Project Guest Bartender
Thought you knew Nick Verreos, you've never seen him like this
Way back in the spring of 2007, Heather Eubanks, San Diego Magazine’s former fashion guru, suggested we cover an August event at the W Hotel. A man named Nick Verreos was going to be doing a pre-launch for his new line of clothes (the main launch would happen in New York).
“Nick who?” I asked.
“Nick Verreos, from Project Runway.”
“What’s Project Runway?” I asked an intern with a background in fashion.
“It’s a show about aspiring designers—it’s all the buzz right now. Duh.”
“Who’s Nick Viralos?”
“You mean Verreos?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s only like the hottest name in fashion.”
“Well, he’s pre-launching his new line at the W.”
“Can I cover it? Please. Pretty please.”
“I’d love to let you, but I already have T doing it.”
I didn’t think much more about it. T was going to do a writeup, and Heather assigned Lauren Raddack to photograph the event. Lauren and T talked, and I was sure the shoot was as good as in the books.
By late September, it was evident things weren’t so kosher. Raddack had long since handed in dozens of great shots from the event—and T had fallen off the face of the earth. She didn’t return phone calls or e-mails. In fact, the worst had happened. She allowed the legend of Nick Verreos to crawl into her head; how could she, a budding fashion writer, even try to tell the story of this shooting star and Hollywood celebrity, Nick Verreos?
By November, I knew T—still AWOL—was out of the picture. So I called the people at Limelight Communications, which had publicized the event. One of the women there told me not to fret—she was at the event, and she’d write up a piece to go with Raddack’s great photo layout. I breathed a sigh of relief.
By mid-December, it was obvious Limelight had dropped the ball as well. At that point, I thought maybe the pagan god of journalism was trying to tell me something. Maybe Verreos was cursed? I considered hiring a private investigator to have him looked into—or maybe a seeress to tell me what dark and foreboding secret he was hiding.
Shortly thereafter, I tracked Verreos down by phone. I was expecting a pompous socialite who would be abhorred by my obvious lack of sophistication in all things fashion—or perhaps an icy and satanic deep-breathed admonishment to stay away from this new Faust. What I got was a fun and easy-going guy who seemed amused by (and thankful for) the events of the past couple of years, a guy I might have just as easily had a beer with at the bar at the W Hotel. We talked for about 20 minutes, and I recorded the conversation. And then life intervened, with a thousand hellish chores and demands on my time. That digitally encrypted conversation sat on my computer for weeks.
Then along came Giselle Domdom, the newest addition to the San Diego Magazine editorial team, and a highly touted whiz with all things multimedia. I handed over 20 minutes of audio and dozens of pictures to her, and within a week she handed back three minutes of a clean slide show. Verreos has since become the fashion spokesman for an online site and continues to work at his alma mater, the Fashion Institute for Design and Merchandise in Los Angeles (an institute with a branch in San Diego). T is still AWOL, and anybody with information pertaining to her whereabouts should e-mail the magazine immediately.
For more on Verreos, go to nikolaki.uber.com.
Click here to view the video interview with Nick Verreos
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