Designers…

We take a break from our regularly scheduled Christmas Countdown for this special announcement:

If you are still interested in watching the new season of Project Runway after the abomination that was last cycle, they have just announced the new cast of designers.  I am still on the fence.  If it weren’t for Tim Gunn they would have lost me at “One day you’re in, the next, you’re out.”  Oh yes, I am out.  But Tim is still plugging away.  So I have to stay too.

Again they have decided to give people in the bowels of fashion a chance at the big time, instead of taking people working in their basements on their grandmother’s sewing machine.  I often wonder if it was just that when the show started, people who were actually in the business weren’t about to risk getting fired to take three months off and compete in a show that might be a monumental flop.  So they had to settle for the Austin Scarlets and Wendy Peppers.  But I have to say with a hint of nostalgia, I liked it better back then.

Lifetime has the full skinny on this group on their website.  It includes the audition interviews.  Once upon a season they showed the auditions as the first show.   It’s still the best part of Idol, so I’m not sure why Runway decided to dump it.  It would help them by helping us invest in the designers earlier.  But, tragically, no one consults me about these things.

Quite an international group this time around.  Maybe we can look forward to some sexy accents.  There are designers from Cote d’Ivoire, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, China and one designer who said he was simply from “The Philippines”.  How deliciously vague.  Perhaps he isn’t sure which part he is from.  Or perhaps he has never been to the Philippines but remembers his parents always yelling at him about how they “didn’t have Nintendo Game Cubes growing up in the Philippines, so quit your bitching…”  so he has taken that on.

There is a girl inspired by mushrooms, an anorexic girl from Wisconsin, a costume designer (you have big shoes to fill, Chris March was one of my favorites), an actor who lives in Orlando (which translates into Disney cast member), a designer that makes purses that look like cartoon bombs, one whose favorite designer is God (oh yeah, she said God), and someone from Chicago (well, she’s from China, but she lives in Chicago, dammit!).

If I could have stomached another rendition of the Cotton song (apparently it is the fabric of our lives), I would have gone further in depth.  As it was, I give them all props:  no one said that Michael Kors is their favorite designer.

My sister and I did the Happy Dance when we realized we are less then a month away from the new cycle.  But then I worry.  I was so excited about the last cycle, and they gave me beige pumps.  I don’t trust them to come through for me.  This is the first time I wade hesitantly into a season of the Runway.

So bring it on, Lifetime.  Bring it.