We are midway through the premiere season of Project Runway All-Stars, and I’m trying to muster a reason not only why I should care, but more importantly why I should continue watching at all.
For reasons I cannot fathom, none of our comforting favourites are back: wise silver-fox patriarch Tim Gunn, pluckily cruel Heidi Klum, harshly discerning Nina Garcia, fake-tanned yenta Michael Kors, all nowhere to be seen. Instead, we have supermodel Angela Lindvall as host, who has both the charisma and line delivery of a stack of glossy paper; Marie Claire editor Joanna Coles as mentor, who has yet to convince me that she knows anything about clothing beyond how to look at it; and Georgina Chapman (of gown house Marchesa) and Isaac Mizrahi as judges. I love me some Mizrahi, but really, the most animated moment of the current season was his fight with Chapman over who loves a jumpsuit more. The only thing that’s familiar about All-Stars is the competition format and the contestants. Those poor, self-deluded contestants.
Now, I am a devotee of this franchise: I have followed Project Runway since its beginning. I have indulged in a couple of seasons of Project Catwalk (the British progenitor) and am steadfastly devoted to Project Runway Canada. If there ever was a target audience for this show, it’s me.
I’ve always enjoyed Project Runway for its elevation of the discourse of reality television. Unlike, say, the Top Model franchises, where after 36 cycles (or however many it’s been) Tyra Banks has yet to convince me of the hidden craft of modeling, or that being dangled by a belaying rope from the top of a tall building has anything to do with the exercise of said dubious craft, the Project Runway contestants have to think around their skill set in order to succeed at the proposed challenge. Here are people with an actual learned technique, slaloming through an (admittedly absurd) competition on the merits of their technical proficiency.
This eliminates many of the preposterous tropes of reality television competition. First, the contestants all have some kind of native intelligence, because they’ve all had to learn a skill (let’s not say “master a skill” just yet). And I know why they’re on my TV: their designs got them there, not because they’re pretty, or they want a husband, or they have a puzzling yen for subsistence living in hazardous locations. This also means that the judging is not wildly arbitrary. When people get booted off, or “Auf’d,” as my friends are fond of saying, it’s because of their poor design choices, not because they failed at sufficiently broadcasting their “personalities” or because they couldn’t negotiate the harem mentality fast enough to earn themselves a rose.
On the other hand, let’s not kid ourselves: Project Runway is a reality television show, and will therefore forever be utterly irrelevant. I am under no illusions that I am watching the gestation and birth of America’s next top fashion designer. Oh sure, they get a car, they get seed money, they can sell their collections on Bluefly or Piperlime or whatever colour-coded online tchotchke retailer is sponsoring a given season. But in the nine iterations of Project Runway, has any contestant actually made a go of it? Anyone heard of Chloe Dao lately? Do the names of Project Runway winners have the same currency, in the fashion world, as Jil Sander, Marc Jacobs, Alexander Wang, Miuccia Prada or, for God’s sake, Bob Mackie?
Of course not. Reality television shows aren’t about the real world; they’re about entertainment. Anyone with actual ambition or work to get on with doesn’t go on them, which makes the existence of Project Runway All-Stars somewhat baffling. First of all, “All-Stars” is a bit of a misnomer. None of these people have actually won any of their respective seasons of Project Runway, and most didn’t even make it to the top three. So perhaps a more apt title would be Project Runway Favorite Losers, or Project Runway Also-Ran, or Project Runway Didn’t Quite Make It, or Project Runway Insanity. Because really, the presence of these designers on this show is a perfect illustration of the old saw defining insanity as forever repeating the same actions and expecting different results. They’ve all been here before; they’ve all failed at it before; and yet here they all are, doing some of the same challenges, parading the same personality traits that got them camera attention the last time, all lusting after the same non-prize that eluded them the last time.
Watching this stale re-run of a show only takes an hour of my time every week, which makes me only a little bit of an idiot. But these people — the ever-increasing self- caricature of Austin Scarlett, the gawping folksiness of Michael Costello, the braying Kenley Collins — have knowingly entered the ring again. Who do you have to be to voluntarily submit yourself to another round of the same sadisms?
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Sholem Krishtalka is the Toronto Standard’s art critic.
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