Season 6 of Project Runway was the first Lifetime season, the L.A. season, ultimately the lost season. Season 7 was the triumphant return to New York. Season 8 has no artificial drama, so suddenly it’s just the eighth season, and you realize that this show has been around for a long time. The producers knew they’d need a big flourish to keep the show fresh and interesting. And that flourish was: 17 designers, instead of 16! That’s 6.25 percent more designer! Plus, in this episode, the designers were still in “the audition process,” which according to Heidi meant that they were “not yet on Project Runway Season 8,” even though we were watching them on Project Runway, a program in its eighth season.
The designers met in clusters and then proceeded to Lincoln Center by every form of transportation imaginable. Mondo, Peach, and a couple of other less interestingly named designers took the Liberty State Park ferry. I guess the producers decided, everybody knows this crap is staged, so let’s not even try to make it realistic. Mondo is this season’s Young Eccentric Who Will Stick Around Longer Than He Should, but he won my affection by shutting down the “What’s the name of YOUR clothing line?” conversation on the boat. “Nothing. Because I don’t have one,” he said, and that was the correct answer.
Another contestant, Jason, was wearing a hat. “I’m kind of wearing this hat here,” he explains, “because I want to throw the competition off.” Freaking diabolical. The signature item for Casanova, the contestant from Astoria by way of Puerto Rico, was a tiny, skinny tie that barely cleared his sternum, in case he had to operate heavy machinery at some point in the show.
At Lincoln Center, Heidi and Tim revealed The Twist, because “there’s always a twist on Project Runway!”—disregarding the Season 7 opener, of course, when the challenge was “design something, such as clothes.” The designers had to pick one item of clothing from their own luggage to incorporate into a look. Then they had to hand that item over to the contestant on their right. They’d only get five hours to finish—the shortest time limit “in HISTORY!” according to Michael Kors. Now, this is how you do the first challenge. They’re not sleep-deprived yet, so you’ve got to work them extra-hard.
Tim showed the designers their working space, explained that the Brother Sewing Room is called that because it is full of Brother Sewing Machines, and reminded them that they are competing to live their dream of selling their line on piperlime.com. The next 20 minutes were perfectly entertaining but mostly unremarkable workroom hijinx.
Peach, this season’s Old Boring Person Who Will Stick Around Longer Than She Should, struggled with the knit scarf she was given, which came apart under any amount of stress. Tim Gunn advised her to work it under some tulle, possible the first concrete workroom advice from Tim we’ve seen in years, who is typically edited down to his core catchphrases.
Nicholas embraced the episode’s moronic semantics and marveled aloud that “I’m not on the show yet!” YES YOU ARE. I AM VIEWING YOU ON A TELEVISION AS YOU SAY THIS.
Casanova pouted that another designer was tearing apart his $1,000+ Dolce & Gabbana pants that he never even got to wear, which made me wonder why he pulled them out of his bag in the first place if he wasn’t willing to see them reworked in a design. Then I realized that the dude doesn’t speak great English, so he often had only the vaguest idea of what was going on. Worse yet, the producers clearly have decided that this will be his “quirk.”
The price of an exciting, short-turnaround challenge was a mostly underwhelming runway show, but there were a few standouts to glimpse (and they were just glimpses, in a runway sequence that seemed even more hurried than usual—curse you, extra designer). Sarah made a cute khaki shorts jumper with a bit of a factory-worker vibe to it. Hawaiian designer Andy’s all-black outfit with the open-back blouse was clean and angular without getting too harsh, although the chopsticks in the hair and the umbrella hat pushed it into You Only Live Twice territory. Mondo and Valerie made decent cocktail dresses with ’60s-ish palettes, although Valerie’s looked a little little like a frightened scarecrow face. Kristin produced a heavy, over-layered dress from Mondo’s kilt, which I point out only to note that Mondo packed a kilt.