Project Runway's Most Dramatic Moments, S1, Part 2

We're not done with Season 1 yet, bitches!

3)Reunion-Gate

Oh Season One. How we miss the rawness of it all. What we wouldn't give to go back to those halcyon days when the designers had no idea what they were in for. The backstabbing, the fighting...

...the drinking on camera.

Just stop for a moment and remind yourself that they held the reunion IN A BAR. How awesome is that?

Let's put the inevitable Wendy beatdown aside for a moment and recall the ironic-in-retrospect Vanessa beatdown. See, before the reunion, Vanessa gave an interview for the Popgurls site. You can find it here. Go ahead and take a look.

What's so fascinating about it is, 4 seasons later, we can't imagine ANY of the designers getting so bent out of shape over such a relatively harmless interview. Did she smack-talk? Sure, but when we think of the kind of smack-talking that we saw in later seasons and in later interviews, we can't help thinking the people SERIOUSLY over-reacted to what Vanessa had said.

Look at Wendy's face there. Hysterical.

The thing is, knowing what we know about the show now, a lot of what Vanessa said was dead on. Even more dead on was her retort to Jay and Kara Saun's judgmental tirades that the only reason they were so defensive about it was because they made it into the finals.

In fact, it's particularly ironic watching Jay's hurt and offended response on behalf of the show when you consider all the bad things HE'S said about the experience in the years since.

In the end, Vanessa did what anyone would have done in the same situation (if they were drunk and had already spilled their wine all over the floor).

"I don't want to be here. This is bullshit."

She walked out, to Heidi's eternal delight. Vanessa, you're one of the few contestants on the show we've never met but we're here to say, you were (mostly) right and you didn't deserve the dogpile you got for it.

Of course, we have to move along to the Wendy dogpile now.

"I think people misunderstand my objective by coming on the show. I didn't come on the show to interact with fellow designers, I came on the show to win. I don't regret my approach. I just assumed that we were all doing the best we could in this difficult environment to get to the end."

"It's not about getting to the end, it's about how you get to the end."

You know, that's all well and good, and we're not really defending Wendy because she was pretty much a shithead through the whole contest, but for Christ's sake people, it's a REALITY TV COMPETITION. It really is astonishing to watch just how naive everyone was about the whole thing back in those days.

And in that vein...

4) HOTEL ROOM-GATE

Now, THIS, kittens, THIS was PRIMO DRAMA. The naivete of the Season 1 contestants allowed for some fantastic moments like this, where they simply let out every single thing they were thinking on-camera and with both barrels.

"It is a little bizarre that you live in a room with me and you don't speak to me."

"I'm not bizarre, how's that bizarre? If I think you're a backstabbing liar then I'm not going to talk to you, so to me it's not being fake, it's being real."

"Maybe if I coerce them to fight with each other physically, I automatically win."

Hey, what do you know, Jay? It worked!

"Wendy, everybody hates you. It's a fact."

So much for staying out of it.

"I've met people like you my whole life, who pretend to be your friend, who stab you in the back, who will do anything, I live in freaking Hollywood, do you understand that? You're going to need your soul one day, Wendy, and you don't have it."

"Don't sell your soul to get anywhere because you may need it one day."

Oh, come on. We're with Wendy on this one. Again, not to defend her, and we can certainly understand why Jay and Kara Saun were hurt and angry, but when you start talking about someone's soul in the context of a reality television competition, you're getting a little full of yourself. Especially since, Jay and Kara Saun, at this point, had absolutely no reason to be threatened by her. They had to know that she had no chance to win the competition, so why not just ignore her at this point? They would have come off looking a lot better, which is probably a lesson that was learned by all the designers in subsequent seasons because we were never again treated to such delicious drama as this on the show. Oh sure, there were blowups and personality conflicts, but nothing like this, where the full on hatred of the participants was laid out for everyone to see.

[Screencaps: projectrungay.blogspot.com]


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Project Runway's Most Dramatic Moments, S1, Part 1

Let's get our crazy on, bitches!

We're at 17 days and counting until the LONG OVERDUE premiere of Project Runway Season 6 and we thought it would be fun to take a look back at the most dramatic moments in the show's history. Sure, we all SAY we watch the show because we love fashion and creativity and enjoy watching talented people do amazing things - and that's true (partially) - but no matter how much we all may complain when the drama gets out of hand, we can't deny that the dramatic moments are what make the show so DELICIOUS to watch. Besides, we'd argue that if you want to watch creative and talented people pull out work under ridiculous circumstances, the drama is to be expected.

We struggled to figure out a way to do this in countdown format but we simply couldn't come up with an order that either of us agreed with. Instead, we're going to break it down by season. We leave it up to you guys to determine what order they should be in, but we guarantee, you'll find it an almost impossible task.

So, without further ado...

1) MUSTACHE-GATE

"The Wendy Pepper that showed up the first day of Project Runway is not the Wendy Pepper we know now."

Oh, honey. Truer words were never spoken.

She's long been considered Project Runway's first "villain," and while we agree that it's a sobriquet Wendy Pepper more than earned, it wasn't quite so simple as that.

The truth of the matter was that Wendy was in fact the show's first walking tragedy. She THOUGHT she was getting by through her scheming and her plotting, but in the end, the people she "plotted" against would have gone home with or without her added schemes. In reality, she was a fascinating person to watch because she was so completely un-self-aware and instead of revealing what a Machiavellian schemer she was, she instead showed the world how low her self esteem was and how out of her element she felt. She didn't make it to the finals because of talent or because of scheming. She made it there because the competition was structured in such a way that consistently doing just well enough to not be auf'd had the same outcome as doing the best work week after week. A flaw in the show that we suspect was "corrected" in subsequent seasons.

All of this came to a head when someone who'd had enough of her crap took a pen and drew a mustache on a picture of her daughter. Now, in real life, with people who aren't completely drowning in stress and low self esteem, such an act might make them angry, but they wouldn't have a complete meltdown over it.

Not so with our Wendy. She completely LOST IT. You would have thought that someone had assaulted her daughter instead of the silly, childish prank it was.

In all likelihood, her sobbing response to the situation was simply another in a long line of ploys to cover for the fact that she thought that EVERYONE ELSE was more talented than her and that she had no right to be there.

Was it wrong for Kevin someone to draw that mustache on a picture of someone's daughter? Absolutely. But people were under tremendous stress at the time and Wendy had just gotten away with throwing Kevin under the bus deliberately in order to get him auf'd.

Under different circumstances, her co-designers would have probably been a little more sympathetic, but she'd burned all her bridges behind her and at that point, no one really cared anymore.

Of course, part of what made it fun ...




... was the bald-faced lying. Like we said, DELICIOUS.

Also, it was hysterical that the whole drama played out with everyone dressed in ugly postal uniforms.

2) SHOE-GATE

Ah...yes. Shoe-gate. Part of what made S1 so great was that the personal dramas all played out like one season-long plotline. Like Melrose Place with sewing machines. There probably wouldn't have been a shoe-gate if there already hadn't been a mustache-gate.

The short version: Kara Saun contracted with Dollhouse shoes to give her custom-made shoes to be worn in her runway show and then when she was called on it by Tim (on behalf of the producers), tried to claim that the shoes were worth 15 dollars a piece in order to ensure that she stayed under her $8000 budget.

A claim that was clearly bullshit after one glance at the shoes.

The reason this made for such delicious drama was because Kara Saun had always been the golden girl of the season. She'd won more challenges than any other designer and the judges clearly adored her. Wendy, dripping with low self esteem and feeling like the dirty girl in the school cafeteria, was LOVING the controversy.

This all played out in the pre-finale show workroom, with two people who HATED each other (Kara Saun and Wendy) and one person who was trying desperately to stay above the whole thing (Jay).

"Finally! Something happens to Miss Fucking Perfect. Love it!"

Although he wasn't coming off as above-it-all as he would have liked. Yes, we know that sound bite was him quoting Wendy but he clearly had a problem with the situation.

Up till that point, Kara Saun really HAD been Miss Perfect. Not only had she won the most challenges, but she'd done almost everything she could to get along with other people and stay above the fray.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason (we suspect she felt she was untouchable at this point), she tried to pull a fast one on the producers, which left her open to criticism from the very LAST person she wanted to hear:

"No, don't talk to me."

"Well, I will talk to you because I'm going to tell you that Jay and I shopping at the store for five-dollar shoes is hardly comparable to you custom-designing shoes and putting an arbitrary value of five dollars on something that looks like your shoes."

"I just heard you on the phone equate a shoe at a sample sale for five dollars to a shoe you custom-designed and had made to your specifications..."

"...and that, my dear, is not fair or above board, Miss Perfect."

All of which put we, the viewers, in the bizarre position of cheering on the person we hated while she tore into the person we previously had been cheering on. The fact of the matter was that Wendy was RIGHT.

In the end, the producers came up with a solution that was so bull-shitty that we're still rolling our eyes 5 years later: the models would walk the runway in the custom-made shoes but the judges were supposed to ignore them in assessing the collection, which is all but impossible when the shoes are perfectly coordinated to the outfits, not to mention when they're knee-high white leather boots with fur trim.

[Screencaps: Projectrungay.blogspot.com]


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