Project Runway -- Here's a big "Harry Winston up yours" to you!

I wasn't going to blog about PR any more because everybody in the fashion blogosphere is already blogging about PR, and in a more timely manner. (In case you missed any of the thousands of recaps and comments on the internet, PR airs its original episodes on Wednesday). However, when my favorite food blogger, the very charming and diet-destroying Amateur Gourmet interrupts his usual program to post an agonized statement about the outcome of Episode 6, I have to concede that the PR thing is bigger than I am, resistance is futile, and I might as well comment about it here because the damn TWOP threads are moving like the speed of light and I'll never catch up enough to comment there.

For you kind people who come here to read about vintage clothing and not TV, I can guarantee you this -- I will NEVER write about American Idol.

Anyway, here's the deal. The Episode 6 challenge was a trick challenge, that is, the designers had to make clothing out of something weird. The were bused to New Jersey, thrown into a recycling center, and told that they had to make their next garments out of the recycled material. So the designers hauled buckets of refuse back to Parsons and they set to work making dresses out of mylar, paper, plastic sheeting, newspaper and one old copy of Martha Stewart's "Living."

In spite of the odd and uncooperative materials, the outfits they produced were exactly what you'd expect from each of them. Jeffrey, the Tattoo Guy, made a complex and funky dress. Michael from A.T.L. made a dress for a fashion intellectual. Laura made something for the Ladies Who Lunch (oh, best comment evah about Laura, here). Perky Angela made a weird granola granny streetwalker suit of armor. Fraulein Uli made something, uh, Uli. Robert "Mr. Barbie" finally loosened up enough to make a dress Barbie would wear (keep it up, Robert!) and Vincent, well, Vincent made something insane.

The initial unexpected underdog was Kayne, Pageant Guy. He initially made a gown with a huge, stiff, bottle-cap studded paper skirt. The garment looked like it had a bad case of frog acne. The lovely, soft-spoken, so-sweet-she'd-cry-for-a-cheat Alison also had a false start, but she tossed out her original design an made the intricate origami number pictured above. Her dress wasn't anything anyone would wear (excluding paper fetishists), but neither was anything else -- they were made out of trash, for pete's sake.

And Princess Alison was auf'd for the most horrible sin a person can commit in fashion-land; her dress, in the judges' opinion, made her model look fat.

If Alexandra, Alison's model, looks fat, or zaftig as Tim Gunn said, then I must look like the Goodyear blimp. Just slip my moorings and fly me over the Superbowl, m'kay?

The prevailing opinion of most posting PR fans is that Alison was auf'd because she didn't bring teh drama. In fact, the remaining designers are the bitchy, the camp, and the crazy (except Uli, who'd better put on her bitch game face before she loses drama points too). So we viewers will be getting plenty of drama, but good design? Maybe not so much.

Speaking of drama, in this episode Laura, she of the unfortunate clavicle, was revealed to be the uniformly disliked bitch of the season. At the end of the program, she was shown chewing out Vincent for somehow evading aufing yet again. Vincent fired back, telling her to "stick some Harry Winston's up her nose," which has to be the weirdest "up yours" I've ever heard.

Summary: Michael won, Jeffrey should have won. Alison was auf'd, Vincent should have been auf'd. Ah well, controversy brings in viewers, doesn't it?