The young people he works with have often endured a tremendous amount of trauma, Neasloney points out, but they also look for joy and ways to shine as their truest selves. “It’s difficult for me to separate myself from this organization because I’m so invested in the mission,” he says. The Ali Forney Center was founded in 2002 and helps hundreds of LGBTQ+ young people a year - and Neasloney stresses that, even with his newfound notoriety, he’s not giving up his day job any time soon. (Per the Human Rights Campaign, LGBTQ+ young people are 120 percent more at risk to become homeless than their straight, cisgender peers.) He was killed in Harlem in 1997, at the age of 22. The Ali Forney Center was named after someone from the very community the Center seeks to help: Forney, a gender noncomforming Black teenager, spent the latter part of his life advocating for LGBTQ+ homeless teens. Their struggles, he points out, are “really life-or-death.” Rather than attempting to shift the narrative in his favor, he’s trying to funnel the interest, and the outrage, to help the young people with whom the Ali Forney Center works. “Regardless of if I respond or if I don’t respond, people are going to find the meaning they want to find in what the moment was on the show,” he says. While he says he initially posed the question because he felt like he could be himself around the Runway judges, viewers have been divided about its intent.
“The message on the shirts really speaks for itself, however people take that message,” he notes. They sold out within a day 50 percent of the proceeds go to the Ali Forney Center. The shirts were available in sizes up to 2XL, though when a few people DMed him about 3XL options, Neasloney fulfilled those asks as well. Instead, he focused on the design, which featured his infamous question spaced out in white script on a black tee: One shirt featured one word per line and another resembled a vision test. He tells MTV News that the garment is “not my specialty - I do luxury womenswear and luggage, and for the past year I’ve been primarily a bespoke designer.” Neasloney concedes that he wasn’t trying to reinvent one of the most ubiquitous articles of clothing.
(For her part, Kloss wished him “all the best” on Twitter.) The clip was viewed millions of times on Twitter alone, and it was a “no-brainer” for Neasloney, who works on events and communications at the Ali Forney Center, to redirect the attention for good.Įnter the tee shirts, which he unveiled last week on Instagram. Neasloney was eliminated from the competition later that episode and has since doubled down that he has “a lot of respect” for Kloss - the quip was born out of feeling a sense of friendliness with the judges, who also include Elle editor in chief Nina Garcia and More Than Enough author and former Teen Vogue editor in chief Elaine Welteroth. But social media read even more into the line, give that Joshua's brother is Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and one of his top advisors. The garment’s message? “Not even to dinner with the Kushners?” - the very question that earned the 29-year-old instant digital notoriety when he posed it to Project Runway judge Karlie Kloss on an episode that aired January 2.Ĭontestants on the rebooted hit show had been tasked with using clothing from a Goodwill to make an outfit Kloss could wear to a CFDA event in Paris Neasloney’s navy skirt and white halter top combo wasn’t impressive enough for the judges, including the luxury womenswear designer Brandon Maxwell, who said he couldn’t see the model wearing the outfit “anywhere.” That’s when Neasloney referenced Kloss’s husband - she’s married to tech investor Joshua Kushner. But he was already focused on designing his newest project: A $35 tee shirt, with proceeds from its sale directed in part to the Ali Forney Center, a nonprofit based in New York dedicated to supporting LGBTQ+ homeless youth. When Tyler Neasloney went viral, his social media mentions were impossible to keep up with.
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