Daily Blague

Well, Laura Bennett won. And Kayne Gillaspie got auf'd. Oh, the depths, the depths - that I know such things, because I just watched them with my very own eyes! Where's my Rolodex of excuses?

What? I threw it away? In the interest of better blogging?

I know that I'm a goner for the rest of this season, and I accept that. The question is, what happens when the next season starts? With luck, I will tune in dutifully (grrr!) - and realize that I just can't go through this again.

Project Runway is a brutal reality show, but the brutality is strictly professional. The designers have personalities, just like anybody, and they vent and carry on - or don't, like Michael Knight and Uli Herzner. But it doesn't matter: the grading is strictly on the fashion and its construction. Best line from last week's show: "Vincent, are you glueing?" Vincent Libretti got auf'd last week because of his really rather mistaken creation.

And what I mean by "brutal" is that the remaining five contestants thought they'd seen the end of him. Surprise! Vincent and Angela Keslar, the previous loser, were given second chances - with a twist. If they didn't win, they'd be out. Comebacks are always possible, but they're never probable, and I wasn't surprised when both designers fell into familiar traps - Angela was too strange, and Vincent just didn't plan very well. As Laura said, he's a genius in his own mind. You might think that he has Jeffrey's confidence, but what he really has is a bluster to compensate for it.

So - how demoralizing can it be: I got auf'd twice. That's something to tell the kiddies. The nephews and nieces.

But the experiment was far more demoralizing for the five who had survived the last round. The deflation was reflected on every face. Competitors love small fields. Anything can go wrong - so why have two ringers brought back from the dead who just might get something right? I couldn't have gone on. When Laura broke down, in her sharp, sort-of, way, I was totally with her. Why bother? Bringing Vincent and Angela back on the show was the most Sisyphean thing that has ever happened on television.

I am hoping that Laura will win. She's a tough broad, but I think that she combines a great design sense (that might work quite well outside of Project Runway's freakish time constraints) with an obvious command of the nuts and bolts, dollars and cents of fashion - as she showed last night, with the fewest fabric extras. I'm really wondering about the wisdom of this (now showing!) pregnancy, but, again, that's personal: it has nothing to do with her abilities as a designer. The failure of her Paris dress was striking, because what worked well on the bâteau mouche got sat on in cargo and looked tired in New York. (It was definitely a dress for an outdoor venue, not for the cave of Project Runway's studio.) But Laura's confidence has had a battering. Her dress for Jeffrey's mother ought to have fit a lot better. Tonight's dress couldn't have been a better fit. Good for her.

Given a good backer and a sane life/work environment, Michael will almost certainly be a successful designer, even if he's never a brand. As the judges said tonight, falling all over themselves, he knows how to dress a woman. That will never fail him. Uli knows how to dress a woman, too, but I worry that she's stuck on things she might have seen her mother wear twenty or thirty years ago. And Jeffrey doesn't like women. His winning dress for the last show was all about gift-wrap. It was a fun dress and I liked it. But it was a disguise, something that Edith Head might have dreamed up for someone with a poorly-proportioned body.

Although I never watch television - but never! (sob) - I do believe that the idea of fashion is central to the functioning of civilization. It gives the libido an opportunity to show up in polite society. A dress is not supposed to advertise what its wearer actually looks like without any clothes on; a dress is supposed to suggest how great she looks without any clothes on. Or, rather, how great she is. Plus (I can say "plus" in a piece about fashion, can't I?), human beings crave novelty, and the genius of fashion is to provide it inconsequentially, just for pleasure.

Next week: Heidi Klum in The Night Porter!