The Other Runway

Bravo has thrived on making facsimiles its popular programs. When Project Runway debuted and became a hit, the network immediately capitalized with Top Chef, which was as entertaining in its own right, though slightly unfocused. From Top Chef sprung even less sharp imitators—Top Design, Shear Genius—that provided some, if not all, of the fun of the vastly superior original. Now Project Runway is moving to Lifetime, and Bravo has been stripped of its flagship property. What they’re left with is The Fashion Show, the fuzziest of all fuzzy photocopies stuck in the maws of the machine.

When I first read the press about The Fashion Show in the months before its premiere, I had gotten the impression that although it would naturally resemble Project Runway in its focus on fashion design, that the two were supposedly to be fundamentally different in some manner. I thought that the new show was going to focus more on the production of completely lines, or something, rather than a single hastily-produced garment for that week’s challenge.

Apparently I was wrong. The Fashion Show appears to have been designed from the ground up as a Project Runway clone. There are the same wacky challenges—“Design an evening gown for a socialite using only ten dollars!”—and the same inevitable episode in which the aspiring designers are asked to create clothing for women smaller than a size zero and spend an entire hour whining about it. Isaac Mizrahi pretends to be Tim Gunn and Kelly Rowland fills in for Heidi Klum. It doesn’t really work. Mizrahi knows what he’s talking about, but seems to have been instructed to copy Gunn’s patented “I’m worried!” expression whenever he visits the designers. Rowland looks pretty and enunciates exquisitely, and that’s pretty much her entire contribution.

It’s the designers who make Project Runway compelling, and here it’s the designers who make The Fashion Show such a wallow in joylessness. It’s as if designers with actual talent were somehow advised to steer clear of this street corner Gucci handbang knockoff of a show, and the casting directors were left only with Z-list designers. Not even that . . . the directors seem to have assembled the cast solely from any fast-food worker they could find who once stared off into space and thought, you know, I wish I could be a fashion designer.

If for some reason my description compels anyone to watch (please don’t let it), I’ll catch you up. There’s a bitchy black guy who’s quick with the finger waving and the head bobbing. There’s a Zoe Deschanel lookalike. There’s a pimply sylph of a fellow of pan-Asian extraction who giggles like a geisha behind his hand every time the camera turns in his direction. And then there’s a special appearance from Tingle, famed fairy from the Zelda series.



I ain’t lyin’.