Project Runway Season Five – “Episode Five”

“Lipstick Jungle”

August 14th, 2008

After last week was spent pimping out NBC’s Olympics coverage, which has clearly benefitted from the attention (I’m equating its success with Project Runway, as unlikely as that is), so now NBC Universal is turning their attention into my universe: the surprise Sophomore pickup of NBC’s Lipstick Jungle, Brooke Shields’ drama series that is searching for an audience it never quite found.

The result is our first episode to separate our groups into pairs, and one of the most prevalent examples of the producers clearly influencing the celebrity client to select some designers who clearly don’t understand the aesthetic that is required. Kelli and Blayne end up in the Bottom Two for taste more than their execution (Although that was also poor), and chances are that if she had selected a few more appropriate designers we would have seen a far better challenge; but, I’m not convinced that’s what the show is really after.

I enjoy Project Runway because of the creativity, seeing what people create for these challenges that test their ability to adapt their own designs to a client, or to a certain rule or guideline. Here, though, this challenge was really quite straightforward, even though they tried to make it seem like this character (Wendy) was the most unique businesswoman in the history of television. No, she’s not: she’s just Brooke Shields. As a result, anyone whose aesthetic was very distant from Brooke Shields was not going to achieve well, and the sketches they created were rarely far off from their own personal style.

I think that’s why it’s tough to see Kelli go home in a week where, honestly, she shouldn’t have been designing that garment to begin with. The producers had that garment picked so that they could have a “worst” outfit, something that from the beginning was so inappropriate that it boggles the mind. While I understand that there is a potential interest in seeing whether someone can take something that seems to be on the wrong page and turn it into something fantastic, the inevitable failure of such efforts really isn’t that fun to watch.

Frankly, the end result came down to Blayne’s willingness to flat out say that he was the one responsible for his design that, clearly, wasn’t what they wanted. At that point, I’d have yelled at Brooke Shields for picking something that she knew wasn’t the right fit and thus “validating” it, but he simply said that it was his responsibility. Kelli started out by attacking Daniel’s track record, and that her past designs were great. Well, considering that the one challenge she won was working with grocery store materials, I don’t think that really counts towards her “taste” as Nina put it. And while this seems an unfortunate missed opportunity to get rid of Blayne, I found him much less annoying this week.

Everyone else just kind of got to skirt through this: I did enjoy Korto and Joe (Both who claim to be “above” the other drama) ending up with the most of it, and Terri and Suede trying to out-crazy the other in terms of their obsessiveness (Her line about no one sucking her titties was kind of fantastic in its awfulness), but their actual designs were just kind of there. And even the winning design was just kind of there, fairly one-dimensional and just further gives Keith an inflated sense of self-worth that is rubbing me the wrong way.

The best design was Jerell and Stella, which wasn’t given enough attention for its quality or its ability to connect with both of their design aesthetics. That is really what this challenge was about: creating something that worked for the TV show while mediating their own design with Brooke’s comments and their two styles. The winning design didn’t seem to achieve this to the same degree, and the show was never about that: it was about ensuring that two of the designs were poor enough to create a Bottom Two between crap and crappier, as opposed to two designs that didn’t quite live up to their potential.

And that’s a bit unfortunate, even if it is the lay of the land these days. And, in case NBC was wondering, I’m still not going to watch Lipstick Jungle. Sorry!

Cultural Observations

• I really enjoyed Kenley’s outburst of laughter, as it really is quite hilarious that Daniel is outright convinced of his own aesthetic being something it, well, isn’t. Outside of having the patience to work with plastic cups, he just hasn’t made anything that interesting; it is interesting, though, to see these two who were so chummy last week suddenly devolve into Kenley’s disapproval of Daniel’s perspective. She’s a cold one, that Kenley.
• Jerell bounced back nicely from last week’s struggles, and Stella continues to do strong work in various forms which has allowed for her to stick around despite her niche aesthetic. While her use of leather in various challenges is getting a bit stale, this duo week gives her a chance to play more subtlety and show a bit more versatility with another designer. It was a good pair for both of them.