Tyler Breeze talks about the origins of the Fashion Files, Vince McMahon’s hilarious initial reaction, and how the WWE series accidentally ended.
Breezango, the team of Tyler Breeze and Fandango, was a comedic bright spot on SmackDown in 2017. However, at one point, that series wasn’t going to get past one episode.
WWE Superstar Tyler Breeze was a recent guest on Fightful’s In The Weeds. When asked about the story of Vince McMahon not getting the Fashion Files but becoming more hands-on with it once it went viral on social media, Breeze said the story is close, but revealed that McMahon was never hands-on with the Fashion Files at all.
“It’s close,” Tyler Breeze began. “So he never actually had hands on, ever. Which I’ll go more in-depth on that. Obviously, I knew when I got called up that it was going to be a hit or miss, like it was, Vince is either going to love me or he’s going to hate me. And obviously, in a record amount of time, he did not like what I was doing. So then it was just a natural writing on the wall where I went, ‘Yeah, he’s going to tag me and Dango up at some point.’
“And me and Dango were cool, but we weren’t looking to be a tag team or anything else. Then all of a sudden they tagged us up. And we were essentially just supposed to be the other guys to Goldust and Truth, and they were supposed to be the funny ones, and we were just supposed to be the butt of the joke and whatever.”
Tyler Breeze didn’t expect his tag team with Fandango to take off like it did
Much to Breeze’s surprise, the tag team with Fandango took off with the fans as the duo clicked pretty good. Despite that, Vince McMahon still wasn’t doing much with them. So Breeze decided to take matters into his own hands and start a WWE.com web series.
“Well, I guess what ended up happening was we ended up clicking pretty good, and we ended up being entertaining,” Tyler Breeze continued. “And so they went, ‘Okay, we can do more with these guys.’ But then it never really came to fruition. It was kind of just like, eh, we’re around, but we’re not really doing anything. And it was very clear that they weren’t about to all of a sudden make things happen.
“So knowing what I did about WWE and just wrestling in general, where if a couple months go by and you’re not really doing much, you should probably kick yourself in the ass and get to doing something. So we have a digital media team, or a social media team, or a dot com team, or whatever you want to call them.
“They’re there, and they have cameras all the time, and people just don’t use them. So I went, ‘Hey, I’m gonna write a couple things and see what we can do.’ And I kind of wrote like a three or four-episode skit of me and Dango slowly turning into the Fashion Police. And we just got dot com to film them.
“So I did like two or three, and then we did the last one, where we’re finally cops. And we did like a good cop, bad cop with Billy Kidman, and it was hilarious. I was laughing my head off because Dango is so funny, and I was laughing my head off, and we just put it out. And we’re showing that there’s something if they want to do it.
From WWE.com to SmackDown
The WWE.com series caught the attention of the head writer of SmackDown at the time, who brought the series to the blue brand. But Vince McMahon’s initial reaction to the vingette wasn’t a good one, and it seemed its run on SmackDown would be dead on arrival.
“And it’s kind of exactly what happened,” Tyler Breeze continued. “The writer of SmackDown, the head writer at the time, saw it, and he went, ‘Why isn’t this on SmackDown?’ And I went, ‘I don’t know. You write SmackDown, so like, put it on there.’ The next week, they wrote the first episode of the Fashion Files and put us on there. And it was one of those ones where they wrote, it was hilarious.
“We were in the writers’ room, so everybody’s sitting there, we’re filming this one, and they’re all sitting right there, and as soon as they said cut, the entire room broke out laughing. And we went, ‘Oh, man, this could be really good.’ And so they aired it on the show; it did pretty well, whatever. And Vince went, ‘What is THAT? Why are we putting this on TV?’ And so everyone was like, oh, okay. We won’t do that again.
Vince McMahon didn’t get the Fashion Files
Despite Vince McMahon not understanding the Fashion Files, the social media numbers for the segment spoke for themselves. So much so that McMahon stepped aside and allowed the creative team to continue the series.
“So then, I guess, in the meetings they have, they talk about social media numbers and stuff like that,” Tyler Breeze continued. “And they went, ‘Okay, so, like, how did social media do last week?’ And this was going into the next week. And they went, ‘Okay, well, our number one trending thing was the Fashion Files.’ And Vince was like, ‘What? We had Randy Orton on the show and all these other things. And Fashion Files was number one?’
“And they went, yeah. He goes, ‘Okay, book it again, I guess.’ So then they booked it again, and all of a sudden it was number one again. And he went, ‘I don’t get it. Just keep doing it, I guess.’ So whenever they would even go over the show, they would get to the Fashion Files part, and they would go, ‘Do you want to go over it?’
“And he would go, ‘Nope. Just do whatever.’ And it was really funny because the writers at the time told us, they went, ‘This is like, unheard of because Vince usually wants to know everything about everything. He’s kind of leaving us on an island on our own to just write whatever we want. And he’s not asking questions. He’s not questioning it. He’s just going, whatever, people are liking it, so keep doing it.’
“So they were having a blast writing all this crazy stuff, as you saw, where, like, the Twin Peaks episode came out and everything else. And they loved it because it was just very rarely do you get to write whatever you want. And so, I think it ended up being, like, eight months. It was just doing so well on socials that they just kept writing it, and we kept doing it.”
How the Fashion Files seemingly got canceled by accident
“And to this day, I think it got canceled by accident because there was a pay-per-view coming up, and we weren’t booked on it, but they had a Fashion Files. So Vince said, ‘Why do we have one? Like, why are we doing this? Because they don’t have a match on the pay-per-view, so why are we doing it?’ And I think all the writers freaked out, and they went, oh God, he hates it. Never do it again. Then we never did another one after that. And that was the end of it.
“And I was pretty sure it was just a mistake. I’m pretty sure he just said don’t do it before a pay-per-view where they’re not wrestling. But it was wild, because in that eight months, Tyson Kidd, of all people, he’ll talk about it, where he’s, like, ‘I’ve never seen anything like it. Where it’s a pre-tape, it’s a vignette. It’s something that the fans in the arena, they just watch it on the screen. But when you see the Fashion Files come up, they give a clap, like they’re about to watch a play. And then when it ends, they applaud. I’ve never seen anything like it.’
“And it’s by far the most reactions that we’ve ever gotten, me and Dango together. And it worked. It was wild, man. It was a wild eight-month thing that happened because of social media. And that is it. If it wasn’t for that, it would have been dead after one episode.”
Day One is…H?
The Fashion Files made its SmackDown debut in May of 2017. You can check out the original episode in the embedded video below:
READ MORE: Former WWE Star Claims They Quit The Company Due To Bullying
What do you make of Tyler Breeze’s comments? Did you enjoy the Fashion Files run on WWE SmackDown? Are you surprised that Vince McMahon allowed this series to continue despite not understanding it? Let us know your thoughts by sounding off in the comments section below.
If you use any of these quotes, please credit Fightful’s In The Weeds with a link to this article for the transcription.
