I have a love for talent based reality tv shows. The ones where even though the audience seemingly gets the opportunity to see the artistic working process, the show in fact just enhances its mysticism. Project Runway and Top Chef do this for me. Contestants are given ridiculous parameters and tight schedules, and more than the drama of stress induced squabbling, the best parts of these shows are when you’re wowed by some contestant’s ingenuity and talent.
I bring it up because the more I watch the now many incarnations of Project Runway (Canada is awesome, yo) the more problems I have with the judging process, which increasingly pretends that it can be an objective and quantifiable process. Perhaps this is a result of having to edit possibly lengthy conversations about deserving winners/losers into short soundbites that make it sound like the judges have a consensus, and thereby convince the audience that their decision is ultimately the right one, however, I still find listening to them irritatingly condescending and disgustingly predictable.
My beef with almost all Project Runway judges is that they like to pretend that a unique, creative vision (someone able to “push the boundaries” and pave the way for the future of fashion) is tantamount, behaving as if commercial, approachable fashion is unimportant, while consistently touting sellability/wearability as king. Generally this plays out by endlessly praising (albeit) talented designers who have worked with/or who are inspired by Vivienne Westwood, Alexander Mcqueenesque figures, but often awarding challenge wins to those who have the most commercial appeal, and throwing out contestants who dare to be different, but who are not sufficiently and obviously avant-garde.
I’m a huge, huge fan of Westwood and her ilk, but there are also so many different sorts of interesting designers out there who produce amazing things that are not immediately apparent or comprehensible, and do not announce this loudly. If we’re looking at the big names, then Prada comes to mind. She is consistently lauded as being at the forefront of fashion, but I’d argue not only does she have a much quieter design aesthetic than Westwood, but her shows, and her ideas I think are often very anti-fashion. Prada’s “cool” comes from a true nonchalance that eschews the necessity to be beautiful, alluring or attractive. A few seasons ago Prada styled a show with an intense dowdiness; all the models were clothed in ill fitting, oversized clothes, in if memory serves, unflattering and strangely fake looking tan leather. The ubiquitous peasant skirt that was hugely popular a few years before that was a descendant of a Prada show skirt that in its original incarnation, dare I say it, was not avant-garde, nor wearable or flattering.
My argument is therefore this: I don’t always expect wearability from a designer, and I don’t expect this fact to have to be announced to me with a lot of fanfare and frou frou styling. While I believe that some designers are “artists”, I’m also aware that their success is still based on their commercial viability. However, particularly in a show context, wearability shouldn’t have to be presented by those who create it. Which to some degree is what happens in the real industry: a (deliberately) unwearable idea gets played with by other designers, by the original designer or design house, by the high street, by the consumers, by the magazines. It’s why I love fashion so much, you get presented with these amazing creations, and you get to play around with them, perhaps in a watered down, mutated, often bastardized form- but you get to play. What other art form is as available to its admirers than fashion?
Which is why as much as I love Project Runway, I find listening to the judging process irritating. 1) Ugliness, even dowdiness has its place in fashion: stop throwing out contestants because they’ve produced an unflattering looking pant that everyone ends up wearing in six months time. Fashion loves unflattering silouhettes, why are we pretending otherwise? 2) Fashion forward doesn’t have to automatically equal Westwood, please let’s move on. 3) Also let’s not pretend that fashion is not grounded by commericial concerns if you can’t stop talking about it. On a separate, but related note: I wish designers would stop crying plagarism- all designers are plagarists so they should stop being all hoity toity about the high street. If the design has hit the high street, it’s pretty likely it has already been devalued anyway, so it’s a bit of a moot point. You only need a d-list celeb to wear a hot dress before a trend dies in the arse, so I really don’t think the high street is entirely to blame. The high street store, for better or worse, is now just as important to the evolution of the trend cycle as the almighty Lagerfeld himself, deal with it.
