Fashion Fridays: Trinidad’s Anya Ayoung-Chee on ‘Project Runway’

Words by Jesse Serwer

Hard to admit to this, as a man, but last night I watched the Lifetime Channel. Alone. But I had good, manly, journalistic reasons. The object of my curiosity was Anya Ayoung Chee (AKA Anya de Rogue), the Trini beauty-queen-turned-designer competing on the new season of Project Runway, the second episode of which aired last night. The former Miss Trinidad & Tobago has been the subject of most of the hype surrounding the fashion-design show this year, due mainly to the existence of a sex tape depicting her in a threesome with her boyfriend and another woman. This news is old to Trinis: it was a major controversy in T&T and elsewhere in the West Indies when the tape first emerged in 2008. With Anya re-emerging as a designer with the label Anya de Rogue and appearing on a major US reality show, though, it was bound to re-emerge. Slightly less controversial is the fact, revealed in the first episode, that she only began sewing four months prior to the show’s taping. Host Heidi Klum explains in the second video below that her sense of style outweighs her lack of experience with a sewing machine. Check the other clip for a look inside Anya’s closet at her home in Trinidad and head over to the site for her line, Pilar by Anya, and decide for yourself.