Project Runway 9, Episode 2: They'd Make Great Pets

Diana and I started watching this last Thursday and then turned it off at 10pm. We finally watched the rest of it last night. That 90 minute format sure is a real winner.

Olivier Green
There’s rather a heated debate around the interwebs as to whether or not Olivier's accent is cute or completely and annoyingly fake. He said in an episode that we was born in Ohio and moved to London when he was 16. Then to Milan. He certainly does not have the accent of an Ohioan. What the editors left out (but that Diana discovered thanks to her fabulous internet skills) was that he moved to the West Coast and then to Taiwan when he was little. Then he moved to London when he was 16. So he spent most of his childhood in Taiwan, presumably speaking Taiwanese or Mandarin. Phew, he's not the pretentious little poseur he was coming off to be. Here's his casting footage where he explains his origins:



The Losers
You'd think I'd get tired of complaining about this, but I'm not. The show's tagline "One day you're in. The next day, you're out." is a great big fat lie. They all agreed during the judging that the wee-wee pad napkin dress that Bryce made was "the WORST dress", but did he go home? No, of course not. It's not about "one day you're in & the next day you're out". It's about your full body of work up to that point. Which is bull-shit. He should've been gone. Not that I'm defending Joshua C. His puppies-on-the-puppies umbrella dress committed the cardinal sin of the unconventional materials challenge: being too conventional. He was clearly the odd-man out and got aufed accordingly. Still, stop using that tagline if it's not true already! The show would be a lot less fair and a lot more interesting if it were true.

The Winner
It would seem that every time Heidi and Nina disagree, Nina ends up winning. That's how Gretchen won last season. That's how Olivier won this challenge with his hamster/rabbit bedding dress. Frankly I preferred the elegance-in-bird-seed dress that Anthony Ryan made. Instead, Olivier won because he used the same color palette as Michael Kors' 2011 fall collection. (Which seems to be remarkably similar to the colors Gretchen used too, if memory serves...)

After watching Joshua M. spend the entire episode spouting his "sometimes more is more" philosophy, I greatly enjoyed watching the judges smakdown his sea-vixen-barbie styling by telling him "no, actually, sometimes more is too much."