Guilty Pleasure
8/3/06 23:27![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
madrobinsWhen I was a kid I wanted to be a clothing designer. I had big pads of newsprint, which I would fill with designs (nine to a page) drawn on "model" forms I had made. My idea was that I wanted to design for women with imperfect figures: big breasts, or wide hips, or no waist or long waist or short waist. I designed a cocktail dress in 1962 which I saw two years later in a fashion spread in LIFE Magazine, and you can bet I was incensed...how dare Oscar de la Renta steal my design! Of course I grew into a woman who almost never looks at anything resembling a fashion magazine, but when I was nine I was passionate about clothing design. So it makes sense that for the last month or so I have been totally absorbed by Project Runway. Like most reality shows (and can I saw without sounding like a snob that I don't watch much reality TV?) it has all manner of outsized personalities and is cleverly edited so that there are the divas (and divos? Is that the masculine of the word?) and ego-monsters, the people who go into screaming fits or burst into tears. And yet it's almost impossible not to be drawn in to the drama at the same time that you're trying to examine the seaming on an evening dress. They started out with sixteen designers; each week one or more was eliminated, until they were down to three, who went on to show full collections in the final competition. Tonight was the finale, and the final outcome of the competition.
I was rooting for Daniel, who seemed to me to have a combination of talent, originality and vision in about the right balance. Santino, this season's wildman (after the wildly uneven Zulema was eliminated) is very creative, but frequently his ideas are more important to him than the person he's designing for--or at least they were until this final competition, when he reined himself in so tight that much of his wacky originality was lost. It's easy to cast Santino as a machiavelian loudmouth--they have him on tape saying snarky things about everyone else's designs--but for me what it came down to is that they were vying for a "mentorship" with Banana Republic, and I could not imagine this guy restraining himself to fit that kind of mold. That left Chloe, who has a great sense of 'wearability,' and whose final collection had some great pieces in it. Overall, I thought Daniel's was more versatile and more original--there's this one jacket I would kill for (I would also kill to have the sort of body that would look good in that jacket, but that's another rant)--but in the end Chloe, who is older and more seasoned and has some business experience behind her, won the competition. That's okay by me. I am sure all three of these people will do well. And I note with amusement that both of my children have taken to designing clothes in the last month or so.
I was rooting for Daniel, who seemed to me to have a combination of talent, originality and vision in about the right balance. Santino, this season's wildman (after the wildly uneven Zulema was eliminated) is very creative, but frequently his ideas are more important to him than the person he's designing for--or at least they were until this final competition, when he reined himself in so tight that much of his wacky originality was lost. It's easy to cast Santino as a machiavelian loudmouth--they have him on tape saying snarky things about everyone else's designs--but for me what it came down to is that they were vying for a "mentorship" with Banana Republic, and I could not imagine this guy restraining himself to fit that kind of mold. That left Chloe, who has a great sense of 'wearability,' and whose final collection had some great pieces in it. Overall, I thought Daniel's was more versatile and more original--there's this one jacket I would kill for (I would also kill to have the sort of body that would look good in that jacket, but that's another rant)--but in the end Chloe, who is older and more seasoned and has some business experience behind her, won the competition. That's okay by me. I am sure all three of these people will do well. And I note with amusement that both of my children have taken to designing clothes in the last month or so.