When women stop Jay Manuel on the street, one of the first things they tend to ask the silver-topped fashion correspondent, who rose to fame on America’s Next Top Model, is, “How do I look?”
His response? “I always just chuckle,” says Manuel, who recently talked to the Straight at the launch of his brand-new Sears Canada clothing line, ATTITUDE Jay Manuel, at the department store’s Pacific Centre location. “Some people think that I walk around with this supercritical eye, looking at every person and putting them on a scale of one to 10. And that’s just not how I think.”

Since I already knew I was having a bad hair day, I didn’t bother asking how I looked. So my first question for the man who never misses a red-carpet event was, “When do you sleep?”
“That’s a good question,” says Manuel, who in addition to his Canada’s Next Top Model gig, always seems to have several other fashion-police-type TV projects on the go at once. “My managers and agents laugh at me when they see emails from me at three in the morning. They’re like, ‘Why aren’t you sleeping?’ ”
But despite his obvious lack of free time, when Manuel decided to head up his own label, he wasn’t about to do it in name only.
“I am involved in everything, soup to nuts,” says Manuel who, if I’m not mistaken, has the brightest teeth and most immaculately groomed eyebrows in the world. “I didn’t want to just be a face of a brand. I wanted to work on a brand—that was important to me.

So I’m at the fitting and I’m talking to the models and they’re not used to that,” continues the hands-on creative director. “I want to know what’s working, what’s not working before we do the final patterns for production. I literally chalk and move pins and move seams, and my pattern drafters are freaked out by that because most people aren’t that involved. They might just sit back and say, ‘Oh, I do like this. I don’t like that.’ But I’m very much sweating in the trenches.”
One of the first things he designed for his debut collection was a classic, fully lined, slightly stretchy power suit that you can get in black or white. The jacket goes for $79.99 and the pants cost $49.99.
“It was really important to me to have a power suit,” says Manuel. “I wanted to address the working woman’s needs and even the mom on the go. And what’s great about this is we sell it as separates, so you can just get the blazer and dress it down with jeans and shirt or a beaded top, or you wear it together as a suit. And it has a flared-leg trouser, which is universally flattering, because not everyone can wear the skinny.”
Another standout is the mini, belted black shimmery trench coat ($89.88). Hands down, this piece boasts the most “attitude” in the entire collection. And speaking of, the question remains, why did Jay Manuel—a man with such awesomely flamboyant personal style—opt for a relatively conservative, department-store label? Well, according to the amiable Canadian done good, it was always his intention, so he makes no apologies.
“Some people were like, ‘I thought it was going to be more crazy and more high-fashion,’ but that just wouldn’t sell on a midlevel. And I do think it’s quite fashion-forward and I do think this collection has a lot of interest in it,” says Manuel, before shrugging his shoulders and warmly adding, “But that’s just my opinion.”
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