We’re not sure if it was the move to Lifetime or just the inevitable gild falling off the lily, but our once-rabid devotion to
Project Runway has waned to the point where we barely realized Season Nine (?!) starts tonight.
Sigh—we can remember a time when we dissected each episode with surgical precision, assigned heroes and villains, and affirmed the unflappable refinement of Tim Gunn over coffee the next morning. Now we can’t even remember who won last season. (Um, was it the gay guy or the quiet girl?)
Any
who, back to the Season Nine premiere. Thankfully all the regulars have returned—Nina, Tim, Tangerine Koors, and Miss Heidi, who—surprise—is
not pregnant, along with guest bobblehead Christina Ricci. Gone, however, is
Models of the Runway—that pointless spin-off where the mannequins, who basically have no control over whether they stay or go, act like they have a say in whether they stay or go.
Awwww!
Weirdly, this season sees 20 designers appearing in the first episode but only 16 actually make it into the competition—so we have watch them do the designer equivalent of lip-synching for their lives and explain why they should be on the show. It’s kind of a reverse of the Fashion Week stunts they’ve pulled before, where five designers get to go to the tents but only four get to compete—we call shenanigans!
But the first episode is really about sizing up the competition and figuring out who we love, who we hate and who we just want to feed miniature Dove bars to in a palatial suite at the Plaza. (It is for
us, anyway.) So we pored over the designer profiles and video clips on the Lifetime site to see what kind of characters we’re dealing with this go-around. (There’s 20, so we just did a sampling).
Click to the next page and let’s begin the
character assassination analysis!
Project Runway debuts tonight at 9pm on Lifetime.
ronnie
this sh*t is still on?
Dorothea from Germany
Heidi has such an annoying voice. I can’t stand it. It sounds even more terrible when she speaks German. I don’t watch “Germany’s Next Topmodel” anymore. Heidi is so disgustingly condescending to the candidates.
christopher di spirito
I must be the only gay man in the USA who has never seen Project Runway.
Big Mean Carl
I’m just watching until Miss Piggy shows up.
Elloreigh
Well, for those one or two of us who do still watch the show:
I say Danielle Everine and Laura Kathleen are the designers to watch out for. Danielle seems to be wound pretty tight, and seems to have been shocked that she wasn’t one of the top 3 in the first round. That will either inspire her to step up her game, or to self-destruct somewhere down the road.
As for Laura Kathleen, don’t let her blond pretty looks fool you into thinking she doesn’t have the grit for this competition.
Then again, I would have voted Gretchen off several times last season, and she ended up winning. So don’t go by my opinion.
I would have given the win last night to Anthony Ryan Auld. At least he did make the top 3. It kinda scares me that Miss Trinidad also made the top 3, making pants and sewing silk for the first time in her life. She’s either wickedly naturally talented, or damn lucky to have pulled that off. I remain skeptical of her ability to make it through to the finals, but we’ll see.
I would have sent Joshua Christiansen (sp?) home, rather than Rafael.