Recap: Project Runway – When Accessory Walls Attack

Four way monkey

Hola Gasmii!!! I hope you had a very safe and very fun Labor Day weekend. MrWallace and I went boating and brain cell hunting. We ended up bagging quite a few, which is quite a feat considering they are nearing endangered status at this point.

Last week was a classic PR standby of Designing Women For Real. Or Designing for Real Women. Some were dumpy, some were frumpy and some were bigger than a sample size 2. Quelle  horreur! Blorpheus finally showed he can be hip and on-trend by being a gigantic rippling bully to his size 14 (gasp!) client. He was duly ostracized by fellow designers and chastised by judges, but it was Urkel that went home for pleasing his client. Too bad she had terrible taste and he made a dress that looked cheap and made the wearer look cheap as well. We really could have used Julia Sugarbaker to talk some sense into that episode now that I think of it.

Unibrow won his first challenge when he turned an asian boy into an asian girl by reading her 50 Shades of Grey, which was a pretty neat trick.

A Patchwork Grey

The morning grumbling at Atlas is about how much they fake-miss Urkel who might not have uttered a single word during the competition. Sonjia and Dreads are dying to have more “silk chiffonies” sent home; Sonjia feels the fabulous and frilly fashion coming from Skunk and Blorpheus are things men want women to wear in some gay Gone With the Wind fantasy instead of clothes women feel confident and beautiful in. She has a point but I feel there may be more of an interpersonal conflict dynamic at work here. Lord knows I would lose my mind trapped in a house with that much estrogen.

Don’t forget to rouge in some cleavage

At least we have Elena and Dreads to bring in a guy’s perspective. Oh and the ex-ballroom dancer.

How a man gets dressed after his deodorant shower

The group meets up with Heidi at the runway. She has decided two weeks running of delivering useful information is her limit so she says “hi”, makes fun of how tired and wrinkled her show has made this batch of 20-somethings and sends them off to an address on 5th Avenue to meet Tim Gunn.

“I got my frown lines from a seal”

The designers arrive at the flagship Lord & Taylor store and we are treated to a montage of the best soundbytes the contestants can come up with about the sponsor. Apparently Lord & Taylor is no longer just for old ladies.

“These mannequins are just coming into their own, in a sense”

There are 9 dresses, each designed by a previous PR winner and the challenge will be to fill out the collection with a 10th cocktail dress. At first I thought I missed that every season has had a L&T challenge, but it turns out this is a new idea to sell an exclusive “10th Anniversary Project Runway Line”. So the winner will have a manufactured look that will be sold in the Manhattan flagship store, online and will be a little doggy in the window. Very prestigious! They all work very hard to pretend to care and make L&T relevant. I think it’s slightly amusing that they are celebrating 10 years of PR when I’m pretty sure L&T weren’t sponsors until more recently. The other element of the challenge is to make sure to keep the design cheap enough to manufacature at a profit and also boring enough to appeal to women who consider blue rinses a fashion statement.

I’m kind of wishing we got bonus footage of the past winners designing. I bet Jay McCarroll was cursing up a storm at trying to make something for the geriactric set.

I’ve heard of ghost writers

Dmitry and Christopher are happy to have something in their wheelhouse and dive into the challenge. I’m sure Blorpheus said something obnoxious about this being a perfect time to pleat his way to glory, but as a commenter pointed out, he is not getting a lot of air time after he farted and sharted all over the workroom last episode. Editors must have done some damage control after the Fatties Anonymous backlash.

On the other end of the confidence spectrum, Elena thinks she will have a hard time shoe-horning a football player into the lineup.

Her makeup is starting to represent the clown spectrum

The designers get cracking and verbally masturbate to the thought of strange women walking around naked under whatever crap they can  throw together in 12 hours. I can’t tell if they are really as excited as they say or realize that sucking up to the sponsor will guarantee more camera time. Elena still doesn’t know what to design and Christopher is confident that he can stand out by designing a gown instead of a cocktail dress. Skunk has his usual level of modesty in thinking he can design a dress that will turn the whole rest of the collection cohesive. Elena seems to think he is probably right and backhand compliments him that the challenges have been custom made for his aesTETic so far.

Blorpheus tells us he has an edge (presumably somewhere under all the rolls) having worked in production and manufacturing before.Since she’s not allowed to make trousers, Dreads just stands around and plays the pencil harmonica.

“I got the ‘Can’t-Make-a-Jumper-Goddamnit Blues’”

Both Sonjia and Blorpheus agree but state their points as insultingly as possible – Sonjia finds the men to be girly and over the top flamboyant while Blorpheus calls men stronger designers and women more practicalf (read: pedestrian). I would expect only a gay man to call women overly practical. They both sound like sexist assholes though so at least that is an area of equal opportunity!

Zombie chiffonie impression

Everyone straps on a diaper for Tim Gunn’s diarrhea-inducing Tour de Criticism. Skunk is worried that his look has gone matador and L&T already has a whole Pamplona section. Dmitry is also unimpressed and deadpans another personal Valentine to me.

“Most of his dresses look… puh-retty… bad”

Tim proves he’s still in the Hot Tub Crew too by telling Dreads her dress is looking a little Joan of Arc. Unfortunately Dreads has immersed  fully into the girls vs. boys game and takes that as a compliment. Unfortunately I’m pretty sure Joan was burned by an angry mob for wearing fugly clothes with box pleats though.

Joan and horse by Elena

Tim quickly gives Unibrow props for a good design and thinking about what the wholesale price is to ensure he fits into the L&T budget. I think he just wants to get away from the stink of garbage and three day old McMuffin wrappers though.

Elena needs some advice on how to keep her detailing minimized to drop the cost. Unfortunately Tim’s cold hard truth machine is doubtful that her design is producible on a mass scale. This is not the news the rugged Ukranian survivalist wants so she bursts into tears.

Only the strong survive in the Ukraine. Until they get moderately bad news

Tim once again explains the point of the challenge – that thinking about how to deliver her vision in a format that fits the parameters is a design exercise she should be able to think through.

“Is it at all possible for you people to listen the first time I tell you something inherently obvious?”

Elena listens carefully and recalibrates her design interviews that she has spent years and years perfecting her particular brand of giant insect clothes and doesn’t get why her superiority is not being rewarded by the judges. Skunk continues his newly developed pattern of kindness to women by encouraging our little wolf puppy to stay strong and trust her skills. If he was a real friend he would help her do her makeup in the morning though.

At least get her to step slowly away from the fake eyelashes

Dmitry gets a nod from Tim, as does Christopher. Next we are not shocked to find Blorpheus has been a-pleating. Tim lets it go, but not only am I tired of this one way monkey, but this time the pleating has a somewhat sinister feel. As one commenter already likened it to Sauron’s eye, I’m not the only one who thinks a boob-level swirling black vortex is less than marketable.

“If I could please get a model that is just a torso instead of these giant leggy fatties”

Tara Reid is in trouble because she needs a material with stiffness to it, but has an uncooperative fabric. She might find something else in the workroom but at this point she could really only borrow silk chiffon from the swirling twirling male designers in the room. Basically there isn’t a stiffy in sight.

The models come in to panic everyone further and the girls are fast falling behind. Tara is re-cutting an entirely new dress, Sonjia is in the weeds, Dreads is quietly failing and of course Elena is worried that she is too amazing for Lord & Taylor and the judges in general. To be fair, she is probably right but it isn’t exactly the highest bar.

The next day we have final touches in the workroom. Christopher suddenly proves he is the same person as Skunk but has been getting a kinder edit all this time when he calls Elena’s dress the same as her personality: “trying to be sweet, but then, crazy bitch”. He asks who puts a harness on a babydoll dress and says he doesn’t get it and doesn’t want to. Very encouraging of you, please try writing motivational greeting cards!

Plaid shirt? Neck beard? Multi-colored pompadour? I smell a skunk