Missing Muses (My Project Runway All Stars Recap)

In this episode the designers meet Angela in Central Park where they are instructed to find a muse that will inspire a fashion forward look. They are then told they need to convince this muse to give them the clothes off their backs. They have two days to complete the challenge but only thirty minutes to convince a total stranger to strip on the streets of New York. The designers run off into Central Park to locate these compliant strangers, but mysteriously end up fifty blocks away in Union Square.

Surprisingly, they don’t have too much trouble finding people willing to give up their clothes. Most of the designers just went for garments, and didn’t really find a muse in the sense that their style inspired the style of the end product. Only Austin, and to a lesser degree Mondo, had any connection at all from the original look to the runway version in the end. The rest of the designers seemed just to be collecting rags. And expensive rags at that. Kenely paid one woman fifty dollars for a shirt worth no more than 9.99. Anthony kept buying T-shirt fabric from random guys. In most cases the concept of a muse and tuning an existing look into something more high fashion was totally out of the picture.

In the work room Michael is feeling the pressure. He doesn’t seem to know where to start. Joanna comes into the workroom and says out loud exactly what we are all thinking. Hello. It’s a doily. Of course you can’t work with it. It belongs on your grandma’s dresser. He comes up with a body suit instead. Rami, is off to a great sculptural start, and Anthony has too many options because he didn’t choose a muse with a fashion direction. He is floundering in a pile of half naked guy’s t-shirts.

Jerell is scaring me. I’m not sure where the fabric came from for his garment, if you can call it that, but the African tie-dye dress on his muse doesn’t really seem to show up on his runway look. Actually, it could be there and I’m just not seeing it because I’m so distracted by the shoulder piece/bikini top/bare midriff of his model. Yikes.

Anthony finally pulls together a look. It's a Joan Crawford redux jumpsuit and it has nothing to do with any one whose clothes he procured n Union Square. Apparently, it doesn’t even use fabric from said clothes.

I’m not even sure what to say about the guest judge. If you have read any of my other blog entries, you know I have issues with judges that are not industry insiders and have no real input outside of, “I would wear that,” or in this case, “I would look at a girl in that.” A hockey player who supposedly interned at Vogue? It actually makes me yearn for the actress/models I’m always complaining about.

Rami may not have a muse, but he certainly has a successful, well styled outfit. Austin’s outfit is some strange Punk Rock Barbie version of the girl he met in the park. His model looks like she is playing dress up, but the judges love it and there is a strong reference to the look of his muse. Mondo wins with a crazy mix of fabrics and patterns, as only Mondo can do.

This isn’t the first time that the perimeters of a challenge haven’t been met on Project Runway. In my season we had to make a dog accessory and one contestant broke the rules by attaching a belt from the accessory wall to the dog and calling it a leash. He basically didn’t have an entry. The judges looked the other way and didn’t send him home because the dress he made to go along with the accessory was great, and a great look trumps following the rules. (He was sent home for another cheating incident later in the season.)

This time though, the judges seemed to think the rules mattered, and Anthony, with no muse and little acquired fabric ending up in his final look, was sent home.  For me Rami was the winner, and no one should be sent home with Jerell’s lion king costume standing on the runway.

Read my previous episode recaps >>

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