Project Runway 9, Episode 1: Come As You Are

I half watched Project Runway last night while working on other things because I knew I’d be watching it again this weekend with Diana. (She had to work late last night and missed it.) I’m going to write about it anyway as an experiment. We’ll see if my opinions change after watching it again later.

Audition Show followed by Audition Show
I enjoyed the Road to the Runway show. However, after watching an hour-long audition show where the designers showed their work in front of a panel consisting of Seth Aaron and other assorted past designers and fashion people, I really didn’t need to see another half-hour audition show where the designers showed their work in front of a panel of Tim, Heidi, Nina, and Michael. I’d just seen that. I guess it was my fault for watching the Road to the Runway. I’ll never make that mistake again.

On the other hand, it gave us a solid introduction to every designer and allowed us to see the Lifetime recommended Twitter hashtag for each of them. Let me run right out and tweet something about #PR9DAVID.

The Promos
If you watched it on TV, as I did, you saw countless promos for Lifetime’s new show Against the Wall. What did I learn from these commercials? I learned that it’s a show about a woman who’s the only girl in a family of police officers. So naturally she goes into Internal Affairs. Shock, horror! She is of course shunned by her cop brothers and father. And she has a lot of sex. I mean A LOT OF SEX. Every other seen in the promo was her having sex, so much so that I don’t think the name of the show is a metaphor for her mental state. I didn’t realize Lifetime was into soft-core porn.

The Four that Got Away
At the end of the second audition show, they eliminated four designers. Then they moved into the first challenge to eliminate one more. I’m not quite sure why this was necessary, other than as Heidi said “because we’re a little bit mean that way.” I would rather have seen 5 designers get aufed after the first challenge. Can you imagine how exciting that would be? How tense it would be in the workroom with everyone knowing the bottom 5 were going home? Either that or just start with 16 and let us see them show their best work to Tim, Heidi, Nina, and Michael for critiquing to start things off. As it was you just wasted these people’s time and forced that poor woman to cancel her wedding in Iceland.

Come as You Are
I loved the first challenge. I don’t think they’ve had a better first challenge since the supermarket challenge in Season One. It surprised them. It challenged them. I was amazed at what they were able to make.

The Bottom
Joshua’s creepy, mostly because he’s clearly not comfortable in his own skin in a Michael Costello sort of way. His red & white tennis outfit had construction issues even I could spot half-watching it on TV. That’s bad. I’d have more confidence in Julie’s ability to design if she could style herself at all. Coming down the runway, I liked her pink pajama contraption the least, but she wasn’t going home because they loved her clothes in the second audition, proving once again the show’s tag line is a big fat lie. I think Rafael was designing cloths for MC Hammer and slipped through a time-portal to the present. They even called him “fashion backward” in the judging. He wouldn’t take his hair-rag off the first day of the challenge, in spite of the fact that it was clearly the most interesting piece of fabric he had to work with, because his hair was a “hot mess”. If how your hair looks on TV is more important to you than your design, you deserve to be going home, and he did go home.

The Top
Anthony Ryan, I like you but I get it: you're color blind, you had cancer, you’re “rocking one” now. Let’s hope I don’t have to hear about that every episode. I liked your shirt and skirt, but didn’t think it was top-three material. Anya is currently the favorite on the Lifetime online poll. Of course she is. She has a sex tape. She’s intriguing because on the one hand she’s a former Miss Universe contestant and vaguely famous, while on the other hand she only learned to sew 4 months ago, giving hope to all of us armchair fashion designers everywhere. Her top and pants were amazing. I would have given her the win. Bert’s my current favorite because I like his story and he’s so different from any other designer they’ve had in terms of who he is. I liked his winning dress all right, but I couldn’t help but think “that woman’s boob is touching his dirty boxers… ew.”

Christina Ricci
Nice work as a guest judge. She had intelligent comments, and as always, she’s easy on the eyes. She’s not as dangerously skinny as she was, but she’d still be hotter if she put on a few pounds.

In Short
A solid beginning. I’m looking forward to the rest of Season 9.