On my former Bravo show Guide to Style,I found people in a fashion rut with no clue how to get out of it. My job was to unwedge them from their rut, their own personal monkey house, and then to say, “You’re out of the rut now. Where do you want to go? Who are you?”
The worst-case scenario is that it doesn’t work and you go back to where you were before.
On Season 7 of Runway,I found with too much frequency that some of the designers would say, as early as ten p.m., that they were done and were going to surrender the remaining time.
“You’re done?” I would ask them with a tone of shock. “If Leonardo had had more time with the Mona Lisa,it would be even more beautiful. Use the time and make it better.”
There have always been designers on the show who wouldn’t use the full time for whatever reason.
But never before Season 7 had I seen a whole group of people with such a languid approach to time. I call Season 7 the season of the sashay. No matter how close to the deadline they were, no matter how quickly they needed to get their models ready for the runway, there was no physical demonstration of urgency. Everyone just sashayed around the workroom and the sewing room.
Althea Harper was a little bit like this in Season 6. She was very last minute and would get caught up with the lichen on the bark; forget about the forest for the trees. “There’s more to life than this ruched hem!” I would try to tell her.
In the same season, Johnny Sakalis and Mitchell Hall were social gadflies who just wanted to chat all the time. I said, “You two have work to do,” and they would just keep gossiping. “We are late!” I’d be yelling at the workroom. “You need to move it!”
There they were, saying, “I’m coming … I just need to move thisover here…” Slow as can be. All of them! A talented bunch of people, but wow, were they lackadaisical.
JUDGING ON Project Runwayis sometimes about informing people that they are living in the monkey house. Often a designer has worked on something so long that he or she thinks it is the most beautiful garment on the face of the earth, when in fact it is an abomination.
Michael Kors is a great judge, and I think it’s partly because he does such clean, elegant work that he has a great ability to let the designers be themselves and not project his own taste onto them. (Friends of mine who love to wear lavish jewelry are big fans of Michael Kors dresses, because his clothes have such simplicity that they make a fantastic frame for baubles.)
He and Nina Garcia play so well off each other, because they both have a great eye, and they aren’t afraid to say what they think. There’s a great exchange in Season 7 when Nina throws her arms up about a neckline treatment.
Michael says, “Nina! How many necklines do you ever really see? I can count them on one hand!” The two of them have a big debate about how much innovation is possible when it comes to necklines. The Fairchild Dictionary of Fashion(my bible!) devotes ten pages to necklines and collars, but the truth is that clothes today typically feature only a few different ones.
I love these kinds of specific conversations about fashion. It really gets at the heart of these choices the designers have to make, and it’s so satisfying to listen in on these two important fashion people talking about it. Their squabbles are very instructive when it comes to how the design world approaches a burning issue like the boat neck.
It’s a lot harder than it looks to be a judge. And when we have designers as guest judges, it’s often hard for them to keep their own aesthetics in check. Most designers are incapable of understanding any aesthetic other than their own, and they want to impose it on the designers. Unlike most designer judges, Michael is really terrific about seeing each designer on his or her own merits. It’s a rarity.
Nina has a great eye, but there was one time she championed a dress that everyone else hated, and that I would say belonged in the monkey house. Perhaps you’ll recall the green neoprene dress Ra’mon Lawrence Coleman made in Season 6. He was dyeing it in the toilet before I suggested he take pity on the model who had to wear it and switch to the sink. The dress, a hot green mess thrown together at the last minute, was a disaster.
Well, Nina had a forty-five-minute filibuster for the neoprene dress. Nina is so tough and cool that she has the capacity to intimidate Heidi (and all of us a bit, truth be told). Nina’s trump card was her crystal-clear assertion that she would wear the dress. With that said, Heidi went along with it, too. Well, the look I thought was going to send Ra’mon home ended up winning the challenge for him. I couldn’t believe it.
Project Runwayauctions the winning looks of each season, so I bought the dress for Nina. It went for $305. When it arrived in a little cardboard box, I couldn’t believe how tiny it was, just two pieces of neoprene sort of glommed together. Seeing it up close was very illuminating. There were yellow pins sticking out of it, rough edges, spattered dye—and I still haven’t figured out how to assemble the top. Thank goodness I won it rather than some fan, who would have gotten that package and declared, “This won?”
I’m planning to send it to Nina with the suggestion that she wear it for the next event we have to do together. I have a feeling she won’t.
In any case, what keeps the show from turning into one big monkey house is the seriousness with which our judges take the matter of construction and design. During the runway show there is a huge amount of deliberation, far more than most people realize. From the moment that the judges see the work on the runway to the moment Heidi says who’s in and out, five to six hours elapse, not the several minutes you see at home.
I’m frequently wrong not just about who will be chosen as the winner, but also about who’s in the top or bottom three. Sometimes it flips while they’re deliberating. The judges change their minds a lot before they reach a verdict, which I believe is positive and a great testament to the seriousness of their discussion.
Guest judges are real wild cards when it comes to what they like. Sometimes a guest judge will say, “This was my favorite look!” And all the others had it as something that justified sending someone home. That’s why Heidi rarely asks the guest judge to speak first anymore. In the make-each-other-over challenge in Season 2, Santino Rice’s jumpsuit for Kara Janx might well have sent him home had Freddie Leiba not said right off the bat that he loved that look.
It’s all edited out in the final show, but one guest judge told the designers what she would have done had she been designing for the challenge. “I would have picked this fabric, instead! I would have designed it this way!”
That is not helpful. The competing designers didn’t use that fabric or that silhouette, so how can you judge them on what you would have done rather than on what they did in fact do?
In the finale of Season 3, Nina Garcia, not I, was scheduled to give the designers a critique early in the week. But because of the whole Is-Jeffrey-cheating debacle, she came in late on Thursday, instead. The Bryant Park fashion show was going to be held the following morning.
When I arrived after the critique, I asked the producers, “How did it go?” and they said Nina had given the designers a hard time. I was disappointed to hear that, because I thought, What are they going to do? The show is tomorrow. At this point in the game, negativity isn’t helpful.
So I did my routine for the camera, and then I went back to the designers and said, “I heard the visit was hard.” Everyone shrugged. Laura Bennett looked up and wisely said, “As if we could do anything! We didn’t even listen.”