T.V. Review: Project Runway @ 10 p.m. on Life Network
Unlike most reality shows and the spasms of guilt symptomatic of watching them, Project Runway is on the low end of the genre’s exploitation scale. Currently three episodes into its third season on the Life Network, the show selects twelve fashion designers who compete in a weekly design challenge to make it to the top three. Those lucky three get to show their collections at New York Fashion Week.
The crown jewel of the series, however, is not luminescent host Heidi Klum, or any of the designers, but Tim Gunn, official Project Runway mentor and Chair of the Department of Fashion Design at Parsons The New School for Design. Known by fans as the “Silver Fox,” the always impeccably-dressed Gunn gently but firmly critiques designs in progress with incredible diction and sublime taste in adjectives, until he can only tell designers to “Make it work” and “Carry on.” Gunn’s dignity, taste, and excellent posture put the show in a class of its own.
Watching the designers respond to the challenges and frantically try to construct garments under strict time and material restraints is simple, compelling television, but not usually as funny as the judging at the runway show, which concludes each episode. Judged by a including designer Michael Kors and the unapologetically bitchy Nina Garcia of Elle magazine, watching designers try to justify bizarre aesthetic choices or failures is the perfect palette-cleanser of schadenfreude to prepare for Klum’s “Auf”-ing of one contestant.
Although it’s still early in the season, some designers don’t live up to their portfolios—and Vincent Libretti’s arrival and continued presence are utterly confounding—the show does seem genuinely focused on talent. Project Runway is actually an avenue to success as a legitimate designer, unlike the Idol franchise, and has launched successful careers for its contestants, including Season One winner Jay Carroll.
Some of the challenges are slightly ridiculous, including the first challenge of the season, in which designers had to make a garment from materials in their apartment. It’s shocking what impressive work some designers can do under those constraints. This work can be “impressive” in a variety of ways, as Oklahoma pageant dress designer Kayne Gallaspie and the hapless, possibly stoned “squid without an ocean” Bradley Baumkircher regularly demonstrate.
Season Three has tried to introduce more interpersonal friction, but many of the more deluded contestants go home early, and as tensions rise later in the series, there’s still not much screen time for emotional melodrama with so much garment-making to do.
Since Project Runway is past its halfway point in the States, it’s easy to catch up to your American neighbours through file-sharing programs.
While not as aesthetically fascist or ego-destroying as What Not To Wear, Project Runway isn’t perfect either, particularly in its treatment of body image: later in the season, a thin model whose measurements cause problems for a designer is referred to as “zaftig,” and a challenge involving everyday women as models causes the designers a depressing amount of consternation.
But if you’re interested in fashion and silver-haired sages, Project Runway is a far more pleasant diversion than, let’s say, America’s Next Top Model.
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