The thing about Project Runway is that almost everything I love about the show is utterly inconsequential. It’s a reality show about would-be fashion mavens and yet I’m more interested in pondering how designer Leanne can be 27 and yet still look like a 14 year-old who puts hearts above the letter I when she writes in her My Little Pony diary. Or why fellow designer Suede talks about himself in the third person. Or why every time their mentor Tim walks into a room I find myself making lewd remarks while imitating his nasal drawl. I’m not there for the challenge of making a cocktail dress from materials that would make MacGyver blanche. I’m there to be totally shallow. I like that.

 

The thing about reality shows that the public cheerfully, and wilfully, disregards is that it’s about as artificial as wrestling. That’s not to say what happens on screen didn’t happen ‘for real’ to the participants; it’s just that it’s edited, structured and reworked into a narrative—and that’s presuming there isn’t any manipulation from the producers beforehand.

 

I don’t particularly mind this—again, I’m here to criticize Jerrel’s severe choices in model make-up. However while watching this, and other reality shows, I have come to realize the narrative tends to follow a predictable pattern after a while and the producers who shape it have a few moral lessons in mind. I thought I’d share them for the benefit of all—especially those who think Kenley has a voice like a foghorn.

 

George Orwell once observed that “any life when viewed from the inside is a series of defeats”. George Orwell might consider himself lucky that he never had to witness the internal monologue of the designers on Project Runway. Every creation they make, according to them, is always fabulously brilliant. Every criticism is always just plain wrong. The only obstacles they ever face are external ones: criticisms, pressures of time, the material and Tim’s acerbically encouraging remarks. I know these designers are good and talented but they never appear to have more than a glimmer of self-doubt. This hubris usually ends leading to their demise, as their brilliant concoction of fringed fabric and torn up leather they think is a work of genius ends up being criticized by Michael Kors for looking like an eviscerated Christmas tree. And, of course, they never see this coming.

 

Perhaps because I’m a heterosexual male who as a teenager tended to look at his sister’s copy of Vogue for the attractive women and not what they were wearing, the aesthetics in judging fashion seems completely fluid, bordering on being a form of semiotics. Apparently, the worst thing you can be is (as said with Heidi Klum’s German Midwest American accent) ‘boring’. And yet, going in the opposite direction, say an avant garde creation that would embarrass Vivienne Westwood, gets you punished as well for being ‘too costumey’. It would seem the judges like you to be visionary so long as you tiptoe above the crowd rather than stand.

 

After a while you begin to notice that the designers get a little resentful of the judges denying their obvious talent and they get moody and bitchy about it on camera. And at that point they might as well send Tim in wearing a Glenda the Good Witch costume to dismiss them from the show immediately because the resentment hangs over them like a funeral shroud until Heidi tells them “Auf Weidersehen”. The only exception to this is the especially attractive pouters; for some reason their capacity for eye candy outweighs the sheer annoyance of their sulkiness—and so Kenley gets a pass yet again—but this is true of most reality TV.

 

If there is one thing Project Runway has taught me, it’s that to get ahead in life you need to be totally insincere to everyone. The designers are icons of passive aggressiveness. They say polite, diffident things about their fellow designer’s outfits and then rip it apart as soon as you’ve left the sewing room. Tim, whose job it is to coach them, will use phrases like “I’m not getting it” or “You have a lot of work to do” rather than “This glorified sarong is the most embrassing thing I’ve ever seen” or “Call your mother and see if she can get you a job at JoAnn Fabrics. As a cashier.” Also, call me old school about my reality shows, but when someone is eliminated, they should leave the Board Room Island Catwalk immediately, not hug all the colleagues who are pretty much thrilled the victim has been axed.

 

Okay, as moral lessons go, it’s pretty soft and self-serving, but, hey, this is a show about fashion not about the ethical abyss of policing, the foreign nihilism of living in the past, or the evil that lawyers do. I’m good with that.

 

Just so long as they eventually explain why designer Korto seems so depressed all the time.