PROJECT RUNWAY Season 12
Episode 7
I’m immensely sorry I couldn’t be with you all last week as you witnessed His Royal Highness, The Duke Of Gunn, bestow his one and only save onto the (unfairly eliminated) Justin, thereby sending him back to the mystery land of foaming vaginas made out of a ripped up parachute. But I am back, and Justin is back, and everyone I’m sure is very grateful. (Except my mother. She keeps telling me to “stop with that blooging and do something useful with your time!” Ladies and gentlemen: blooging.)
Before everyone has a chance to catch their breath and process what the hell just happened, Heidi is prancing about in a pair of super hot gold gladiator heels and mispronouncing “Marie Claire,” which somehow Dom works out to mean this week’s challenge will be inspired by shoes. “I hope this is the hardest challenge because I have immunity,” says a blunt Alexandria – the irony of the whole thing being that, compared to making clothes out of garbage or rests of food, working to simply match a pair of shoes seems like a welcome reprieve.
The shoe selection process is quite entertaining: each designer is given a buzzer button, and must answer fashion trivia questions in order to pick their favored pair. The questions – no doubt put together by a Lifetime intern after a quick Wikipedia search – ranged from basic to extremely basic, which of course meant Miranda struggled since her specialty is…..wallpaper. Wonderful. Look for her to do really well on Project My Bedroom Wall. The shoes, though – from boring ballerina flats to dominatrix thigh-highs, down to a bizarre red-and-yellow plastic piece that came without a sole and wouldn’t be amiss on the feet of some Lady Gaga-esque torturer of our eyes, whoever picked them was going for variety – which proves interesting when Alexander and Miranda, with drastically different pairs of shoes, somehow end up purchasing the same plaid fabric. Oops.
TIMSULTATIONS! In an effort to make up for being too kind last week, Tim begins his rounds of deliciously biting commentary by insulting the whole room: “this is the quietest work room in Project Runway history!” he sneers. Well, then. Onto the fun! “It’s looking a bit dated,” he comments on Ken’s poofy black doll costume. “Where’s she going in it?” he asks of Bradon’s cascading “boiling” dress – a horrifying cross between a Salvador Dali painting and a Wal-Mart bag that sat too long on a hot stove. (“It’s such a mess. It’s hideous,” comments the increasingly bitchier Jeremy in his Henry Higgins cadence.) “I look at this and I see Kate Middleton,” he comments on Helen’s sleek black two-piece, “but I then I put [her planned embellishments] on, and it’s her mother in law.” This is probably a good time to begin my TIM GUN FOR AMERICAN IDOL 2013 JUDGE campaign. He’d be amazingly aloof, underhandedly bitchy, and nobody else wants the job anyway. Write to your local Fox afilliate. Demand it. Breathe it. Own it.
THE RUNWAY! I hate to admit it in writing because he’s a megalomaniac who probably searches out compliments paid to him on the internet, but Ken had my favorite look of the week: a sleek, defined silhouette that paired well with his chosen shoe and seemed wearable outside of the runway’s parameters. Elsewhere, it’s curious that Alexander and Miranda not only chose to make similar garments out of the same plaid fabric, but that their tops were also the same color – except Alexander handily won the plaid-pants-off because Miranda’s creation was not fashion as much as it was a cardboard cutout of a strawberry shortcake frozen dessert. She, of course, lands in the bottom, along with Bradon’s matronly swing dancer dress, and Jeremy’s garment – a high-boots and sweater combination that had the judges working their noggins to come up with different ways to say his model looked like a prostitute. (Zac Posen came the closest to actually saying it with his venomous “it verges on trampy.”)
The winner of the week turns out to be Helen – who made the most simple of the three black dresses that comprised the top looks – but who wowed the judges with her expert construction. The loser – finally – is Miranda, whose lack of artistic vision when it comes to things other than wallpaper finally catches up to her.
The actual loser, though, is perpetually depressed model Nastassia, who for the sixth week in a row got paired with a designer who stuck her in something terrible and ended up at the bottom. Could she catch a break? Is she, herself, an omen? Or will she kill herself out of anger/embarrassment/disappointment before we ever find out?
See you next week!
