WORKSHOPTSL

With a group of that size assigned to a task, the group must agree on a team leader: otherwise, you get the under-bus-throw-fest we saw with the women's team. Granted, the designers are not there (as on "The Apprentice") to learn to be leaders, but this is Project Management 101. Everyone needs to be heard, and the leader needs to pick a direction and make sure everyone contributes. Have none of these designers worked in an office before? Where do they get the idea that one by one, it's OK to announce how stressed you are and that your brain has shut down?

I can understand and sympathize with Helen bursting into tears if she is tired, stressed, and anxious, but what bothered me most is Michelle going over to give the poor dear a hug. Michelle can be supportive -- or simply appear that way -- with positive encouragement: "C'mon, Helen you can do it!" Giving hugs feels infantilizing, and I'm curious to know how many female viewers feel similarly. Helen, to my eye, often goes for a "little girl" shrug and innocence that I find disingenuous. Of course it's TV and it's emotionally manipulative, but I don't like seeing adult women acting below their age. Call me old-fashioned.

What was most disappointing (but not wholly unexpected) was that this last episode focused on drama and interpersonal baloney when the show, one would think, is supposed to be about FASHION. There was virtually no discussion here about particular challenges, how designers felt they evolved as artists or craftspeople, or what they're all doing now professionally. Project Runway, IMO, plays with the viewer's mind a little, in that you see all the backroom drama and interpersonal BS when all that matters is what comes down the runway. I have to remind myself not to want Kini to win just because he's so doggone cute and not to hate Korina because her emotional toolbox is a few items short. It would be nice to put all the drama aside for at least this one episode and just have designers talk about CLOTHES.

The poet Allen Ginsberg once said, "You have many writers who have preconceived ideas about what literature is supposed to be, and their ideas seem to exclude that which makes them most charming in private conversation." That, I think, is why Kini and Amanda didn't win. When the judges encourage you to make your work more "sophisticated" or "young," you can do one of two things: (a) try to imagine what the judges mean when they use that term and play to it, or (b) determine what *you* think sophistication and youth means and marry it to your own vision, which is an extension of your own personality. Amanda and Kini, I think, did more of the former and not enough of the latter. It's tough, because you're in a competition and ultimately, it's not about who is the "best designer": it's about who the judges thought won the day or deserves the prize. So the judges are ... well, the judges. Creativity is a formidably hard balancing act between your own vision and voice, what the market has seen before and will support, what the mentors and the judges think, mercurial tastes and trends, and how stressed out or good you happen to feeling that day. If it were easy, more people would be trying it. Congratulations to Sean.

http://i.imgur.com/ecwPcOq.jpg

There's a difference between self-confidence and sense of entitlement. There's a difference between justifying your presence in a competition by defending your work and justifying it by trashing someone else's work. And there's a difference between saying "I'm good enough to be here" and judging other people's deservedness to be there (which, as a contestant, is not your job). As distasteful as Korrina's professed attitudes were, she is still in her twenties (an accounting for her behavior, not an excuse) and she clearly has not matured beyond a childish sense of entitlement (which, I believe, is a fear of competition based on low self-esteem). For her to declare that she shouldn't have to compete in the one-hour challenge -- when the whole show is a competition -- is just delusional. Korrina may indeed be a "better" designer than Char; Char may not "deserve" to have lasted this long; and Korrina may consider her looks "better" than everyone else's -- but none of that matters, not here. What matters are what the judges decide, and their decisions are the informed but ultimately subjective opinions of a certain group of people. If you cannot accept that no competition is a pure meritocracy, don't play. Pick up your marbles and go home.