Alright poodles, we're rolling up our sleeves and getting back into it.
This is the part where we talk about her personality on the show and blahblahblah. Nothing against her, but except for a minor and highly edited storyline about a rivalry with Uli, there's nothing to talk about, so let's jump in.
Let's start off by admitting one thing: Sweet P has an aesthetic; a sort of shabby romanticism of faded flowers and hippy chick girliness coupled with an ever-so-slight L.A. edge to it. It's not our thing at all but it's a perfectly commendable aesthetic and you can do a lot of interesting things with it. We're going to try and bear that in mind in our critiques. It's only fair to admit upfront when something's just not your thing.This was a pretty nice dress. Somewhat plain, and we don't like the color, but cute nonetheless.
Our main criticism is the fit on this garment. Generally speaking, Sweet P shies away from fitted garments. That's fine, but this is clearly a dress that's meant to fit the wearer a little better than this. Admit it, if your girlfriend came out of the dressing room looking like this, you'd say, "Let's go down a size and see how that looks."
Still, a good first entry and one that made us and the judges sit up a little bit because it was different from what we'd expected.
Okay, here's what we're talking about. That faded, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, rocker chick thing she does. Definitely not our thing but if you're going for that, this is a very good design.
Again, it's very away from the body and floaty, but with this dress, it makes sense because she clearly wasn't going for a fitted or tailored look like the previous dress.
It's also not a color that we particularly like but if you like that sort of thing, if you're one of those airy, poetry-writing, flowers-in-your-hair, boyfriend-rides-a-motorcycle types, then this is the dress for you.
A pretty dress, no doubt. Main criticism: technical. Look at that side seam. You can hide that kind of sewing with a lot of frayed ruffles but you can't hide it in a basic seam.We should add that we DO like those frayed ruffles as well as the frayed and ripped fabric roses. A nice touch.
This look got a lot of criticism in the comments section but honestly? We have no problem with it.
Except for the fact that it doesn't hide that it was made from unconventional materials and therefore could never "pass" as "real" clothing, it's still a kind of cute, kind of witty design for her.
A costume? Sure. But a cute, well-made one. There were certainly entries a lot worse than this one in this category, including the one from the winning designer.
The silhouette, the colors and the flowers all tied it in nicely to the rest of the collection.
If you read our previous posts on the show, then you know we felt this collection received higher scores than we felt it merited. The three previous looks deserved whatever praise the judges wanted to heap on them, but we were totally befuddled when the judges all praised this look.
It's not awful, mind you (at least this part of the dress isn't); it's just so incredibly basic and style-less. Plain Jane. And regular readers know how little we like big floppy bows as embellishments for grown women.
It's a pretty fabric, even if we don't like the color (again), but it doesn't remotely look like a red carpet dress, which, at the very least is supposed to look expensive.
This, at its best, looks like a home-sewn bridesmaid dress. Put her in a big floppy hat and she'd be right at home in a 1978 wedding party.
The absolute worst part of it is that awful dust ruffle on the bottom. Unfortunately, there aren't any good shots of it, so if you can't see it or remember it, trust us. It's bad.
It's really not a bad collection at all. As we said, it showed some growth and expansion on her part (as well as some improvement) while remaining totally within her aesthetic and identifiable as her work. We have no doubt that she has or could have a decent sized customer base to build a line on. We just think the judges over-praised and over-rated it. In our imaginary judging, she would have rated a solid 5th place, possibly 4th, but definitely not ahead of Uli's.Which, come to think of it, is probably why the editors worked so hard to create an Uli/Sweet P rivalry.
[Photo: David Russell/myLifetime.com - Screencaps: Projectrungay.blogspot.com]
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