This Thursday the finale of the initially controversial Season 6 of Project Runway will be on my TV on the Lifetime Network, but I will be watching it not with eager anticipation as I have runway shows in the past, but merely out of devotion to the concept of the show and the inspiration and art that I've seen it is capable of harnessing. This season though, has indisputably disappointed me and all runway viewers with whom I've discussed it, and I hope that, as promised by Nina Garcia, Season 7 will have rectified the errors that have made this season so dull and uninspiring.To start, the most commonly noted shortcomings of this season have been the inconsistency of the judging panels and the lackluster results from challenges coming from the lackluster nature of the challenges themselves. Sensible explanations have been given for the issue of the judges but mostly the problem was the show's relocation to Los Angeles made it difficult for Michael Kors and Nina Garcia to regularly attend judging panels, as their primary businesses are located in New York. Frankly, I'm not sure why they moved the show in the first place. If we learned anything from the snooze-fest that was the 2008 VMA's, it's that things are always better in NY than in LA, and that goes for reality television both competition based and otherwise. Season 7's in NY, so check on that problem.
In terms of the challenges, to me, the only ones that demanded the exceptional creativity demonstrated in seasons past were the newspaper challenge and (MAYBE) the divorcee wedding dress challenge. Literally every other challenge could have been shortened to be, "Make a pretty dress," and then you through the Bob Mackie at them and tell them it has to be sequined and fabulously tacky, and you get that slick feathered black number that Carrol Hannah made, like, come on, to use the lexicon of the show, it felt a little safe for the challenge.
But that seemed to be what the producers and the judges were going for throughout the season. The designers who seemed to have a particularly innovative or experimental aesthetic were very quickly auf'ed and we were left with a bunch of vanilla collections you could most successfully market at Target.
Irina, Althea and Carol Hannah, what do they have in common? They're all designers who are going to Bryant Park who if cast in a different season never would have stood a chance. Irina at least gave the editors a storyline to work with by positioning her as the bitch. But that really got tired when you realized her bitchiness was generally harmless and reserved for the interview room. This feels a good place to transition from the mass market stylings of this season to the personalities and the judges' and editors' reactions to them.
Did anyone for a minute believe that there was any potential romance between Carol Hannah and "man's man" Logan? No. Didn't think so. Go out and change the tires on your pick-up man's man and stop making monstrously tasteless or inexpressibly bland looks that you somehow get away with even over more talented designers. Plus the fact that they played that up so much while having ignored homo-relationships in past seasons demonstrates the show's latent and perhaps unexpected heteronormativity.
Next thing, WHAT THE FUCK IS HEIDI'S BEEF WITH GORDANA?! Yeah, okay, what she made for the Christina Aguilera/Bob Mackie challenge was a bit of an embarrassment construction wise, but it was hardly the most mortifying of the season and did not warrant the berating she received from Frau Klum, plus the undercutting Gordana got when she was announced the winner of the divorcee challenge. Is it an ageism that makes Heidi harbor such resentment for Gordana? I don't know. But I enjoyed her perspective and appreciated her not beating us over the head with her humble upbringings a la Cry-stopher. Tom and Lorenzo at Project Rungay did a great interview with her you can read here. The episode where the judges' vendetta against Gordana was most apparent was in the final episode where they didn't even name a winner of the Getty Museum challenge, pretty clearly, because it would have been her but they couldn't justify awarding her with that and not sending her to Bryant Park. Whatever.
Their auf'ing of Gordana was one of several auf'ings that I was more than a little perturbed about. My fury has actually grown incrementally since their dismissal of Malvin, the soft-spoken, admittedly pretentious, but into conceptual andorogony New Yorker whose chicken egg was, truthfully, bizarre ad unflattering. But it only annoyed me so much because it was very evident at that point that Mitchell lacked the technical skill to succeed in the PR setting and was not watchable enough of a personality to justify their keeping him. I was also angered and saddened by their auf'ing of Epperson over pretty-boy man's man Logan, which was a poor decision I feel like, and perhaps again resultant from an ageist attitude, and I was really annoyed by their auf'ing of Ra'mon over Louise.
A lot of these annoyed me so much because of the aforementioned issue of the inconsistency on the judging panel. It puts the players at a clear disadvantage because it doesn't give them sufficient time to tailor their individual aesthetics to the judges' tastes, since those tastes are constantly changing, and it doesn't give them the benefit of the judges seeing week by week what the contestants are cumulatively capable of. Many of the blogs I read on the show are saying that these problems swayed the results towards a Real World demograph amongst the three finalists and I'd say that's an accurate assessment. You have three attractive, young girls who don't seem to push the envelope in their designs or their personalities but are generally likable but probably forgettable.
Lastly, and, maybe this should have been sooner because, this element was so endlessly irritating, was the overstatement of the models' significance throughout this season. The models' role in Project Runway was always an important one, but it's importance was anecdotal, circumstantial and tended to be arbitrary, just like the function of models in high fashion on a runway. To say that viewers and contestants did not take the models into consideration is certainly a fallacy but this season it was as if they were nearly as important as the designers themselves, having a challenge catered entirely towards their taste and a companion series following every episode. Maybe it was Lifetime trying to squeeze every second of lucrative ad time from the highly watched series, but I have yet to meet someone who is actually attached to any of the models or their personalities.
I do hope that Season 7 is less dissapointing because Project Runway does have an extremely entertaining formula that makes viewers feel like a part of an industrial sphere that has historically been regarded as distant and elite, but I think that if the show continues to cater towards the aesthetic tastes of the average American it'll lose a core of its viewership. Then again I'm no entertainment shaman. So I'll just say that if nothing else, I'd quit watching it!
