“Bad taste kills,” scrawled flamboyant fashionista Carson Kressley on a door during a recent episode of “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.”
Which begs the question: Can it really be cured?
Since its July debut on Bravo, “Queer Eye” has plied makeovers on many style-challenged straight men. Pulling up in their signature black Suburban, the show’s Fab 5 assess their subject’s degree of hetero cluelessness, then transform him and his home.
Then, watching on closed-circuit television from a luxurious penthouse, the hip quintet assess the newly metamorphosed metrosexual, clinking martini glasses over every artfully “joojed” sleeve, groaning in unison at every grooming faux pas. (Remember, boys — and, maybe, girls: Shave with facial hair, not against it!)
But what happens to the “Queer Eye” Cinderfellas once their fairy godmothers have left the building? Do they just lapse back into a fog of untrimmed nose hair, ossified Chinese takeout and Old Spice? Is it really possible to turn a slob into a style savant — and make it stick?
Adam Zalta
If anyone makes a case against “Queer Eye” recidivism, it’s Adam Zalta, 39-year-old father of three and star of the episode, “A Great Mess in Great Neck.”
“It’s a Toys ‘R’ Us crack den!” exclaimed interior designer Thom Filicia when he first glimpsed the family’s toy-strewn living room. In the kitchen and foyer, the tile floors were exfoliating. And the storage spaces were so crammed that the term “walk-in closet” was pretty much a misnomer.
“It’s the House of Horrors,” offered Zalta’s mother helpfully.
As for her son, an extremely likable computer-business owner, he needed a little sprucing up of his own. Zalta got his hair cut about every solstice and shaved in the car with an electric razor once a week. And let’s not even get into the ear hair or the uni-brow.
Then the Fab 5 descended on the tousled North Shore home in New York, stuffing all the toys into the basement, redoing the red-carpeted living room and artfully repainting the built-in bookshelves to showcase the family’s photos and objects.
The kitchen floor was patched with tiles borrowed from under the refrigerator, and tone-on-tone corkboard tiles covered the “Where the Wild Things Are” wallpaper in the kitchen.
Six months after the last echoes of clinking Cosmopolitans and “Cheers, Queers” left this leafy Great Neck neighborhood, Zalta is still stylin’. “I go pink, I go green, I even go stripes now,” beams Zalta, at the moment decked out in a pink Polo oxford shirt. He has gotten his hair cut a whopping four times since the show taped in late March, although, admittedly, he hasn’t returned to the Fab 5-approved salon each time: “I still go to my guy a couple of times in between, because I think a $50 haircut is too steep.”
Ditto for waxing his ears and eyebrows: He enlists his wife, Karen, 35, for the touch-up work, with the plan to return to the salon for a professional job three times a year.
“They opened my eyes,” he says affectionately of his style mentors. “They didn’t hold back. The show showed me how sloppy I was — and you don’t realize how bad you are until you see yourself on TV.”
Reluctant to let the momentum fade, Zalta recently hired a personal trainer and embarked on a nutrition and workout regimen, dropping almost 10 pounds so far.
To keep the Fab 5’s handiwork intact, “no one’s allowed in the living room — only adults,” says Zalta, flopping down on his favorite piece of furniture, the “chofa” — a cross between a chair and sofa.
With the exception of a little backsliding in the shaving department — Zalta might go three days without lathering up — “95 percent of the stuff,” he concludes, “we’ve kept up.” (Among the 5 percent: the kosher foie-gras mousse, which everyone pretty much hated, including the Zaltas’ 6-year-old, who threw it up.)
And social pressure ensures at least a minimal adherence to Fab 5 standards: People Zalta has never met ask mutual friends to drive them over to see the living room.
Vincent Taylor
Another “Queer Eye” alum, Vincent Taylor of the Bronx (Episode No. 106), who gets stopped on the street a minimum of three times a day, says public scrutiny keeps him on his toes too. “I used to go to Pathmark at 2 in the morning and throw on anything,” says Taylor, who is a casting director and studio manager. “Now I have to shave and iron my shirt.”
Pre-“Queer Eye,” Taylor’s big problem was having more stuff than his Co-Op City apartment could accommodate. So the Fab 5 spirited off all the excess to a storage center.
“A lot of it we didn’t need,” Taylor admits, adding that he and his wife threw out 45 bags of rejects from storage once their free three-month rental expired. Some of the things he couldn’t part with — like the sound equipment parked on a handtruck in the corner of the master bedroom — have re-infiltrated. (“He likes clutter,” confides wife, Vivia, conspiratorially.) And a busy life with two precocious kids — Brandon, 8, and Brianca, 4 — means that the kitchen table might be strewn with papers and the bathroom shelves outfitted with non-approved grooming products. But the Fab 5’s sleek design and fashion tips have stuck — largely because they work, Taylor says.
“Smell . . . caffeine and peppermint,” he says, proffering his bottle of Rejuvenating Body Wash and noting with concern that it’s almost depleted. Taylor is now pretty much addicted to his “Queer Eye” skin regimen, adding that strangers ask him about the products all the time. And being the only man of color among the show’s makeovers has made him a bit of a trailblazer.
“I get stopped by a lot of black women on the street who say their husbands are going to spas now because I did on the show,” he says, recalling the singer who visited him for a studio session. “She said, `Most African-American men thought it was very feminine to go to a salon until you did that facial.’ It was like I justified it.”
Like Zalta, Taylor likes every piece of clothing that Kressley selected for him. (And, like all the furniture, the wardrobe was free.) “One of my favorite pieces of clothing they got me has sparkles on it,” he says, retreating to the bedroom to produce a pair of flocked jeans and a purple-and-blue iridescent shirt. But like his Great Neck counterpart, he finds the price tags — a cool $200 each — more than he’s willing to pay for apparel.
Tom Kaden
When it comes to toeing the well-manicured “Queer Eye” line, both Zalta and Taylor have been maintaining a little more smoothly than Tom Kaden of Episode No. 103, whose messy Long Beach, N.Y., house prompted Kressley to request “a Ritalin smoothie.” Pizza boxes, half-eaten bowls of cereal and snack-food wrappers littered the floor, and the living room’s focal point was a boomerang over the window.
Kaden, 30, has the distinction of being the only “Queer Eye” graduate to survive with long hair intact — “Jesus meets Howard Stern,” one of the Fab 5 mused — requiring only a trim and some layers to add volume. But he hasn’t cut it since the show taped in April. And while Kressley addressed his “shoe drought” by lugging in suede Birkenstocks and driving mocs, Kaden retrieved his favorite pair of black boots from the back yard, where they had been tossed out and rained on for weeks.
Working with the Fab 5 required learning a whole new vocabulary, he says. “They asked me where my products were. I was like, `What’s a product?'” After getting “yelled at for using Head & Shoulders — I didn’t know that was a bad thing,” he has settled into using the Robert Kree products recommended by Douglas, who wisely taped numbers under the three bottles in anticipation of the fact that Kaden wouldn’t know a molding paste from a pomade.
As for the house, “it goes through peaks and valleys, but it still looks good when we have people over,” says Kaden, wearing a Diesel shirt that he bought for himself. After six months, the space isn’t “Queer Eye” perfect, with piles of CDs in the corner and excess mail stuffed on the once-artfully arranged living-room shelves. But helping to maintain order is girlfriend Lisa, whom Kaden endearingly invited to move in at episode’s end via a to-do list on the kitchen chalkboard — “Eggs/Ravioli/Lisa, will you move in?/Bread” — which he has yet to erase.
“`Need’ is a strong word,” he says, reflecting on how badly he required the makeover. “I could have gone on without it. But it did help.” Staying presentable “is a lot of work,” he concedes, “and I might lapse here and there, but I would be disappointed if I didn’t keep it up.”
Indeed, all the “Queer Eye” alumni now find themselves facing the same challenge going forward — not only to maintain what the Fab 5 have created, but to build on from there.
Zalta, with his new health regimen and home-improvement projects, is already off to a strong start.
While it’s tempting to keep the living room an untouched shrine, new elements have crept in, including a display of family pictures. A new book sits on the coffee table in the living room: “Kosher Sex,” the title reads.
The Fab 5 would doubtless approve.
