That episode was about as good as Project Runway can get this early in the season. It had a difficult challenge, a bunch of fun story threads, a great guest judge—everything the show ought to do well. Jeez, there was even a medical emergency at the end. It was freaking packed.
We began at Atlas with a killer montage setting Gretchen up as the villain for at least the next few episodes, maybe the whole season. “It seemed like everyone understood why I won even before I won,” she said to the camera, “and they were really rooting for me.” If she had added, “…to get my scalp caught in a sewing machine,” she would have been closer to the truth, as we cut to catty designers bitching about Gretchen in their apartments. The editors cut back and forth like this for a while, as Gretchen kept upping the magnanimity of her self-praise with each subsequent clip. You could tell the field producer who conducted her interview was handing her rope with which to hang herself: “Could you talk more about your fellow designers, specifically in terms of how much they admire your grace and wisdom?”
Tim Gunn welcomed the designers to Brooklyn party-supplies store Party Glitters. “I wish we were here to celebrate that you’ve made it through two challenges,” he said. Hold on, what’s this about TWO challenges? Are we supposed to forget that the first “challenge” took place in a simulacral sub-reality where the only truth was that there was no truth? We are? Oh, thank God.
The task was, obviously, to design something using crap from a party store. Tim Gunn reminded everyone that “the judges don’t like it” when designers cop out by using fabric-like items—wrapping paper or tablecloths. Inside the store, Gretchen asked if there was any store staff around to help her, which was a reasonable inquiry. But the producers had already framed her so effectively as a snob that the question came off as hopelessly bourgeois—of course Gretchen wants to coast through this challenge on the backs of the party-store proletariat.
The staff couldn’t help elitist tyrant Gretchen because they were busy with Casanova, who was asking where he could find the “black table clothes.” The show cut to a flashback of Tim’s “don’t buy tablecloths” speech, with the caption “2 MINUTES AGO.” That might have been the most passive-aggressive chyron in television history.
A.J. was feeling some extra pressure because his trademark aesthetic is party-favor glam, judging by a glimpse of his audition tape. With the challenge right in his wheelhouse he dithered over his design, frantically asking Mondo, “I was going to do birthday. Are you doing birthday?” Mondo responded with his flat affect, “I’m doing Quinceañera.” Conversation over, thanks to the master of the accidental perfect comeback.
There were a lot of strong workroom subplots. Andy seemed to be making the classic Project Runway mistake of focusing on a time-consuming handcrafted detail at the expense of progress on the overall garment, but he got some last-minute help from April and Peach Carr Named Designer. This irritated Gretchen, an avowed social Darwinist who abhors the welfare state in all its guises.
Ivy also had a complicated construction, and she half-joked that she was getting woozy from the fumes of her glue gun—foreshadowing! Elsewhere, Tim Gunn discussed the relative merits of “animal wooly balls” and “real balls.” The winner: animal wooly balls, naturally. (It’s a shame that Jason wasn’t around to enjoy this moment.)
Runway show. Betsey Johnson was the guest judge, an ideal pairing of judge with challenge. She ended up loving most of the crappiest stuff, kind of like Selma Blair did in the season premiere, except Johnson wasn’t just mumbling about being “confused.”