So what'dja think about Project Runway last night? I personally liked peeking into the personal lives of Rami, Chris, Christian and Jillian almost as much as seeing their designs for Bryant Park. Tim Gunn visited all 4 designers in their homes and offered his critique of their collections so far.
We saw Christian's teeny tiny New York garret. The boy's going to be a big star someday, and he can say with 100% truthiness, that "for art" he slept on a mat in a hallway and made crazy beautiful clothes in a postage stamp sized apartment.
Rami's story was surprising...he's from Jerusalem, but not Jewish. The family immigrated to L.A. Mom was a former Ms. Jordan, and while the family was traditionally middle eastern -- ergo, not scripted to be "cool" about a gay son who likes to design clothes -- they always supported Rami and believe mightily in his talent. From the looks of Rami's L.A. studio, the guy's doing well.
Jillian, the Long Island girl, sees herself as design heir to fellow Lawnguylanders Donna Karan, Michael Kors, and Isaac Mizrachi. She appears to be Italian, judging by the honking Christmas tree in the house and the food on the table, (not to mention the tacky Christmas sweater Jillian was wearing...sense of humor?) I peg them as Italians living somewhere on the south shore, say Massapequa. BTW, she's got a very cute boyfriend.
And Chris...what is there to say? This delightful, tender, former drag queen just loves life. He's nuts. I love him. He put actual human hair on his dresses and giggled about it. Billie Edington of MTV News writes:
Of course, nothing was quite as special as Tim's visit to Chris' studio back in New York. Chris introduced his collection to Tim as beauty with a quirk, 95 percent fashion, 5 percent costume. He started by showing Tim a velvet crocheted hairpin dress. Promising start. He then moved on to a tailored black coat with some sort of fur trim. Before you could say PETA, he told Tim it was human hair. I shared Tim's gag-reflex reaction, but I can't take credit for his genius analogy comparing Chris' lack of objectivity to a trip to the monkey house. It goes like this: "You know when you walk into the monkey house at the zoo, and you're like, 'Oh my God, this place stinks'? And after you're there 20 minutes you're like, 'It's not so bad'? And after an hour you don't notice? You've been living in the monkey house, Chris."
Clearly the drama of this episode was the Chris VS Rami fashion walk off. With 4 designers remaining and only 3 slots for Fashion week, someone was going down. Rami and Chris each selected 3 looks out of their collection, for the runway showdown. See their clothes here.
I'm not tellin' who won, but most other blogs are. Here's the :60 video recap of the show.