Project Runway: Miz Shoes Reviews

Boy-HOW-dee, was last night the best Project Runway, EVER, or WHAT?

They really, really had me going with Laura's reference to the Olsen twins, and the clip of Heidi saying there'd be two special guests. The fan blogs/forums had been rife with speculation about why the "special benefits to winning a challenge" line was dubbed in and what those special benefits could possibly be. Last night we found out, with a vengence.

The show opened with the three boys left standing (Kayne, Jeffrey-the-pinheaded-Shmoo, and Michael) all congratulating themselves and each other about still being there. Kayne and JTPS are just ripping on Vincent being gone, and laughing and laughing and laughing about him going home. Maybe that was gloating, gloating, gloating. Whichever. And Jeffrey being Jeffrey, he has to bring up how happy he still is over the fact that Angela is gone and he won two challenges, but mostly, Angela is gone.

Over in their room, the girls are much better behaved, and Laura is just beaten down by pregnancy, the criticism of the other designers, pregnancy, stress and her last week's review on the runway. Noooooo. We love you, Laura (especially with your hair loose). Just put on a little lipstick and get back in the game.

At the studio, or Parsons, or the runway, or where ever the hell Heidi gives them their next challenges, the designers are told HA HA, no challenge for YOU today, you guys are going to a party tonight and we will have not one, but two special guests and that's when you'll get your challenge. Then Heidi, wearing a very large pink and paisley scarf as a very short dress, gives them a nasty smile and a buh-bye and they are left to ponder the implications amongst themselves. Or maybe have a day off to sleep. That's what I'd do, anyway.

Exterior, night

We are outside of a bar. Inside, there is lots and lots and lots of champagne and the remaining five designers. Doesn't look like much of a par-tay to me, but that's what champagne is for, n'est pas? Of course they pop the corks, and, in what is only his second slip of the entire show, Michael literally pops the cork, and the wine spews everywhere. Dawg, that may be the way they open champers in the hood, but the correct way is to hold the cork and turn the bottle until the cork eases out and there is a slight pop, but the bubbles and the wine stay in the bottle where they are supposed to be. Note: both Jeffrey-the-pinheaded-Shmoo-and-recovering-alcoholic and Preggers Laura are tossing it back tonight.

In comes Heidi, and intros the first of their two special guests, and it's ----- VINCENT!!!!

Well, children, you have never seen pouting and stink eye and displays of blatant unhappiness and sulking and what not like we see next, since the last time someone ate the red crayon in a pre-school coloring hour. And that's just Jeffrey-the-pinheaded-Shmoo. He did show enough self control to not actually throw himself on the floor and pound his heels and fists and cry. But just barely. Instead, he settled for sulking on the settee like any old spoiled teenager. And when the second special guest proves to be Angela, well, sweetiedarlings, Kayne just gets on the settee with him and the two can barely be civil to each other, much less the rest of the gang.

The special benefit of winning a challenge (and Keith Malvoy being sent home for cheating, thus leaving the producers one designer short for elimination), it turns out, is a second chance. They each won a challenge, and so they get to come back for one last ride. The only caveat is that the only way they get to continue is to win the challenge. Otherwise? Back on the bus to East Jesus.

The party ends right there and then, with the two losers coming back into the mix. Some of the designers are more gracious about it than others. Imagine that.

Back at the Atlas, Laura explains to Angela how she, Angela, is only there because she rode to victory on the backs of Michael and Laura. Angela, true to form, disagrees and totally doesn't get that she would have lost had not the tasteful twosome grabbed those nasty little Signature Angela Fleurchons out of her mitts and limited her to a couple of them as buttons. Really? she asks. You think? Laura arches her perfect eyebrows, rolls her baby blues and says, DUH. Out here in television land, another million or so folks do the same and add, Oh, HELL to the yes, Angela.

Oh, yeah. the challenge. I almost forgot about it, what with all the drama and shit. A cocktail ensemble. In black and white. Only. And PS? The designers have to use every scrap of fabric they buy. If it's as large or larger than a postcard, they need to use it, somehow.

Angela asks Tim, before they go to Mood, if they can choose one or the other... he says, uh, no. Both. Black and white. Together. Remember this.

The Night of the Living Fleurchons

There is so much going on in this episode, that we don't even get to watch the designers shop. We go from sketching and kvetching to sewing. Laura is having a breakdown. She's lost her mojo. She's lost her ego. She's lost at sea and can't tell anymore what's good and what's bad. Speaking of which...

Vincent is sure he will win with a white top that looks like the Guggenheim Museum (better than it sounds) and a black eyelet slim skirt. He's bought way too much fabric and chooses to make a really awful, vee-shaped drape, uh, shawl to go with the dress. Vincent is hamstrung, too, by the fact that his model has been in a bicycle wreck on her way to the show, and he is given a new (also previously auf'ed) model as a replacement. She is nowhere near the same size as Jia, and splits every seam on his dress and he has to sew her in as she's getting hair and make up.

Uli is working with (don't be shocked!) black and white patterned flowy silks. Guess what? It's the same fucking dress, only short, and with sleeves that look like they aren't really sleeves, but opera-length gloves with no hands, only fluttery hand openings. Yeah. I didn't get it, either. It's Uli goes to Ren Fest, and it isn't particularly pretty. She makes an ugly necklace out of her extra fabric by stuffing a tube of one fabric with wads of other fabric and bunching it up at intervals to look like ginormous bead things. Woof.

Michael makes an asymetrical white dress with a huge black cumberbund with floral cut outs and add-ons and it is, as always with our man Michael, utter perfection on Nazri. Nazri must be hot stuff, because I actually know his model's name and the rest of them are just...the models. Michael lines a purse, or stuffs a purse, I couldn't really tell, with his extra fabric.

Jeffrey-the-pinheaded-Shmoo makes something that is atrocious, even by his low standards. It's black faux-pleather footless thigh-highs and a micro miniskirted bo-ho blouse. It's mostly white with black patterning.

Laura invokes the name and spirit of Josephine Baker (HEY! That's my dog's name/namesake, and now I love Laura even more than ever) and makes a white sorta mini-baby doll dress with black lace overlay, black lace trim on the square neckline and long, sleek, daggery feathers and beading along the hemline. It is, as always, impeccably tailored. Sigh. She makes a purse with her scraps.

Kayne uses black and black only to make a bat-winged, boat necked dress with no back. It's held on or held together by a white shoelace going through giant tabs all around the cut-out back. It's worse than it sounds. Tim almost bitch-slaps Kayne when he discovers that the only white material Kayne has is "trims" and the way Tim says the word "trim" makes it sound very, very dirty indeed. He makes a purse with his left-over trims.

Angela has made... a mess. She's made a micro-shrug out of black vinyl (?), and a sloppy, backless, shapeless, sleeveless hot mess of what is supposed to be a dress to go under it. The collar of the micro-shrug looks like Dracula's cape got mugged by white fleurchons on the way to the runway, and they are breeding all over it. It's eating her model's face, in fact, and it is just worse than anything else out there, except maybe Jeffrey-the-pinheaded-Shmoo's pleatherette thigh-highs. She's stuffed all her extra fabric into a crocodile mini-hatbox purse. The purse is from the Macy's accessory wall. Why she didn't make one of her stupid Signature Angela Fluerchon Covered sacks, instead? It's Angela, so who knows.

Don't Cry Out Loud

On the runway, the emergency back up judge tonight is Zac Posen, wearing a silver ascot. Oh, come on. Nina points out to Angela that one doesn't need to stuff material in a stiff, box-like purse to shape it, and that as far as she's concerned, Angela bent the rules so far that they snapped.

Michael Kors, in what is perhaps his first fashion faux-pas of the season, says that everything Jeffrey-the-pinheaded-Shmoo has done till now just looks like Gwen Stefani, to which I call bullshit. Gwen may make some questionable fashion choices (a bustle on a mini-skirt?) but she would never, ever, ever be caught dead in those broke-ass pleatherette thigh-highs.

Michael also does a dead-on impersonation of Uli and her mantra, "I'm from Miami, I design for hot veather." I'm laughing so hard, that I almost spilled my cosmopolitan.

Zac Posen shows some spot-on analysis of what he's seeing out there on the runway, despite the fact that he dressed himself in a silver ascot.

Everyone hates the proportions on Vincent's homage to the Guggenheim, and when he uses the awful shawl thing to add length to his skirt it looks much, much, much better. I thought about it for a while, and I think he should have done a full, gored skirt with the extra material, and I think the contrast between a very structured white top and the black eyelet and black sateen fullness could have been a winner for him. Oh, well. I'm not one of the voices in his head.

The winner? Miss Laura, but it could just as easily have gone to Michael. Once more, the judges gushed over how this guy is a fashion natural, a genius; how his presentation is always flawless, from hair and make up to accessories. I think they just didn't want him to win three.

Since you had to win to stay, Angela and Vincent go bye-bye once more. Jeffrey-the-pinheaded-Shmoo and Kayne are the bottom two. Kayne is (finally) given the boot for having, in White Trash vernacular, all of his taste in his mouth. In his final interview, Kayne lets us all know that he really isn't a bitch, he just played one on tee-vee. Yeah. Nice try, Nancy. Ain't none of us believin' that shit.

The only thing that could have made this episode any better would have been to see Jeffrey-the-pinheaded-Shmoo get tossed out on his shaved eyebrow. And one other thing. Dude. The fly-eye sunglasses with the rhinestones? Did Kayne give you those, because a) they are SO not rock and roll, and b) they are SO gay.

Whew. That was exhausting. PS... the closet was finished just in time for Project Runway, and I got to sleep in my real bed last night. Like I said at the beginning of this entry, was last night great, or what.