Project Runway Cuts a Designer for Dressing a Professional Woman in a Suit

I’m addicted to watching Bravo TV’s PROJECT RUNWAY even though I know little about fashion and care even less. It’s the creativity motivated by each challenge that intrigues me.

This week’s episode found the remaining six designers facing the assignment of designing a makeover look for recent college grads starting out on the path of their professional lives. And the designers had to also please the mothers of these young women.

The young women ranged in career paths from possible med school to photographer to graphic designer. And it was for the graphic designer that the hapless fashion designer created a suit look.

One of the judges reamed him for creating a look with all the “clichés” – a woman in a suit with a pocket square in her breast pocket.

Personally, I’m old enough to remember when it was novel that designers created suits for business women. I even did a news story for the (now defunct) Philadelphia Bulletin about a Philly department store that opened a department for suits for professional women (rather than suits for traditional social functions attended by “ladies”).

In fact, I was so excited to be able to buy such a suit in which to interview as I neared graduation from Wharton’s MBA program that I actually made the fashion mistake of buying a purple linen suit to wear in March in LA. Only once in LA wearing my purple linen suit and surrounded by women in dark suits did I realize that professional women wore “winter” colors and fabrics in LA during the winter months.

The look that got the fashion designer cut from Project Runway was surely too formal for a young woman interviewing for a graphic designer position. Yet in my time the brightly patterned blouse worn under the pinstripe suit material would probably have produced fainting spells among any women and men who spotted the off-beat blouse.

I’m happy for young women starting out today that fashion dictates now allow them a much wider range of styles in which to express themselves and still look professional.

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Do-Gooder Scrooge, Bravo TV, Project Runway, fashion designers, women’s suits

Bravo TV’s Project Runway Season 5 Contestants are Losers

Project Runway is a favorite television show of mine even though I don’t know anything about fashion and don’t even care about fashion. But the creativity that most contestants exhibit in each challenge is so amazing that I’m hooked on the show. (I mean, really, making an outfit out of items from a grocery store!)

Thus, after watching the first two episodes of this new season, I am really annoyed at the contestants – they are such losers. Seriously, if you got picked to be a contestant for a show’s fifth season, wouldn’t you watch every single episode of all of the four previous seasons to pick up clues to winning?

I mean, when Tim Gunn says he’s worried and advises you NOT to do something, would you really insist that you like what you’re doing and you’re going to keep doing it? For heavens sake, if you’ve watched the four previous seasons, you will have seen that, when Tim Gunn gives that warning and a contestant doesn’t follow the warning, that contestant is usually in deep muck or, more likely, OUT!

In the first episode last week, as soon as Jerry said that he was going to use a plastic tarp from the grocery store to make a rain jacket, I knew he had the best chance of going OUT (and he did). The judges are always talking about TRANSFORMING weird materials into something different. Hello, Jerry, why would you think making a raincoat out of a plastic tarp could be considered a transformation?

And in the second episode, contestant Leanne – who ended up one away from being OUT – had been told by Tim Gunn that she had too many doodads hanging off her cocktail dress. But, as she told the camera, she wanted to do it her way. And her way almost cost her the contest. (She’s lucky that someone else messed up even more than she did.)

Advice for Project Runway Season 6 contestants – who are yet to be picked and who will be the first contestants for the show’s new home at Lifetime Television – up the smart quotient on the show!

Before you audition for the show, run don’t walk to your nearest video store and study the past seasons. Basically the judges are the same – and it’s pretty clear what they like and don’t like. Take advantage of the trail of contestants before you – and learn that when Tim Gunn says he’s worried, you’d better make some changes as fast as your sewing machine can stitch together a seam.

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Bravo TV, Lifetime Television, Project Runway, Tim Gunn, do-gooder, Scrooge