Watching Project Runway in its new 90-minute running time this week, I wondered how they ever fit this show into a mere hour. Just imagine: All those years, the producers were sitting on this footage of the designers milling about their apartments, talking about how tired they were, remarking that they were nervous about the challenge. And they had to throw it all away, pushing a giant pot of television gold into a volcano of time constraints.
But now the show has room to stretch its legs. We get to watch Tim Gunn saying “Go go go!” to upwards of five designers instead of just one or two. There’s time for fascinating twists like tonight’s photo shoot, which gave us a look at the designers’ outfits before the runway show, where we got a look at the designers’ outfits. What an extremely pointful exercise that was! It was loaded with point.
Seriously now: For all the times that we’ve seen Tim tell contestants to “use their editorial eye,” this longer format is a cruel irony. The show is 30 minutes longer, but this week it felt like they’d added an hour.
We began with jubilation from the contestants because they were actually on the show now (unlike last week, when I guess they were on Top Shot). Yup, the show was still banging this “last week didn’t count” drum, as Heidi congratulated the contestants on officially making it to Project Runway Season 8. At this moment, a media-studies grad student began typing up his proposal for a thesis exploring the ontological complexity of reality television. When is a show a show? When Heidi Klum says it is.
For the challenge reveal, Heidi and Tim were joined by the editor of Marie Claire magazine, Joanna Cole, a woman who always approaches her Project Runway appearances with the zest of a dentist's office receptionist. The challenge was to “create a look that defines the Marie Claire woman” for placement on a Times Square billboard. In other words, “make clothes that look nice.”
Jason, whose enormous-competitive-advantage-bestowing bowler has made him the Oddjob of the group, set to work on his “Infinity Dress.” The infinity symbol also resembles the number eight, which Jason noted was perfect since this is Season 8. (Who can forget the way Christian Soriano’s “4”-themed designs propelled him to victory and international fame?)
Small problem: Neither the infinity symbol nor an eight were in evidence on the dress. What we could see, though, was a shiny fabric that looked like it was cut from the inside of an old raft, held together with safety pins on a model who made no attempt to hide her misery. Tim Gunn had a few nits to pick, but Oddjob wasn’t hearing it. “It’s an INFINITY DRESS,” he explained. He added in a testimonial: “What’s better than infinity?” I don’t know, cake? I’m saying cake.
The other workshop zaniness was tame. Kristin complained about the sewing machines. Peach made the same pink-polka-dot dress over and over again, under the delusion that her model was a 1960s American Girl doll. Casanova asked other designers to make his decisions for him; A.J. spurned him while Gretchen obliged. “Casanova could be incredibly annoying if he wasn’t so charming,” she said, making peculiar use of the subjunctive.
Mondo had a mini-breakdown because he wasn’t making friends. He said in an interview that his social struggles were partially due to his talent: “I feel like this art—this gift is a curse to me sometimes.” Pretty obnoxious, but I’ll stick up for Mondo, as it’s the type of thing you say when you are very tired and will find any way to feel sorry for yourself. He was OK the next morning after a little sleep.