nice job Jack!
Aside from a couple of outfits, those were some of the worst looks I have ever seen on that show. Queerty has a nice wrap-up of Jack's moments.
(top image by Frank Louis)
Previously
Project Runway Kicks Off Season with Lincoln Center Preview [tr]
Posted 3:30 PM EST by Andy Towle in Fashion Men, Jack Mackenroth, News, Project Runway, Reality TV | Permalink
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Jack is hawt.
Posted by: Tintin Malfoy | Nov 29, 2007 3:34:17 PM
Last year the kicked the one guy off for using book paterns. Now this guy tears his own pants off to use that patern. He is a cheater who should also be kicked off the show!
Posted by: what a load of bs | Nov 29, 2007 3:37:30 PM
Good for Jack. I hope he does well on the show.
The photographer of the top photo has an interesting site.(franklouis.com) NSFW
Posted by: 1♥ | Nov 29, 2007 3:51:09 PM
Except that this situation was completely different. He even asked Tim if he could use his own clothing as a reference. Last year the pattern books were used in secret, plus there were other infractions (leaving the set, getting on the internet, etc.) that led to the expulsion.
Jack is in the clear.
Posted by: Desideratum | Nov 29, 2007 3:52:17 PM
Love me some PR, but I was surprised Jack won. I thought better outfits were sent off stage.
Of course, I agree with the judges once every season, so...
Posted by: Marco | Nov 29, 2007 4:03:19 PM
I did watch Project Runway last night, but it isn't really capturing me the way it used to. For one, last year's winner was a travesty - there were multiple times that arse should have been booted and yet endured. But that's over and done with.
What bothered me last night was the fact that they a) were forced to do men's clothing and b) had almost no time to do it. While I like interesting/difficult challenges, I just don't feel like anyone who lost on that type of challenge actually deserved to lose. If you're going to take people out of contest's scope, then you may as well give them the extra time to do a good job. So evident was the fact that no one had that kind of time that all the contestants' clothes sucked, or were incomplete - including the winner's.
Posted by: Ryan | Nov 29, 2007 4:25:17 PM
Every hour sees the gay and black man elbowed out of employment by some newly arrived emigrant.” A century and a half ago, a deeply conflicted Frederick Douglass saw immigration as a looming threat to the fragile economic gains that Northern blacks had made in some trades and industries. The famed black abolitionist and pioneer civil rights champion was no lone voice in denouncing immigration. Black leaders waged ferocious fights with each other over ideology, politics and leadership, but they closed ranks on immigration. “The continual stream of well-trained European laborers flowing into the West,” warned educator Booker T. Washington in an 1882 speech, “leaves Negroes no foothold.”
Washington’s great fear was that immigration would displace Northern blacks from manufacturing industries and that Southern landowners would use cheap European and Asian labor to boot blacks off the land. Educator and civil rights activist W.E.B. DuBois railed against Washington’s racially accommodationist views. Yet, like Washington, he attacked immigration as a dire threat to blacks. He accused “the Northern industrialist of the promotion of alien immigration to eliminate black workers, and depress wages.”
During and immediately following World War I, millions more Eastern and Southern Europeans poured into the country to escape war, poverty, hunger and anti-Semitic pogroms. Many were poorly educated, marginally skilled workers who crowded the cities and muscled blacks out of the bottom-rung manufacturing and farm jobs. Black leaders and rabidly racist, America-first anti-immigration proponents screamed loudly for Congress to stop the flood.
In an editorial in 1919, the New York Age, a black newspaper, skipped the niceties. “Speaking purely from a motive of self-interest, the American Negro can say that the passing of a law restricting immigration for four years is a good thing.” Two years later, the Chicago Defender, which had virtually become the bible for black American readers by the early 1920s, chimed in, “The restrictions recently placed upon immigration to these shores ought to help us if they do not help anybody else.” In a speech in 1920, black nationalist Marcus Garvey painted an even scarier picture of what unchecked immigration could mean for blacks: “We will be out of jobs, and we will be starving.” It was vintage, over the top, stir-the-masses Garvey rhetoric. But it pricked a public nerve.
When Congress passed a racially exclusionary anti-immigration bill in 1924, the black press cheered madly. The Immigration Act of 1924 barred entry of “aliens ineligible to citizenship.” Because Japanese and other Asians were barred by a 1790 law stipulating that “whites only” could be naturalized, the 1924 act effectively ended the immigration of all Asians into the United States.
The radical, pro-Socialist, pro labor Messenger instantly hailed the bill as a victory for black workers and claimed that it would open up more jobs. A year later, the National Urban League’s house organ, Opportunity, which championed black professional and business interests and relentlessly opposed the Messenger’s pro-Socialist views still applauded the anti-immigrant assault: “The gaps made by the reduction in immigrant labor have forced a demand for Negro labor despite theories which hold that they are neither needed nor desired.”
The 1924 restrictive immigration law didn’t totally allay black fears that immigration would unhinge their tenuous economic plight. Some blacks viewed Mexican immigrants as the new threat to black jobs. In 1927, the Pittsburgh Courier pushed the panic button and warned that Mexican immigrants would “menace” blacks’ position in industry. “The Mexicans are being used as laborers on the railroads, on public works and on the farms, thus taking the places of many Negro workers.” The Courier did not blame Mexican immigrants for taking jobs, but regarded them as pathetic pawns of greedy, unscrupulous employers to depress wages, labor standards and sow divisions with black workers.
Though the Courier nailed employers for exploiting illegal immigrants, it did not take the next logical step and urge black workers, labor groups and civil rights leaders to join with Mexican workers and fight for better wages, fair hiring practices and improved labor standards, and against Jim Crow segregation that impoverished black and Mexican workers. This was the pre-Depression era of naked, laissez-faire capitalism, and the black press and black leaders banked on the goodwill of white corporate employers for black economic gains. The Courier wailed that Mexican immigrants would snatch jobs from blacks in public works and railroads in the 1920s. But the estimated million or so Mexican illegal immigrants that trickled into the United States then was relatively low. They were mostly concentrated in the Southwest and posed no direct threat to blacks in the industrial North. Yet, in singling out Mexican illegal immigration as a potential danger to blacks in the 1920s, the Courier gave verbal ammunition to opponents of illegal immigrants that some blacks decades later would eagerly pick up and use.
Starting more than a century ago, Douglass, Washington, DuBois, Garvey and the black press sounded alarms over legal and illegal immigration. They forged a strange alliance with conservative and even fringe anti-immigrant groups to finger-point immigrants as the ultimate peril to blacks. As the national debate rages over illegal immigration, some black leaders and their strange bedfellows are doing the same thing again. Jack on Project Runway is just like this. Best of luck.
Posted by: Leland Frances | Nov 29, 2007 4:29:18 PM
What's with the thread-jacking?
Posted by: Lia | Nov 29, 2007 4:41:00 PM
The ramblings of a bored queen is sooo...overrated.
Posted by: patrick | Nov 29, 2007 4:43:13 PM
Haha my roommate hooked up with him...well they basically jerked off together because he's HIV positive. Lol...
Posted by: matt | Nov 29, 2007 4:54:21 PM
Haha my roommate hooked up with him...well they basically jerked off together because he's HIV positive. Lol...
Posted by: matt | Nov 29, 2007 4:54:45 PM
Project Runway is dead to me.
Posted by: David | Nov 29, 2007 5:19:46 PM
a bad episode in the worst season ever of PR. For starters, Kit should've won that challenge. Her outfit was both complete and stylish. Jack's pants were terribly ill fitting and looked like something straight off the rack at Banana Republic, yawn, boring. I'm just finding the characters on this season to be very unlikeable and the show feels stale. And I look forward to PR like some people look forward to springtime!! Hope it improves...
Posted by: Danmac | Nov 29, 2007 5:30:28 PM
Honestly, I don't know why anyone would bother to pay attention to Jack when the deliciously sexy Rami is on the same show.
Posted by: Desideratum | Nov 29, 2007 5:43:39 PM
I don't watch the show but I have seen this mess in the bars/ clubs and he always looks like he has taken half the english alphabet
Posted by: ReasonBased | Nov 29, 2007 5:50:40 PM
Jack is a talented guy, but that outfit was meh in a big way...all those stripes made me a little seasick.
Agreed, other designers did better.
Also, did anyone wonder why the design looked like it would work great on a string bean with no chest or rear end (like the model)? Didn't Tiki Barber mention that he has a big behind? Those stripes are going to look like a test pattern on his butt! How is he going to carry that off?
Posted by: joey | Nov 29, 2007 5:51:27 PM
Guys, can we please cut back on the spoilers? Since i'm not in the US, I watch the show trough bittorrent, and the episode hasn't been released online yet.
Posted by: butter | Nov 29, 2007 6:10:56 PM
I'll give you that the time restraint was ridiculous but JesusHChrist they whined TOO much about how hard it was to design the menswear pieces. Women wear pants, blouses and jackets, don't they? I would think there would be similarities. Maybe they just aren't as talented as they think they are.
Posted by: kyunderwear | Nov 29, 2007 6:15:32 PM
Well, during his press tours prior to this season, Tim Gunn said, many times, that almost every week viewers would probably hate the decisions the judges made. He would sometimes disagree with them in the past, but this season he disagreed constantly. We're seeing that already. (And I adore him even more now, if that was possible.)
Posted by: Turtle | Nov 29, 2007 6:55:11 PM
YAY FOR JACKY! congrats on being the least offensive option in a sea of sloppy, poorly tailored, unfinished outfits! YIPPEE FOR MEDIOCRITY!
Posted by: oliveOIL | Nov 29, 2007 6:56:13 PM
Drag queens are butcher than jack
Posted by: Jack is a girl | Nov 29, 2007 7:10:15 PM
Word-association Stereotype TIME!
rami: hotGAY
chris: fatGAY
ricky: crybabyGAY
jack: hivGAY
steven: creepyGAY
christian: youngGAY
marion: who?GAY
kevin: nongayGAY
Posted by: southseaisles | Nov 29, 2007 7:17:15 PM
Ok, Tim Gunn said he could use his own clothes as a reference. Throughout the seasons, we've seen designers who know only patterns for the female body, so when Keith used a pattern book, he was truly cheating. Jack shouldn't be penalized for being resourceful. What he should be punished for is that tramp stamp. However, I think the outfit looked good, and the color will look great on that Tiki guy. Loved the lines.
But the fleece coat was cool. A little WASPy, I thought.
Christian shoulda won the past three weeks, tho...
Posted by: Ian | Nov 29, 2007 7:33:21 PM
I have to admit, that man does make me do a double-take sometimes. I've always been a sucker for dark features and eyes. Despite that, his icy blue gazers really do get to me. Still, I don't think he's come out of his shell with his designs yet. And those vertical stripes from neck to ankle really didn't do it for me.
Posted by: Mike Zillion | Nov 29, 2007 7:54:02 PM
First of all, what the fuck did Leland say?
I couldn't bear to read it (or am not bright enough to get through it, right?)
Now...Jack is 'cute' I guess, but what is going on with his elbows? Anyone who cannot come up with tattoos more original than that I have to have doubts about. They are kinda sad, I think. Does he think he's a superhero or something?
Posted by: Jordan | Nov 29, 2007 8:14:31 PM