SPOILER WARNING
Last night we watched Project Runway's finale and were mightily upset by the result. Fans across the nation are furious. I wanted to go on record about it.
If you watch the show, you surely know what happened, or what was likely to happen. But, in case you don't, the setup was basically between three people:
One contestant, Andy, sometimes did interesting work but not often enough that he was the likely champion. He'll do fine in the industry, but it wasn't a surprise or concern he didn't win. I'll say no more about him.
One contestant, Gretchen, makes boring clothes. She's a controller and a manipulator, and you don't just have to take my word for it. There was one episode where she so manipulated the other players that Tim Gunn, probably the world's most reserved and pleasant guy, came and lectured the others about having let her roll over them. It wouldn't have mattered if she had something spectacular to offer. But she doesn't. Her pieces are often well-made but almost always boring. And sometimes hideous, sometimes reasonable. I saw almost nothing striking from her. It was a sea of ordinary. As with Andy, she will do fine in the industry, but people didn't tune in week after week after week to see someone with this little to offer win.
The last contestant, a guy named Mondo, had amazing charm. His pieces were sometimes just good but more often quite beautiful pieces. He had won decisively week after week in a number of difficult challenges. They were consistently well-made, but the ones that were beautiful were so well done that my wife and I would have forgiven him for some real travesties in the mix. Becoming a great designer means taking risks. He took some and they were generally successful, but if they had not been, it would still have been a fine price to pay.
I don't have the time or patience to go back and get the exact quotes, so bear with me for paraphrasing here. I won't be going back to this show at all. It's not worth it. I just want to make some remarks in solidarity with a chorus of offended fans.
In case you can't tell from the above, Gretchen won. She should not have. Mondo was the clear winner. There have been bad choices on this and other “reality shows” before but what is offensive is not the choice, it's the rationale.
These judges are regularly billed as the tops in their field. They have the power to eliminate contestants week after week. But this week, it was some of them that showed a need to be leaving the show.
The judges acknowledged being deadlocked. Heidi Klum and Jessica Simpson were on one side of the vote, representing rationality. I don't always agree with Heidi's judgment, but I think she was spot on for this one. Both she and Jessica were all set to buy the pieces Mondo was showing. But that wasn't enough.
What won the day were arguments by Michael Kors and Nina Garcia. They basically said that the drek that Gretchen was offering had the pulse of the market and that they thought they could sell it. The thing was, the instructions to the designers were not “come up with something that we could run off in mass quantity.” The instructions were to design something that really wowed people. Yet in the end, they didn't give the award on that basis.
It's worth noting that they had a preview of this communciation error the week before, when they allowed people to pick three pieces from the bigger collection they were preparing for a mini-showing. The contestants were very confused about what to present. Some didn't want to spoil the big event so didn't pick their best pieces. Some chose the three based on coherence, some on drama, and some on wow factor. The judges beat up anyone who chose their weaker pieces saying after the fact that the purpose was to show the best of what was coming. That the judging criterion was not offered in advance should have been a cue that the show is pure contrived theatre and not about legitimate competition.
Even in the real world, which is notoriously fickle, you do know when you do a show whether you're going for “something to sell” or “something to wow.” These are utterly different. On this show, you don't know. It's all about the judges. It's a chance to tune in and see what the judges have to offer. And they offered us nothing. They basically declared the show to be an assembly line for them to crank out product to sell, and they shirked their responsibility to an audience who had bought into it to see art in the making.
They called Mondo's designs childish, which they were not. Two grown women among the judges were anxious to wear the pieces. My wife was also clamoring. That shows poor judgment right there. The judges who prevailed made repeated references to what they could sell.
The truth is that I could easily believe Mondo can dumb down his design to make it possible to sell, while I can't believe Gretchen will ever come up with a design worthy of Mondo's art.
The decision speaks volumes about the way we as a society are dumbed down and molded by commercialism. It might be we could live in a society filled with a great deal more pleasure and art, but for the fact that some judge here or there, one who doesn't have a TV show so we don't see their actions, but nevertheless a judge with this same degree of control, thinks it's better to just go for what's easy or lucrative than what's right or interesting or fun. This was almost surely a window into a routine practice it might be worth a few minutes to stop and contemplate.
And, finally, what really put me off was that we learned during the show that Mondo is HIV positive. Maybe with drugs he'll live a long time, but maybe not. Life is fragile and sometimes people are only with us for the moment. I wouldn't say he should win on that basis. But I do think it's worth the judges taking into consideration things like this at least in their words if not in their actions.
What really upset me was when one of them, I think it was Michael Kors, said that he was immature and needed time to grow. Maybe so. But life may not give it to him. The utter insensitivity of that remark was breathtaking.
If Gretchen and Mondo had been tied, and they were just not, she would have time to grow, and to recover. He probably will not.
Almost everything that's wrong about business these days can be reduced to such reasoning—go for the money, ignore the impact on society and on the individual. It's not always necessary and even where it's necessary it's not something to celebrate.
Fortunately, Mondo made it to the final stage. His wares got shown to the world, and the world, not just these judges, will also get to make a judgment. I'll be pleased if these two small judges, with their petty and short-sighted decision, are hastily swept into the metaphorical wastebin along with yesterday's design scraps.
Project Runway made a Mondo mistake last night. As my wife observed, quoting a popular phrase from the show, “one day you're in, the next day you're out.” It's the next day, and they are out.
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Comments
Thanks for the analysis.
Gretchen was a wretched mistake.
I CANNOT BELIEVE IT STILL !
Rated with hugs
However Gretchen's life was falling apart too. She had lost a relationship and her home during the final shows. She was stretched thin and yet still created something. I have to admit that I liked her jewelry and her flowing earthy style and I would like to see fashion move in that direction. But the zip and fun of Mondo should have won. sigh....
I also dont like the new hour and a half of these shows. It isnt that important. And the judges need to be changed. That dress Jessica Simpson was wearing was terrible. Thank you for this post so I could vent and kudos to you for watching it with your wife. I tried to get my boyfriend interested but he just grunted.
I am a sometime judge for a number of different business competitions. The entrants are virtually always told that the prizes will be awarded for "the best" business plan.
The judging criteria are almost applied as "which plan is the most fundable?" or "which plan would I, as a VC, want to invest in?"
Those are unbelievably different criteria. Among other things, small, lucrative, tightly run businesses with a coherent plan built on solid research, with double-checked assumptions, that is self-funding will fail. VCs don't invest in such companies because they don't have a huge upside potential.
Or how about performance reviews? In business, we're told if we do a good job, we'll be promoted. At my first performance review of my professional life, I was told (I kid you not): "you do the best work I've ever seen in my career. You write the best documentation I've seen in my career. And you lead the design team for part of the system successfully, even though that wasn't your job. But you're too young to manage people older than you and I raised my wife and child on less money than you're making now, so you get a 2% raise and we're making Paul [who's older but far less experienced] head of the design team." (Where is my dear old boss, Sheldon, now, I wonder?)
That was the performance review that got me to leave programming. It was clear that the judging criteria (age and comparable nominal salary) had nothing to do with my work, and those criteria weren't under my control.
Her collection was dreary. It looked like stuff we would have worn back in the 1960s on the commune. All she was missing was tie die. I hated the colors -- brown, brown, brown, and dreary brown prints. Think Hollie Hobbie shops for granola. Come to think of it, some bright tie die would have helped.
So when Andy's clothes were shown next, it was refreshing, like a cold drink on a hot day -- brighter, prettier. I understand that maybe Andy shouldn't have won because his clothes weren't edgy enough, and the collection was all siver and lime green, but at least the clothes were lovely to look at.
Mondo, hands down, was the most gutsy and creative designer there. I don't like everything he designs, but it's always fun to see what he comes up with, and most of what he does is quite striking.
I realize a lot of people just plain like Mondo more than Gretchen, but I honestly think the dismay people feel about Gretchen winning is not just because of her personality, but because the work she did just wasn't that good.
I can't help but think that there was something going on with the judging that we weren't seeing that didn't have anything to do with the clothes. It's the only explanation.
Linda, I hope having a place to share the anger helps.
I also thought Gretchen's jewelry was interesting but perhaps the most interesting part to the point that it reminded me the clothing wasn't contributing so much. If she had just put that same jewelry on a regular white undershirt, it would have been perhaps as interesting. Maybe the choice of print also contributed a little, as I liked some of those fabrics she used.
The actual clothing itself was, in my non-professional opinion, at best decently made, not striking, and sometimes kind of just weird. The weird tail-like pouch thing was bizarre and not practical to the point of stupid. The outfit that was cut all down the front was not flattering, not socially appropriate, and not even new.
I'm glad you had a place to come and vent. I agree with you both about program length and Jessica's clothing, by the way.
And as for watching with my wife, well, I'm the one who used to watch soap operas (the whole CBS line-up: Y&R, Capitol, ATWT, and GL) for many years, though when Capitol was replaced by B&B I drifted away and after a while didn't watch anything but Y&R. I also later wrote more-or-less weekly parodies of Y&R for many years, which I published to the web as my Another Way Out series. So my wife and I each have our tabloid interests, I guess. I often complain about Open Salon featuring too much tabloid but not because I don't appreciate the genre, I just think you can get such coverage many places and that this site should aspire to featuring more. I got plenty of hits on this article without it having to be on the cover today, and I would have been sad if this story had eclipsed the news that made it to the cover.
Anyway, I'm not just pacifying my wife by watching along. It's a myth that only women and gay men like these things.
I do think we are seeing more blandness out there. Maybe it is something about the depressing economy and political landscape.
It's too bad you and your spouse live so far away from me and my significant other. He and I love watching Runway and he was rooting for Mondo even more than I was, if that's possible ;)
To expand a little on that last point, and to pacify those who may think I've lost my mind by watching these shows, consider the power relationship between the US and China. Naively, one might say we are simply beholden to them since we have borrowed money. But they are not merely lender. They are also seller of many goods. The structure of the relationship is not the same as on this show, so the analogy I'm trying to make here is necessarily very limited. But my point is that we see a complicated dynamic right now in international politics because if the US simply stopped buying from China, it would hurt China. So even though the Chinese don't want us to have to borrow more money, they still want us to buy their goods, at least for a while, so they have to lends us money to do it—or so it's been explained to me. In the interim, we must show deference to them for the courtesy, yet at the same time they must do the same to us to avoid retaliatory action. So it's a delicate balance. And that's fortuitous, at least in the short run, because I think it leads to time for cool heads to preveail and for at least the option of some consensus effects on some things than might have happened more abruptly and unpleasantly if the interrelationship had been different.
I know going to national politics is an odd way to drive home an issue about television politics, but you did start by picking other analogies, too, so for once I'm not starting it. :) Hopefully this illustrates the complexity of being in more than one role at the same time, where one has to recognize and balance obligations that may not be written down formally. I'm sure China didn't sign an agreement to care about our position, as we must have signed agreements to borrow money, but their obligation is pragmatic even if not formalized. And that is the point of analogy I meant to draw with this TV show. The judges may think they have no obligation to the audience, that they can leave viewer preferences to “Viewers' Choice” awards and purely focus on their own preferences. But it's not totally so. We know their identity and the loss of viewership or the product boycotts that result if they let us down will be felt really and financially.
We expect them, up to a point, to impress us with their independence of personal opinion. We don't want judges that are just avatars for mass populism. But there's a fine line between leading a populist movement and following it. A respect on the part of the viewing public for the judges' need for independence no more spells a desire to see them make foolish asses of themselves on national TV than the Liberty granted by the US constitution means the voting public wants politicians who, in the name of Liberty, give up on rationality and common decency because they are “free to do so.”
(Disclaimer: I haven't yet reached a firm position on how US/China relations should be working. The above is really just a regurgitation of my understanding from various pundits of how it is working at present, and why. It's offered only to make a point about this show here, and anyone who wants to argue what China policy should be is asked to try really hard to save it for another day. Thanks!)
Mumbletypeg, thanks for your very crisp comments. My wife and I both laughed with pleasure at the clarity of your remarks. I don't know if you ever watched Trading Space but Mondo's bold work reminds me a bit of Vern's reliably clean and striking design on that show. If you know the show, I wonder if you'd agree.
Barbara, nice to hear your thoughts. I smiled when you said “I don't like everything he designs, but it's always fun to see what he comes up with” because I think that's the essence of a really great designer. Doing good things, yet being willing to miss. Incidentally, if you ever watched From Earth to the Moon, the multi-part miniseries by Tom Hanks about going to the Moon in the Apollo space program, there's an episode about Apollo 11 where Armstrong is practicing lunar landings and deliberately crashes the simulator. Aldrin gets mad at him for that and Armstrong responds something like “I wanted to see what they [mission control] would do.” He needed to explore the entire space, not just the safe space, to really master the capability of that lander. And it may have been the difference between a successful and unsuccessful landing because conditions at the end of the landing were dicey and some would have said he should abort, but he knew what the ship would do. I think the failures we saw from Mondo were good failures, not “I don't know what I'm doing” but “I have the power to learn” and we saw him learn. Others made mistakes and then just repeated them, not growing.
He also held to things he didn't see as mistakes that were in a sometimes-gray area, but I think what he did was within the realm of leadership. Much moreso than Kors holding to his position was.
I have watched it every day since 1979..:)
Susan, yes, I was surprised Heidi didn't exert more force. She's got a lot of clout. But at least she spoke out. That was good. Like when Tim spoke out earlier in the season—that was worth seeing all by itself. I'm always glad to know that someone soft-spoken like that can still make a point when it's warranted and isn't just incapacitated by politeness. Sorry about living so far away. If we ever move, naturally we'll try to coordinate better.
Stellaa, I agree Andy had some good pieces. I think he'll be a commercial success. And maybe he'll broaden over time. He was too narrow to win, but I didn't mean to discount him entirely. And he seems a nice enough guy. As to waking up, yes, I'd compare it to the 1970's. It's hard to look back on that time objectively since fashions do ultimately drift out of style. But I remember watching the movie Dick of all pieces, which really is more about Nixon than about the 70's generally, and it had a couple of scenes that I thought were really kind to the 70's, not treating them like some sort of weirdo convention but reminding me of how utterly warm the colors and brightness was at the time. It wasn't just a look, it was a whole feel of the time, sort of typified too in the movie Hair. A celebration. Perhaps people need a time of vapitude to appreciate the other, but it's been plenty of time on dull. We're due for some sort of resurgence. It doesn't have to be what we had before, but it should be different and bright and fun.
mypsyche, thanks!
Linda, Y&R, yes, seriously. Check out my site anotherwayout.com, where I used to put my parodies. The first few, in retrospect, weren't very good. But I think it came into its own. I'd make a metaphorical link to this show in the sense that the site chronicles a learning experience for me, stretching myself, showing both my successes and my failures. I wanted to learn and so I really pushed on all kinds of different writing styles. I allocated just a few hours per week and pretty much forced myself to just throw something up whether it was really perfect or not, just to be able to move on. The main page of the site has pointers to some of my recommended “episodes” (what I called my stories); each episode is accompanied by a “moral” which are author's notes. Those notes both document why I wrote the piece and kept me, I think, legally protected against claims I was writing fan fiction. Parody is a protected artform that is immune from copyright concerns, while fan fiction is not immune. I heard people who wrote fan fiction were contacted by lawyers asking them not to. I never got such contact, and I hope that's because the lawyers knew that I had and well-documented the specific intent to bring about political change which is the kind of thing parody exists for. No copyright holder would ever give someone permission to do a parody, after all. It's an interesting thing that way. Ah well. Please prefer to follow up in PM, anyway, since this thread really isn't about that and I'm drifting off topic myself.
I will miss watching P.R. with my college-age daughter, but I'm sure we'll find some other more productive activity to enjoy together. Even she was getting peeved with the obvious manipulation by the producers, or whomever was calling the shots. We both had really had enough of Kors sarcasm and his obvious disdain for Jessica Simpson was palpable through his condesending remarks. However, I'm most disappointed in Nina Garcia. After what I thought was a truly sincere reaction to Mondo's news of his being HIV positive, she really turned her back on clearly the most talented of the three finalist. I believe it was for want of a female winner, but that's just my opinion.
Anyway, I guess this is Auf Wiedersehen to P.R. I'll miss Heidi and the truly remarkable talent that I have witnessed for 8 years!
salsagirl1, I've now heard this idea that it might be a desire for a woman to win becaus it's Lifetime more than one place and although that sounds at some level really awful, I have suspected other reality shows of “grooming” people of particular ethnicities in order to broaden market base. If so, the mistake, of course, is to assume that the people of these other groups want to be championed by a person so plainly inferior that they look like their group is represented only as part of an affirmative action. Anyway, I'm continuing to mull the issue myself but so far your suggestion sounds like it best fits the observed facts.
Also, I bet they didn't 100% decide it had to be a woman but said a woman absolutely had to be in the finals (I recall being surprised Gretchen wasn't out last week, so that would explain that as well) and then once the wheels of cognitive dissonance got rolling and these people convinced themselves that there was good reason for Gretchen to be in, they were told that if it was close to a tie, a woman should be favored, and for some reason they were able to convince themselves there was an apples-and-oranges incomparable situation that could be construed as a tie, so they were able to stretch their small little brains to the place where they thought that allowed them to be ethically free to do the thing they'd been requested to do, which is to favor her on gender.
Yeah, I like that theory.