Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: The twins are annoyed with the other contestants, the other contestants are annoyed with the twins, the twins end up making a variation of an outfit they’ve made before, none of the judges comment on their narrow design aesthetic, and another episode of Project Runway wraps up. If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, well, yeah, we’re there, folks. We keep thinking Project Runway is going to zhuzh things up or shake up this season’s established format, and we’re just not there yet — and we may never get there! So let me just champ down on this bit (yes, I am appropriating horse terminology because of the Western challenge) and get to recapping another episode that made me long for someone, anyone, to ask either Jesus or Antonio if they can make anything but a microsized tube top or a duster coat. I long for variance! And I’m getting nothing in return!
Let’s start the frustrations of “Runway Rodeo” off with the expected. The judges send Miss Joan home for her streetwear outfit, and somehow Yuchen makes it about himself. Look, I’m being a bit of a jerk here, I know. But Yuchen cries on the runway, he apologizes to Law, he apologizes to Miss Joan, he sobs in the workroom when she’s leaving; my man makes a big scene, and I understand that he’s going through it, I just also think … this was Miss Joan’s moment, and he kind of took it over. Miss Joan ends up comforting him, and although we always knew she was going to leave in a classy way — she’s 60, she’s survived cancer, she has a business, she’s good — and although it’s clear that everyone is upset about her departure, I wish this felt like more of a moment for her rather than a moment for Yuchen. But maybe Project Runway went hard on showing Yuchen’s shattered confidence because he basically gets the yips this challenge, designing a look that Christian warned him against with a fabric Christian warned him against, and I couldn’t help but think at the end of the episode that Yuchen really should have gone home instead of Miss Joan. And probably should go home this episode instead of the person the Project Runway editors are heavily implying to be the next contestant out.
This week’s challenge: Western wear! At the runway, Christian’s on a white horse, and Heidi’s reclining on a pile of hay. The two of them tell the contestants that they’ll have one day and a $500 budget to create a Western look. Heidi’s exact phrasing for the challenge is “your take on Western chic,” and Christian says “fresh takes on classic country Western styles” when describing the fashion trend, and the episode’s description from Disney+ specifies “a modern take on Western chic.” I use all this context because I’d like to emphasize the words “modern” and “your take” here; we’ll come back to those later. Anyway, Jesus and Antonio are amped about the challenge because they’re from northern Mexico, they grew up in the culture, Antonio still dresses like a cowboy (although, is wearing a cowboy hat enough to be a cowboy, realistically?), and Jesus says they have “western Indigenous” roots and DNA. After shopping at Mood, they both get to work super quickly, and almost immediately, Jesus makes a mistake. He decides to interface his leather fabric (basically lining it with a supportive layer of fabric), and as he’s ironing the two layers, he burns his pale, eggshell-y leather with the hot iron. Veejay is delighted to see the mark that Ethan compares with a pit stain or boob-sweat stain — I agree with those descriptors, and would add as a comparison point “the grimy yellowish stain in a frat house’s never-cleaned bathtub” — and Jesus is despondent because he doesn’t have a backup fabric. IS NO ONE LISTENING TO CHRISTIAN WHEN HE SAYS TO GET ANOTHER OPTION? ARE THE DESIGNERS NOT ABLE TO BECAUSE THEIR BUDGETS ARE SO LOW? IF SO, THEN WHY AREN’T WE BOOSTING THE BUDGET? THIS SHOW DOES NOT SEEM TO COST ANY MONEY WHATSOEVER!
Ahem. Sorry. Jesus is bummed, but then Christian comes in and loves the result. He thinks Jesus should lean into the error by now, purposefully burning more of the leather and creating a kind of pattern, and I simultaneously appreciate that Christian gave Jesus very thoughtful advice and agree with Ethan’s exasperated, thrown-up-hands in his confessional when he reacts to Christian’s guidance. Some more of Christian’s reactions: He’s concerned about and somewhat confused by Veejay’s choice to make a dress out of red vinyl and hand fray hundreds of strips of fabric for it, and he’s flat-out disgusted by Yuchen’s floor-length evening gown made out of silver sequins. Earlier at Mood, Christian had shoved a bolt of similar fabric away from Yuchen’s hands, but Yuchen went with it anyway, and he’s seemingly making a prom dress out of it. Ack! Also worth pointing out: Antonio’s making a fringed, cropped jacket and miniskirt out of pearly faux-leather, and Christian very gently suggests that the look is basic, it’s been done. It has, and it has specifically by Antonio and Jesus! The twins have increasingly relied on silhouettes that consist of a strip tube top or bandeau top, a tiny miniskirt, and a long, layered jacket, and once again, both brothers are doing the same thing. I wish Christian had pushed further with making this point, but he’s not the only one overlooking it; the judges are, too.
The two biggest stories out of the work room are Yuchen’s bizarro stubbornness in sticking with his look (he doesn’t know what Western style is and he’s never heard of Dolly Parton, but he’s not tapping into the other designers for a real genre definition he can use, and he’s refusing to take “Mommy Christian’s” advice) and Veejay’s observation (?) that she shares with her enemy Jesus (??) that she thinks Ethan’s snakeskin maxi dress with lacing down the torso and thighs looks like her gray-wool dress with side cutouts from “Boring to Brilliant” (?????). Veejay, what are you doing? My extremely unkind take is that she knew her dress was going to get torn apart by the judges and decided to stir some shit with Ethan to take the heat off, but that’s evil-mastermind stuff. The reality is probably that, like everyone else competing on the show, Veejay is sleep-deprived, stressed-out, paranoid, and worried about whether she’ll advance. Either way, I agree with Ethan’s comment that she’s “spewing bullshit,” and was deeply amused by his “I don’t agree that a full crocodile gown has anything to do with her wool minidress,” and Veejay doesn’t bring it up on the runway, so whatever.
Ah, yes, the runway! Is Nina there? She is not, and I must say, I’m feeling uncharitable enough toward Nina, given her many absences, that I’m ready to blame her for Project Runway’s definition of Western fashion, including a picture of Taylor Sheridan and a mention of Yellowstone, Nina’s favorite show. She’s hurt us a lot; why not also ascribe this awfulness to her? Instead, Zac Posen and country star Mickey Guyton — the first Black woman signed to a major country label, in 2011 — are the guest judges alongside Heidi and Law. The looks are:
Yes, pointy 3D horns! Don’t worry, I’ll soon explain. Once the runway show is over, Heidi announces that Ethan, Veejay, and Yuchen were the judges’ least favorite looks. That means Antonio, Jesus, and Belania were the favorites, and I honestly was aghast at realizing that the judges had rewarded both the most obvious hot-girl interpretations of the genre and a Melania dress that looked particularly Modcloth-sample-sale. The twins’ looks are basically two variations on the same idea, even rendered in the same color palette, standing next to each other on the runway, and no one is like, “Hey, so crazy that the two of you aren’t offering us anything new or different from yourselves, or from each other.” Everyone just loses their minds over how great these two are, and I can’t believe the amount of memory-hole erasing of Wet Seal and Forever 21 I was watching. I have seen all of Antonio and Jesus’s items in many a second-rate fast-fashion mall store of yore, and I have to listen to these judges acting like a buckle-shaped tube top is a new item? Please. They’re both really persuasive looks, especially Jesus’s crochet coat, and I can appreciate that the outfits are tied to Jesus and Antonio’s childhood and culture, but very little about them is innovative or unexpected. I didn’t like Belania’s dress very much — I was surprised that Zac Posen had nothing to say about how crafty those fabrics looked together — but at least it was recognizably hers and clearly Western without feeling derivative. But the judges are gaga over Jesus turning his burning-leather mistake into a whole look, and he gets the win. Antonio’s broken-hearted since he’s the self-described cowboy in the brothers’ relationship, but Veejay smirks that Jesus’s win is also Antonio’s win, which … yeah, I’ll give her that one.
Because, unfortunately, I think Veejay gets a really raw deal during the bottom-three judging. The judges assure Ethan that he’s only in the bottom three because he was the fourth-ranked look of the six; they liked his snakeskin dress, even if it felt a little too similar to Roberto Cavalli. Their frustrations are instead primarily with Yuchen and Veejay, and my frustrations are with the episode’s editors. Earlier in the episode, Yuchen explained that when trying to understand the Western identity, he applied it to Tibetan culture, and to his understanding of that culture as a Chinese man. He decides to evoke how Tibetans decorate the horns of their yaks by creating 3D boobs for his dress, and he explains that to us and to Christian, but during the judging, it doesn’t come up at all. Yuchen just says he wanted to bring “a little drama,” and all the judges take his dress as a kind of satirical take on Western culture. The dress is definitely “nutty,” as Heidi says, but I don’t actually know if Yuchen wanted it to be “horny,” like the judges joke. I think if he had explained himself (or if we had seen him explain himself), the judges would have had a lot more understanding of his frame of reference. This is basically the same complaint I had about last week’s episode, when the judges didn’t seem to learn that early Harlem inspired Miss Joan for her streetwear suit. Just let us see more of these conversations; we’d watch an extra 10 minutes each episode, I swear.
While the judges think Yuchen’s dress isn’t weird or perverse enough, they simply don’t understand anything about Veejay’s look — and they don’t really allow her to explain it. What was it about red vinyl that appealed to Veejay? Why go against the grain with a one-piece dress instead of going more outlandish, like the other contestants? There’s just not enough conversation in these abbreviated judging sessions. Before the episode’s cliffhanger ending, it feels like the dresses are on equally bad footing: Law three times says to Yuchen, “We hate the dress,” while Zac calls Veejay’s “a Project Runway nightmare.” But I suspect that Veejay could be the one to go here, because they actively didn’t understand how her look was Western, while with Yuchen’s, you could at least wear some version of his sequin gown to the CMT Music Awards or something. They think Yuchen’s is simultaneously too kooky and too simple, but Zac says Veejay “lost the plot,” and Heidi compares it to a bad costume-party outfit. We know Project Runway’s already fine with imitative work, so my money’s on Veejay finally being free of the twins sooner rather than later — just not in the way she wanted.
Fabric Scraps
• The outfit I most wanted to wear this episode: Zac’s suede jacket was nice. And honestly, if Veejay had made a moto jacket of that red vinyl fabric and fringe, I’d love that.
• Highlights of the episode for me: The chyron shading Antonio as “pot calling kettle black” when he tells Belania that she needs to “work on the attitude, girl”; Ethan saying that working with “real tits” as a designer, instead of the faux-breasts he’s used to through drag, “has been, like, a journey.”
• When Miss Joan says that it was Christian’s fault that she bought her streetwear fabric because he wasn’t at Mood when they were shopping … did I not say this?!
• Someone smarter than I will surely write something about the connections between Tibetan and Western culture, and please link it; I will read it.
• In case you also wondered who Casey Caldwell was after Zac Posen mentioned them, they’re a costume designer.
• I always wish Christian were actually a regular judge on the show, because given how often he likes a look that the judges don’t, I think he’d provide such a fresh perspective. Case in point: He actually seemed to like Veejay’s dress and called it a “wild card,” and I do wish he could have been there to explain to the rest of the judges what he found modern about it.
• Next week: Was that Nikki Glaser I spotted as a judge for the season’s first challenge with clients?
