ElectricTangerine

This week’s challenge bordered on the sadistic, so of course, I was glued to the screen.

Sometimes the challenges on Project Runway work, and sometimes they just don’t. This challenge? Definitely in the latter category, in my opinion.

I call shenanigans on this week’s challenge.

Designing menswear is hard enough, but designing for a big ex-footballer with weird proportions and vague sartorial tastes? That’s just mean.

You could see everyone’s smile kind of freeze when they walked into the room and saw Tim Gunn standing with Some Guy. I think Kevin (who makes a point out of telling us how straight he is on a weekly basis) knew that this was Tiki Barber… some guy who played football once upon a time and who’s now a talking head on the “Today” show.

Nobody else had a clue who this guy was. Not to work a stereotype, but a room full of guys who spend their lives sewing and rummaging through the notions bins at fabric stores aren’t generally big football fans.

Oh nooo! Menswear! Everybody freak out!

Let me pause for a moment here to say that while I understand, intellectually, that fashion designers tend to specialize in either menswear or women’s wear; I think were I a designer, I’d find it extremely limiting to specialize to the point where I was actually unable to pull off clothing meant to be worn by the other gender.

Men are not aliens for crying out loud. Look! Two legs. Two arms. Chest. Head hole goes here.
The way some of the designers were carrying on, you’d have thought they’d been expected to knit a sweater set for Cthulu.

Oh and this week’s Best Quote went to Christian who noted that the judges were going to have a hard time choosing a winner because “there’s some jacked up stuff going on up in here.” Or words to that effect.

Quotes like that allowed me mostly forgive Christian for having Jack carry him everywhere this episode. I swear to you, when I first saw Jack carrying Christian into the workroom, I thought “Is Christian humping Jack’s leg?” Now granted, I can understand the impulse, but no…turns out that Jack was just carrying Christian around in a canvas bag. Like Paris Hilton’s chihuahua.

Tee. Hee. Aren’t I petite you big strong hunk of man meat?
Why didn’t Christian just fall over backwards on a worktable with his ankles behind his neck? It’s not that much less subtle.

ANYway, let’s move on to the designs shall we?

- I have to give Jillian respect for the fact that she completed a full suit with jacket, pants and vest, plus a shirt in the time allotted. The suit was a bit sloppy, the buttons on the vest were crooked and I didn’t care for the way the buttons on the jacket were arranged, but I liked the pattern on the shirt and that large butterfly collar is very “in” this year. Overall, I have to say well done. *yawn*

- Oh no she didn’t! Carmen fails to finish her ensemble which really ticked the judges off - big time. You don’t send a model down the runway with a wad of fabric wrapped around his chest in lieu of a shirt!

Here’s the thing - if you’ve watched PR before, you learn that the challenges are about 25% inspiration, creativity and execution and about 75% time management. As someone who works with deadlines both in my professional life and as a perpetual graduate student, I don’t understand how you can go into a project knowing (more or less) how much time you’ll have to complete it and miss the mark so substantially. I always pad for time constraints so that even if things go catastrophically wrong I can still get it together at least somewhat presentably before the deadline.
Also, when you’re working on a large project you get your basic architecture done first. Your model can’t walk the runway without a shirt and pants. Anything you can do beyond that is gravy.
I think Carmen just panicked when Tim Gunn didn’t like her design and she choked.

- This week we learned one very important thing about Christian - girlfriend can SEW and sew fast. That’s going to be an extremely valuable skill in this competition. That being said, the choice about what to sew still doesn’t thrill me. The jacket on this piece was just ugly, bunchy and misshapen. I despised the pocket both in placement and in the use of that weird looking strip of - was that gingham? Ucky tuh! The pants had the same problem most of the pants had: elephant crotch.
The shirt under that lumpy jacket was fantastic. I wish Christian would’ve left the jacket off and just sent his model out with that wonderful, fitted, side zipper shirt. Asymmetry is apparently a theme with Christian and in this case it worked well. I would wear that shirt if I had the body for it. And it was innovative which was something I found sorely lacking in the other designs.

- This one would’ve been my pick for the winner. Not that I don’t love Jack, but I thought this piece was very smart. The khaki-esque pants fit the model very well, broke at the right point and looked sharp and well tailored. The shirt was beautifully made (if a bit boring) and the jacket was magnificent. The fleece was a really strong choice for the cut of this jacket, which had a kind of pea coat look to it. My favorite part about this look was the collar - it was almost tab collar in the back but the transition to the front was extremely elegant and smooth. It hung beautifully and had a great shape. I’ve never seen a jacket like it, but now I want one!

- Another disappointingly dull outfit from Rami. And speaking of “Member’s Only” jackets…hello? You slap a couple of snap epaulettes on this thing and that’s what you’ve got. Boring color choices. Boring execution. Borrrrinnnng.

- Two words: Train. Wreck. There was nothing salvageable about this outfit and the shirt was a disaster. It was a complete and utter embarrassment and to her credit Sweet P knew it. I agreed with her statement that it looked as though it’d been done by a kindergardener. With paste and safety scissors.

The shirt looked like something that someone would’ve put together out of toilet paper at a bridal shower. The tie was straight out of clown school. The pants weren’t as bad as the shirt, but then - that’s not saying a whole lot. I did notice that a lot of the designers put their men in pants with the “soccer mom” high waist. It gave a skinny male model birthin’ hips. This is not a good thing. Burn it.

- Steven surprised me this week. With Marion gone, it seems that Steven got custody of the personality and now he’s become witty and engaging. I especially enjoyed his comments about suddenly understanding how straight men felt around a whole bunch of half naked female models, now that he was surrounded by a whole bunch of half naked male models.

I thought Steven’s outfit was well done, too. I liked the color choices and the execution on the shirt. It was a henley but it was a nicely made henley. The pants were soccer mom pants and the ass was terrible (seriously, gay men spend vast amounts of time watching that particular part of the anatomy so why were the pants such a huge problem?) but even with the problem pants it worked. The ascot was kinda…weird. I can’t really see Tiki Barber workin’ a neck adornment. It’s a little too East Hampton matronly.

- I liked the jacket and thought that the white with the touch of black at the collar had a great visual pop to it. That’s pretty much it.
There seemed to have been a lot of debate among the designers about which side of a men’s jacket the buttons go on. I do believe Victorya had it right. The shirt under the jacket was boring, but seemed to be made well enough. The pants were horrible. Was the model expecting a flood? They were cut way too high and bunched up oddly when the model walked. The crotch seemed to be a “problem area” for a lot of designers this week.

- Kevin had menswear experience and it showed. He also budgeted his time very wisely, knew what he could and couldn’t accomplish and executed it well. I liked that he used strong colors, which Tiki Barber said he wasn’t afraid of (lies, all lies). The tie with the pocket square added a lot of visual interest and texture to the piece. The shirt was a bit too tight in the arms and I didn’t like the way the vest hung. It seemed very women’s wear reminiscent and I felt it looked too short - especially with the shirt bottom hanging out underneath. The pants were too long and too baggy across the crotch, but that’s somewhat nit picky of me to notice. It didn’t affect the overall effect of the outfit. It’s just not something that I could see a big football guy on the “Today” show wearing.

- Ok, ok. I admit it. I like Chris. He’s won me over. I liked that he tried something different and I thought he executed it very well. His suit and pants had a kind of futuristic, European feel to them. Very “Blade Runner in Milan.” There was a sophistication and elegance to this look and the sleeves went all the way to the model’s wrists!

I felt this piece didn’t get the attention it deserved from the judges. I blame Tiki for this. If the challenge would’ve been dressing David Bowie? This would’ve won.

- Hooray for Jack knowing his limitations! Instead of cranking out a poorly executed jacket, Jack decides that it’s more important to create fewer pieces but make them really well. There was some controversy over the fact that Jack stripped off his shorts and used them to make a pattern, but I think Rami was just being bitchy about that. Jack asked Tim ahead of time if that was an allowable thing to do, Tim said yes and Jack was actually very gracious about letting the other designers share his pattern. That evened the playing field, so Rami? Shut your cakehole.

I hate to say this, but I found Jack’s shirt and pants combination dull. I’ve seen it in a thousand different places and on a thousand different stockbrokers. The double stripes combo for the pants and shirt was a novel choice and he managed to pull it off without it looking too “matchy matchy” as Heidi would say. The reverse striping on the pocket and shirt kept it from being a total snooze. I had the feeling that we lost something about the actual colors of both in the televised viewing as opposed to what the judges were seeing.

Still, there’s a limit to how much of a deadening effect television can have on a basic striped dress shirt and pinstriped dress pants. I wouldn’t wear it.

- Ricky almost made it through a whole episode without crying!! If you have to cry, though? This was the outfit to do it over. Sending a piece down the runway with pins holding the seams? Not acceptable. Time management killed Ricky too. The proportions for his suit were off, it was baggy and ugly. The sleeves didn’t come down far enough - that’s a measurement issue, not a time issue. The colors were boring. So we have the fatal trifecta: unfinished, badly made and dull as dirt. Oh yeah, you’ve got reason to cry this week.

- Oh look, it’s a Nature Boy costume. Elisa’s hippie dippie act is thoroughly getting on my nerves. Her whole attack of the Amish Modesty Code schtick made me want to smack her back to Santa Fe.

Still, this week’s outfit from Elisa seemed to originate on this planet so that’s progress. Of course it was from this planet circa 1978, but what can ya do? Retro is in anyway. If you take the Grizzly Adams vest off this, I liked the wide neck and slightly rolled collar and cuffs on the shirt. Grudgingly I will admit that if I were needing costumes for some kind of post-apocalyptic granola cult, she’s the designer I’d choose.

The Winner

Mostly because Tiki Barber would actually wear this.

Auf’d

For the Cardinal Sin of sending a half nekkid model down the runway.