Launch My Line

I confess: when it was announced last year that Project Runway would be moving from Bravo to the Lifetime network, my heart sank a little. One of my favorite competitive reality shows, moving from the network that gave it birth to a channel that seemed perpetually to be rerunning Mother May I Sleep with Danger? I didn’t think so.

Not that Bravo exactly did right by its old property, mind you. Scarcely had the first season of Project Runway swept off the runway than Bravo began popping out imitators—first Top Chef, which developed into a view-worthy show of its own, and then the terrible Top Design, memorable (and not in a good way) for the send-off line of “See ya later, decorator.” Then came the bizarre and yet secretly enjoyable Shear Genius, in which hair stylists did terrible things to models’ heads for a cash prize and the privilege of being jabbered at in incomprehensible English by a Danish mentor. When Project Runway departed, Bravo brought forth The Fashion Show, a program that adhered so slavishly to the Project Runway formula that it was indistinguishable—in all but talent and impact, that is.

Then came Bravo’s latest attempt at catching the Project Runway magic: Launch My Line, it’s called, and it involved a lot of celebrities—and the show’s producers play fast and loose with that word, since the contestants are DJs, fashion writers, promotion event directors, and jewelry designers—who are paired with no-name designers to create and launch their own cohesive line of celebrity-label clothing. It seems an odd aspiration to become the next 6126, but there you go. I resisted watching the show for its first month, because The Fashion Show had simply been that bad. After catching a recording of the first episode, however, I began catching up—because the show is simply still that bad, but compelling in the way that Shear Genius could be.

The ‘celebrities’ receive the same sorts of stunty, contrived challenges as the old Project Runway alumni. One week they’re making cocktail dresses out of materials they’ve distressed themselves, then the next they’re spinning giant game show wheels to determine that they’ve got to make a dress that allows the model to visit a bris in the morning and attend a night at the Grammys at night. (I’m still waiting for the challenge on one of these shows that requires designers to collaborate on something with their wrists and ankles cuffed together.) But here’s the thing: not one of the contestants has any clothing design skills whatsoever, so they’re totally reliant upon their designer to sketch, cut, and sew everything.

Some of the celebrities, like my favorite, Merle Ginsberg, the only actual woman who was a regular on RuPaul’s Drag Race, leap right in to the process and have learned somewhat about the construction of garments. Others, like power executive Marilyn Crawford, have responded to the challenge by listening to the instructions, nodding, and saying as they snap fingers at their designer, “Okay, I want it to be elegant. Go!” Other than a few pointed eyerolls and befuddled responses when faced with the difficulties of creating garments that would meet the celebrities’ specifications and yet not drop off the models’ bodies, we don’t see much of the designers doing all the work. They’re mostly relegated to the background, so that we can listen to the celebrities complaining about each other.

It’s this shift of focus away from the work that makes Launch My Line so watchable and yet so bad. When the garments come out onto the runway, we’ve no idea what makes them attractive or awkward or appropriate, or part of a vision or constructive process. We do know, however, how everyone feels about the kooky jewelry designer burning sage in the workroom, and how many bon mots professional dandy Patrick McDonald has dropped that episode. After five seasons of showing the creative process at work in Project Runway, Bravo seems to have done an about-face on its view of professional artists. In the world of Launch My Line, the personalities are inescapable and the bitchery is thigh-deep, while the talent necessary to make a line of clothing, they seem to be telling us, need only be as substantial as the labels sewn into the neckline.