| Season AS3 | Episode 3 | Aired on 11.07.2013
Victor is wearing a suit covered in shiny bits. It's incredible, but also stupid. And he's wearing kneepants with sock garters. This guy is trying so hard it can be seen from space. But that's beside the point. The designers have been sent to Jay-Z's club, the 40/40. There are nine signature cocktails: Le Exotique, Tiger Eye, The Rose, Spotted Plum, Hemmingway, Summer, Sardinia, The Sunset and Strawberry Fields. Note that "Hemmingway" is not spelled like Ernest Hemingway, although I bet it's supposed to be. Alyssa explains that the "cocktail architect" (...seriously) will make them drinks, and then the designers will be required to be inspired to make cocktail dresses.
Mychael gets a Spotted Plum and the idea is that each person selects the person to choose by toasting to them. There are plums in it. Korto takes Summer, which features candied ginger on the rim. Jeffrey wants a "virgin version" of Le Exotique, which has passion fruit and anise. Christopher gets The Rose, which is red. Viktor fans himself as he orders a Tiger Eye and gets giddy at the prospect of tequila. Elena's Sardinia does not have any alcohol in it at all. It's basically a strawberry lemonade with fennel added. Melissa gets the Sunset, which is watermelon-based. Seth Aaron takes the Hemingway, which is spelled correctly on the television even though the bar screwed it up. And Irina gets the Strawberry Fields, and she insists that going last means everyone's afraid of you. Everybody starts drinking and sketching. Viktor claims his drink is spicy, which justifies his plan to be sexy. Jeffrey is going to show the judges that he can make a pretty cocktail dress, which seems like a pretty good idea in a cocktail dress challenge.
Mood! They have one day and a hundred dollars, which is not a lot. Most of the designers are taking inspiration from the color of their drinks, which is boring. However, Elena chases Swatch around, which is fun. Christopher gets some lace curtains because he's got some kind of crazy idea. Good for him! I'd rather see somebody go home because they tried something crazy than because they did something boring.
Back to the workroom. Elena is insisting on talking about her Sardinia drink in a silly Italian accent. Viktor offers some comments on her sketch, but then he realizes it's a competition and runs away. Jeffrey tells Christopher that his drink had passion fruit, which made him flash back to Vietnam, where he...once had a drink with fruit in it. Vietnam flashbacks have gotten a lot more tame than they used to be. Melissa feels lucky to be here after being on the bottom twice. Elena has dressed celebrities and wants to win. Shocking! Christopher claims he's making a "more elegant" cocktail dress that you'd see on a red carpet. But he admits that his first try "look like a tablecloth from a banquet hall just wrapped around her." Do better, Christopher!
| Season AS3 | Episode 3 | Aired on 11.07.2013
Christopher is worried about how much lining his lace curtains need, although he assures everyone that as a homosexual gentleman, he is very interested in keeping his models "hoo-ha" covered. Viktor has a big piece of fabric with a chapel printed on it, and Seth Aaron thinks that's a little crazy. And expensive. He advises Viktor not to fuck it up. Viktor is careful to cut it carefully. Korto is also doing a big print, and Viktor is ready to battle. Too bad for both of them that the regular season was just won by Dom, who is also into prints. So we're not going to be shocked by color.
Zanna's here! She says she wants "something original and head-turning." She starts with Viktor, who enthuses about tequila and sexiness. He doesn't have a silhouette to show her yet, so she occupies her time by mocking his sketch, which he made while drunk. Jeffrey gets a stern warning for how awful his lampshade-and-hood thing was last week. Korto is quite happy not to be doing a black dress. Her fabric is somehow an interpretation of the taste of her drink. Jeffrey makes an exceedingly on-point observation that her dress is reminiscent of Isaac Mizrahi's 2011 resort line. He's justifiably smug about being that specific with his references.
Zanna's worried aobut the bright red that Seth Aaron has. But she loves Mychael's sketch. Christopher has to deal with his "nip situation," and she cautions him not to do a red carpet gown. Melissa's dress just bores Zanna. And her asymmetry is, as Christopher points out, something she's done a lot. Elena's color must look a lot different in person, because it's quite bland on television, but Zanna enthuses over it. I love that her sketch has little numbers on it, because she was working out the construction as she went. Zanna says some encouraging things. Then she announces a twist: the designers need to make an accessory. They can use their own fabric, someone else's fabric, or convert something from the accessory wall into a different accessory.
Seth Aaron gloats that he was already planning to make an accessory. Jeffrey and Korto have no such plan.
The models are here! Viktor's model is unable to move her arms for fear of moving the bodice and revealing herself. By "bodice," I mean "two scraps of fabric vaguely in the area of her breasts." Christopher speculates on putting chiffon over his curtain, but that makes it a gown, so it's not happening. Elena hates how simple the dress is. Melissa sneers that it's a "slip dress." She's using suede, which is much more complicated. Viktor describes Jeffrey's dress as "abuelita," which he helpfully translates as "grandma." Korto's model is not shaped like her mannequin, and now she's behind on everything.
| Season AS3 | Episode 3 | Aired on 11.07.2013
Five minutes to go! Elena claims she's going well, and her accessory will come in tomorrow's two hours. Korto is already thinking about going home.
The morning! I do not like the brief shots of Viktor's and Jeffrey's dresses. Melissa figures that she's okay as long as the dress fits. Elena takes some neoprene and tries to make a bag out of it. She's never done it before, but she figures she's good at construction, so it ought to work. Viktor is making a clutch with horsehair brushed onto it. Melissa's dress fits, and she makes a yellow clutch and a cuff.
Sidebar! There was once a Project Runway spinoff show called Project Accessory where people had to make accessories every week. They usually had to make several, and it was pretty standard for people who were running out of time to just make a cuff. Cuffs are easy.
Hair and makeup pass without interest. Elena says of Viktor's dress, "I love that print, but I liked it better when Alexander McQueen did it." The runway is in ten minutes, so people run around and say mean things about each other's dresses. Jeffrey thinks Seth Aaron made "a stripper costume."
Alyssa comes out to plug Jay-Z's nightclub again. And there's also something about the challenge. The judges are Georgina, Isaac, Rebecca Minkoff (an accessory designer), and Nate Berkus (an interior designer).
Irina's dress has weird poky-out bits at the hips, a belt immediately below the armpits, and may be covered in feathers. Christopher's looks like a nice dress. He says it's entirely hand-sewn, but the details all came from the curtain fabric that he did not sew. Mychael's made a pleasant plum dress that's cut down to the navel and has a lot of weird fabric ruffles at the sides of the waist. Jeffrey's dress is boring except for the weird collar. Elena's got a lot of cool seams all over the place. I like it. Seth Aaron's made a hooker dress. A nice one, but a hooker dress nonetheless. His accessories are some leg warmers that make his model look like she's wearing thigh-high boots, which doesn't help with the hooker thing. Melissa's made a dress that's almost asymmetrical enough to be in a sci-fi movie. Korto's dress seems entirely acceptable. It's a little weird from the back and sides, though. Viktor's dress is very strange and I don't understand it. It seems to be missing about half of the fabric, but not in places you'd expect.
Alyssa calls forward Seth Aaron, Mychael, and Irina. They're safe. See, Alyssa? You don't have to make it complicated. The models for the remaining designers come out.
| Season AS3 | Episode 3 | Aired on 11.07.2013
Viktor is wearing what looks like a silhouette of a teddy bear for a necktie. Georgina likes the way he repurposed the print, but she's concerned about seeing the model's underwear. Isaac finds it divine. Nate points out the model's shoulders, which is one of the spots I don't understand. Rebecca thinks Korto's patent leather belt is too shiny and doesn't work with the dress. But Isaac loves the belt, and so does Georgina. Alyssa is concerned about the straps in the back, because they could highlight backfat. Nate straight-up tells Christopher he should win. Alyssa is obsessed with his dress. Georgina likes it even more when she learns it's a curtain. Isaac finds the back a little gratuitous, but I think he's scrambling to find something unkind to say.
Melissa's model, now that she's standing still, looks like she has only one breast. The asymmetry is not working here. The model looks like a poorly upholstered couch. Nate likes the colors on the back, although there might be too many. Isaac likes the idea of suede on Elena's dress, but there's too much else going on. Georgina even loves Elena's bag. Nate thinks he's seen the dress before, and Elena admits that Balenciaga was a big influence on her at school. She gets distracted by complaining about the judges from her season. Georgina thinks the jeweled neckline on Jeffrey's dress looks a little cheap, and Jeffrey reminds her that he had only a hundred dollars to work with. So his defense is that it is, in fact, cheap. He's not wrong, but it's not a great argument. Nate was disappointed. Jeffrey says his model is two sizes smaller than his mannequin, so once the dress is fitted, he has nothing to hang it on. Isaac doesn't care about that excuse, saying that he never had the right size mannequins.
In the back room, Jeffrey says, "They hated it. I mean, those stones are cheap as hell and the way they were executed was awful." He knows he's doomed, and he's in a pretty good mood about it.
The judges like Viktor's dress, although Nate thinks anyone who would wear it would get their undercarriage photographed by paparazzi. Isaac insists that the back of Christopher's dress is bad. They love how much work went into Elena's dress, but Isaac is already sick of her complaining about how doomed she is. They mostly don't like Korto's dress, although Isaac and Alyssa gave it a high score. Isaac says Jeffrey is almost begging to go home, and they make fun of his complaints about the dress forms: "No mannequin in the world was going to save that dress.
| Season AS3 | Episode 3 | Aired on 11.07.2013
The designers come back out and Alyssa claims she'll be wearing the winning dress. Elena is safe. Viktor wins. Christopher looks happy for him! Christopher's safe, and Alyssa says she'll wear his dress too. Korto is safe. That leaves Melissa and Jeffrey, who were also in the bottom last week. Melissa's going home, and Jeffrey squeaks through for the second week in a row. Get your act together, Jeffrey. Or your tattooed neck will be on the line time.
Follow Monty on Twitter at @monty_ashley and read his blog, Mysterious Exhortations.