Episode Report Card Jeff Long: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Eye Candy
By Jeff Long | Season 4 | Episode 6 | Aired on 01.01.2008
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.New year, shmoo year -- WE'VE GOT SOME DRESSES TO MAKE. We start at the runway, with a stressful session of model-choosing. Everyone comes to their senses and releases the unfortunate Ashley back into the wild. Finally.
Early the next morning, Tim Gunn wakes all of the designers and takes them on a field trip. To Times Square. To the Hershey's store there. It's not difficult or particularly original to analogize this, but certainly taking a field trip to Times Square is akin to honeymooning in Trenton, New Jersey. Apologies, Garden State. And, the Hershey's store? It's miserable there.
So, the challenge sort of goes without saying once they reach the store. Without time to design anything, the designers have five minutes to grab supplies. Since Hershey's is a branding utopia, there's much more than chocolate there. People grab a lot of pillows and whatnot, though a couple grab some candies for the wrappers.
Christian's smack talking has reached a fever pitch. No one seems to really hate him (except for maybe Ricky, who is completely unreliable as any sort of rational judge of another person's behavior), so I think it may be all in jest. Or maybe he's so open about it that no one is really offended.
We find out that Elisa, on the cusp of a career in fashion t-shirts, had been mowed down by a Porsche on the streets of London. Project Runway has been a way for her to reclaim what she lost. Okay, damn.
On the runway, I'm going to say that, from first impressions, Victorya's dress was the only one I thought really wasn't very good, and that was mostly because she instructed her model to walk like the dress was about to fall apart. She was part of the bottom three with Sweet P and Elisa -- who also weren't up to snuff, but not horrible. The top three were Rami, Chris, and Jillian - who was the only designer to actually use food -- Twizzlers -- and it was amazing. Rami was the eventual winner, because of his vibrant and technically virtuosic creation. And, leaving us, after just telling us that she was almost road kill, was Elisa. Boo. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Previously: Jack left the show due to a staph infection on his face, and Chris was brought back from the dead. Christian won his first challenge with his design for a lady who had recently lost a lot of weight, and Stephen was sent packing because his source material was a really hideous wedding dress that he didn't make work.
It's morning at the Gotham apartments, and Kevin is lamenting the loss of his final roommate, Stephen. He says it's like he lost his "fucking cubicle buddy" and he's sad. That doesn't say a whole lot for the Project Runway experience, if your roommate was like your cubicle buddy. Cubicles suck.
In the other guy apartment, Ricky asks how everyone feels about Stephen being eliminated. Christian says flatly that he doesn't care. Actually, Christian says everything flatly, doesn't he? He's a talented guy, but I find the whole "droll arbiter of what's good" persona that he seems to be trying so hard to project very tiresome. Chris belly laughs at Christian's dismissal of Stephen. Yeah, laugh it up Chris. Sister Christian doesn't have any kinder critiques for you. Christian does follow up with a good point though. He says that Stephen didn't get eliminated because he had to work with an ugly wedding dress; he lost because he created a whole other dress that was ugly. Now, I'd agree about the whole other dress being ugly. The wedding dress was by far the hardest of the source materials to work with, but Stephen's interpretation was stinky. And Christian is annoying.
In the girls' apartment, Sweet P, Kit, and Jillian are discussing the possibilities of the upcoming challenge. Jillian thinks that, five challenges in, what else is left to do? Sweet P says that the first challenge was the only challenge that was supposed to represent them as designers, which is untrue. The SJP challenge and the dead trends challenge both required the designers to express their personal visions. Sweet P interviews that she's thrilled that she's still hanging on and in the competition. She says she wants to go to Bryant Park and win. I want to control the weather. Both of us are going to be disappointed, I'm afraid. I like Sweet P, but, as unique as her appearance is, doesn't she perfectly fit the Project Runway archetypical "middle-of-the-packer" mold? In that regard, she's completely interchangeable with about a dozen other designers from past seasons. Kit notes that they are at the sixth challenge-- "half-way there"-- and they are out the door and on their way to Parsons.