Saturday, August 18, 2012

Project Runway Season Ten, Episode Five: Working Girls!


Joanna Coles: "Marie Claire is launching a new publication called Marie Claire Working Girl, for the strong, powerful, and sophisticated women working in the world's oldest profession. It's the fastest growing segment of the fashion industry and we're very excited about it!"

That really is a huge untapped market! Why hasn't anyone thought of this before?

The designers will be working in two teams and they can't hide their enthusiasm:

Gunnar: "Teams are awesome!"

Raul: "I love working in a team!"

Elena: "Growing up in Ukraine, I was only able to survive through teamwork."

Ah, that's nice.

Elena: "Obviously, I had to kill off my teammates after I got what I needed from them, but the teamwork part was still really important."

Of course.

The teams are:

Team Six: Sonjia, Elena, Melissa, Dmitry, Alicia, and Raul

Team Five: Nathan, Ven, Christofur, Fabio, and Gunnar

Raul is picked last:

Raul: "I'll show them. I just have to punch them harder."

Well, that should work.

I can see a problem already with the teams. There are no women on Team Five. They don't know what a modern, sophisticated working girl wants to wear!

Each team has one designer who will end up on the bottom: Gunnar and Raul.

In the case of Gunnar, I really don't think it's his fault. He raised his objections to the stupid fabric choices and the inappropriate aesthetic that the rest of the team decided on, but was outvoted so he tried to do what the team wanted. Unfortunately, he couldn't figure out what his teammates wanted, so he ended up with a total mess.

And Raul is just a disaster, as usual.

OK, so they have to do a photo shoot. Elena, who is usually so calm and collected, becomes completely unhinged. She's screaming at everyone and complaining about the props:

Elena: "You can't have a chair in a photo! Chairs are what you sit in when you are going to the bathroom! Are you all crazy?"

Yes, we are all crazy. It isn't you.

Anyway, the teams finally manage to take some decent photos of the models looking like they are at work:


Ooh, that's very convincing!

Time for the runway:

Despite the fact that Team Six is clearly much better, we are told the score is tied. Team Six has a couple of duds, but on the whole, it's much more fresh and modern and Melissa wins:


Joanna Coles: "Oh, yes, I could definitely see a woman in either the street-walking or the legal profession wearing that!"

Michael Kors: "She looks like a hooker."

High praise, indeed, Michael.

Team Five has created a collection of old-fashioned resort wear:


Patty the Daytime Hooker: "Maybe if I were a nighttime hooker I could get away with wearing that. But I'm a daytime hooker, so I have to look good."

Patty knows what she's talking about. The only good thing in the collection is Christofur's skirt. He managed to turn an ugly fabric into something beautiful. Too bad picking an ugly fabric and making it beautiful was not the challenge this week. The judges loved Fabio's dress, but I thought it was ill-fitting and awful. Ven made something that would have been perfect for a working girl:


Specifically Ann Southern in the 1950s.

Raul is out again. He says goodbye in that special Raul way:

Raul: "Goodbye, everyone. Elena, I hate your guts."

Oh, my God, Raul, that is so rude. Of course you hate Elena; she's awful; everyone hates Elena. But the rest of us have the common courtesy to bitch about her behind her back. It's called manners.

5 comments:

lovemesomeuli said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
lovemesomeuli said...

Having previously worked as an attorney, I found the conversation about what lawyers would wear to be hilarious. Obviously the judges are out of touch with what "real" working women wear. As an attorney, I would have worn Ven's look, Dmitry's with a jacket, or Sonjia's blue skirt. Now I run an online business, so I work in a t-shirt and shorts.

Love the "Working Girl" reference. Yes, we all had hair and shoulder pads like that. Thanks for the reminder.

Catherine said...

Either NYC has been relocated to Mars, or the judges on this show have never been in any office other than a fashion-business office, because 99.99% of what they say is "perfect" for working women in wholly inappropriate - at least here in Rochester, New York.

Ellen said...

I'm thinking that this might be the final season of Project Runway.

new york house cleaning said...

These women have the power!