Last week on Project Runway: Heidi product placements her children’s line of clothing, demonic baby dolls from the depths of perdition, Christopher and Sonjia win for making adorable itty bitty gender reinforcing outfits while Elena is sent to the Eastern Front… I mean home for making a baby rummage sale all in one outfit.
What will happen this week? Tune in below to find out.
Last week on Project Runway: the designers make costumes for the Rockettes, no word on whether Heidi will be guesting with them at showtime. Christopher wins with a prim yet sexy and slightly jingoistic ode to New York City, and Ven goes home for making… a mildly sparkly cut off mother of the bride dress. My heart goes pitter-pat for joy.
What will happen this week? Read on, my friends, to find out.
Last week on Project Runway: Designers are visited by their mommies and other people close to them so they can be well and truly emotionally frayed as they design their own fabrics. There’s far too much human plumbing in the workroom. Dmitry wins the day by creating an amazing jacket with floating panels to pop his print underneath, Gunnar is sent home for making a scary/depressing print and making a throwaway outfit with it. Ven is told that one more rose will get him axed… and I find myself praying he finds another way to work the dratted thing in.
What happened this week? Follow me to find out!
Last week on Project Runway, designers busk and craft for funds to make fashion. People actually buy the ugliest tee shirts in the world (crafted for you by Elena!), to the tune of hundreds of dollars. Sonjia wins with a jacket I want to snatch off the model before she can get it off the runway and out of my clutches while Alicia is sent home for failing to make something successful to go under Elena’s worst coat yet. Oh, and we learn that Ven can’t sew anything that doesn’t involve his alien roses.
Look out below to see what happened this week.
Last week on Project Runway: the Lord&Taylor challenge brought out the best in several designers, and the strange in others. Christopher won with a dress that three women in America have the figure and coloring simultaneously to pull off but that will look fabulous in a window, and… nobody is sent home. Not even Gunnar who designed a dress seventy-three million women in America already have in their closets and the rest have rejected as too ho-hum to wear.
What happened last night? Follow the bouncing cut line to find out.
So, darlings, last night’s Project Runway certainly had me on pin cushions and needles trying to figure out which way the judges would jump. I’m still not certain I get how they did. Nevertheless, I’ll tell you all about my take on the episode and see if I can figure it out as I go.
As per usual, I’m cutting so as not to spoil anyone, and because if I didn’t the whole review wouldn’t fit on the page.
You all know how I feel about Tim Gunn. He is totally my gay imaginary celebrity boyfriend and I long to feed him fresh-baked scones.
But I also enjoy reading his books. He’s got a breezy, opinionated flair for language and he knows his stuff, even when I disagree with him on how to interpret it.
Well, now he’s written Tim Gunn’s Fashion Bible: the Fascinating History of Everything in Your Closet.
Ever wondered what Queen Victoria’s corset has to do with what you’re wearing now? Tim can tell you. What togas then mean for you now? Tim is here to explain it. How the Sixties were the downfall of underwear? Well, my guess is that one is one of those issues where he and I would have a lively (albeit friendly) debate whilst dripping clotted cream in our excitement… but I’m still interested in his argument.
It’s available right now for pre-order on Amazon (release date September 11, just in case anyone is wondering what to get me for my birthday on the thirteenth) for just $16.46 (list price $28.00) and eligible for Super Saving free shipping on your purchase of $25.00 or more.
Oh, and I’d also like to note for my fellow Project Runway fans that in an article that ran on Racked National just yesterday, Tim called contestant Ven Budu ‘atrocious’ and let it be known that the editing in last week’s episode was actually flattering to Ven. Also, gird your loins, folks, he let slip that there’s going to be an upcoming challenge in his least favorite category that ‘will not disappoint you in terms of horrible.’
I’m just going to come right out and say this before we get started with this week’s Project Runway recap: All women are real women. Models may come from an amazingly restricted end of the gene pool, but they are real women. Everyday women in the street may not be models, but they deserve every chance to dress in ways that make them feel beautiful and comfortable. Any clothing designer who forgets either of these things makes us all suffer with his or her severe case of cranial rectosis.
And now, on with the show.
In this corner, the Bearded Battler from Blighty, William Morris!
And in this corner, perennial star of reality television, Tori Spelling!
Yeah, seems a little incongruous to me, too.
But that’s the death match New Yorker columnist Alexandra Lange pits against one another in her recent article Don’t Put a Bird On It: Saving “Craft” from Cuteness.
Lange finds Spelling’s current reality show, Craft Wars, an offense against William Morris’ leadership of the Arts and Crafts movement… oh, and Etsy is an anti-feminist horror because many of the crafters are women who make cute things.
I would posit that Craft Wars is to serious crafters (who still exist in large numbers across the country and across the world) what the funky craft projects published in Victorian women’s magazines are to the Arts and Crafts movement. In short, both ends of the spectrum have always existed side by side. Sure the average Victorian housewife didn’t have Beadazzlers and plastic mesh (although they did have something like Yankee Candles), but that hardly means every proposed – or even finished – home project was tasteful, useful, and not cute.
I would also posit that the worst aspect of Etsy isn’t the cute, it’s the plethora of buy and sell imported goods available that dilute its purpose of selling handmade items.
Am I a fan of Craft Wars? No. I’ve seen about half of a couple episodes and, well, it didn’t do that much for me. I hate the fact that there are builders who create the larger, sturdier bits while the contestants mostly decorate stuff with what the judges are pretty sure to say is nowhere near enough glitter.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t think there’s a place for something like it in the crafting world. I think my feelings were summed up best by commenter LGREYFORTWHITE, who said:
“I’m of two minds here: I had a parent who was a professional silver-and goldsmith. Family friends were all weavers, ceramicists, hand-printers, glas-blowers, metalsmiths working in all the differents media…. So, yes, I too recoil a bit when glueing pencils onto a window box is lumped into the ‘craft’ category. However, I have also witnessed acquaintances of mine start out stringing beads into nice earrings and necklaces, and become motivated to learn the full spectrum of jewellery-making techniques, or set about learning to make the glass beads by hand. So, starting off with something elementary may lead people to more engaging work. Not all of them will “graduate”, of course, but some will.”
And you know what? If even one of them does so because of watching an episode of Craft Wars, then it will have served a useful purpose.
It’s time once again to parse out reality… or what passes for it on Project Runway, the show where clearly nobody has ever seen the inside of an office not featured on a show involving Kardashians. Clearly nobody ever watched The Apprentice, or even The Office.
And if you don’t know where that rant came from, you might want to watch the episode before you read this… or you might want to just jump right in and read all the discussion now. Your choice.
