“Time to bring the runway to the beach”: Bathroom Modeling Gone Reality TV

Since I don't shop and do bathroom modeling here (the clothes in Korea just aren't doing it for me) I have somehow attracted this program called Project Runway from Bravo, a reality show something like America's Top Model but intelligent focusing on fashion designers.

When I watched Uli’s collection an image unfolded of a woman, ultimately the dream of every hard-working woman I know, lounging on a tropical beach daydreaming. She looked out at her surroundings and wondered what it would be like to be on an African jungle safari. She gazed at the vast sand around her, whose color and texture is embodied in these nude color garments.


Glimpses of tiger teeth or claw-like shells peered out of the sand.She studied the ridges of the palm trees and saw the stripes of a white tiger. She looked out at the sea and sky and imagined it were an African sky. (Notice this is the first African American model she uses.) Then comes the sun and like a woman proudly radiating her beauty we see the first swimsuit whose rays vibrate into animal stripes. The sun begins to set and there is a violet sky as smooth and dark as a cougar. (Again, her model chose is perfect.) Back to a tiger-like bark dress (It is this erratic color jump that most annoyed the judges)
for a final transition to the green leaves of a palm tree where the woman dives into the lush jungle, swallowing both her and our imagination. It was a dream within a dream within a dream, the metaphor of our existence.

And the winner is…

I have watched the entire 3^rd season now and though my heart feels heavy, I understand why the judges chose Jeffery instead of Uli, for the same reason that co-host Tim Gunn and Harvard professors use SAT words, because the rest of "us" don't. What makes the elite of any community, art, intellectual or otherwise is their ability to separate themselves from the masses. When the message seems too clear, too commercial the elite apparently feel less special and potentially obsolete—the masses themselves trusting their own opinion, not the elite’s means someone’s out of a job or at least perceives themselves to be.

This is an intellectual attitude that I do not really agree with, especially when the message the masses are embracing is that of such beauty and positive uplift. The peace movement and the record-breaking numbers of people choosing peace over war despite its rejection by government regimes is an emblem for which I speak.

Jeffery had a perspective that only he really understood. I know a thing or two about the Japanese esthetic from which Jeffery was inspired. It has lot to do with pathology (perfect for his roller-coaster drug past). In literature they even have a special word for it, 物の哀れ mono no aware or "the pathos of things." But based on PR’s judge comments, Jeffery could have talked about the aesthetic of concrete for all they knew.

It was this that the judges respected; it was this—dark, complicated, perplexing—that qualified him for elite fashion design status. It’s the emperor has no clothes meets high fashion.

Uli, on the other hand, appeared too humble for the judges, too transparently easy. Her simple but evocative message was so obvious that it irritated the judges who constantly mocked her. They mocked her for being inspired by nature. She lived in Miami and designed what she saw, a story far too juvenile, and for her to be an uneducated immigrant from East Germany, also a story that had already been told. Certainly the New York bias, where the fashion industry is based, influenced the judges’ decision. Attitude over ease; conflict over carefree(dom). Why be inspired by trees and sand when there are sky scrapers and other people’s art to model your stuff after.

Ultimately, what I have learned from Project Runway is that high fashion feels as much for a woman as an artist feels for a canvas—she is nothing more than a tool for expressing his perspective, or more crudely, his existentialist angst (Jeffery ’s collection). Because I appreciate art I can understand these clothes as illustrations of the extent to which we “humans” fool ourselves into believing we are disjointed and broken. It makes my choice, the celebration of creation’s connective cord through a woman, for a woman, by a woman (Uli’s collection), all the more clear.