Adam Taylor/Lifetime
Shan Keith Oliver flashed a 1,000-watt smile backstage at the Los Angeles Theater. His grin, which viewers of Project Runway: Under the Gunn have gotten used to seeing week after week, was especially radiant tonight as he watched his collection strut down the runway of the Under the Gunn finale.
The designer, born and bred in St. Louis, had stitched, sewn and hemmed his way through 13 weeks of off-kilter couture challenges. He had even won three of them. Now, this was his moment.
But it’s a moment that Oliver didn’t think he would ever have. After auditioning for Project Runway four times, he was ready to throw in the sartorial towel. It was a process that took years. Oliver had been auditioning on-and-off since the show’s second season, which aired in 2005. He would show his portfolio, travel to Chicago for interviews, and exchange countless emails, only to hear last-minute that he didn’t make the show’s final cut.
Last year, he got an email that Project Runway was auditioning…again. “When I first got the email, I deleted it,” Oliver says. He wanted to put the experience behind him and keep designing on his own. “Then I went back and looked at it. I decided to try one more time.”
For his swansong audition, the 33-year-old designer went all in. He decided he wasn’t going to buy any new fabric, but simply work with the materials he had in his studio. The father of three was getting his daughter ready for school when inspiration struck. “My daughter goes to a Catholic school, so she has a uniform,” Oliver says. “I started thinking, if she could design her own uniform, what would it look like? What would it look like when she got older?” So he stitched a plaid gown fit for a grown woman with an eye for fashion. And what did the judges think? “They loved it,” he says.
Unlike some of his fellow Under the Gunn competitors, Oliver did not attend design school, nor has he ever had a formal sewing lesson. “Being a designer has always been in me,” he says. Oliver’s mother, who made her children’s clothes, first exposed him to sewing and design. He would watch her sew, then sneak in time on her sewing machine when no one was around. He read books on sewing and taught himself the basics.
“I didn’t want anyone to know I was sewing,” Oliver says. “But eventually, it got to the point where I had so many questions, I had to ask my mom for help.” His mother, who thought his sisters had been stitching when she wasn’t looking, was happy to teach him. One of the first pieces he designed was a mismatched sweater. He cut up a brown sweater and a tan sweater and sewed the two together.
Oliver’s mix-and-match aesthetic reappeared in his Under the Gunn finale collection, in which he mixed leather and lace for a “hard and soft” combination. Oliver presented his five-look collection, which was designed in only three days, to Heidi Klum and Neil Patrick Harris, along with Under the Gunn’s other judges and a packed crowd at the Los Angeles Theater. Although he didn’t win the grand prize, Oliver is looking to get back behind the sewing machine after wrapping up his time on the show. “I’m praying for an opportunity for my brand to become global. That’s the number one question: What’s next?"
