This week’s challenge, apparently paid for by the powerful American gelatto lobby, was an improvement over last week’s head-scratching gimmick (that challenge being to design a dress for Miss Piggy; the unspoken challenge was to become hysterical over the prospect of “meeting” her, which required pretending she was not a fictional character materialized by a piece of felt with some guy’s hand inserted in it). The grab bag nature of the “design a dress inspired by this flavor of gelatto” was accompanied by additional hodge-podge constraints and judges just to round things out. Was there any special reason Diane von Furstenberg and Miranda Kerr were judges? Was there a reason why the garment was to be completed in a mere six hours, other than to make the designers hate themselves and want to die?
Spoilin’ ahead!
- Michael won for the second week in a row, this time with a dress that had some heavy Golden Girls vibes. Really, I saw Blanche Devereaux sashaying around in it over the strains of “Thank You for Being a Friend.” That said it was soft, voluptuous, and pretty.
- Kenley wanted to play it safe and survive because she didn’t want to push herself too much in six hours. Which made me wonder what her excuse is for when she plays it safe the rest of the time, never deviating from girlish, poppy, largely conventional dresses. I even like her dress and everything, but it looks exactly like something you could buy on ModCloth.
- Austin’s white and African and glitzy or something; I dunno, he was safe.
- Marla did something that is not black and white and big and graphic for once — no, it was red and white and big and graphic. That said, I liked the results better than I expected; she came in third. She chose really big, chunky accessories (belt and shoes) to ugly it up, though.
- Mondo made a cantaloupe-inspired caftan with an orange from the WHOOOOOOA NELLY spectrum. I thought it was…really ugly and costumish. I don’t know if he was favorably rated because He is Mondo or whatever. The back was pretty, but I thought she looked like a member of a cheerful cult.
- Anthony produced a cute yellow skirt and an incredibly ugly, overly intricate, badly made green top.
- Jerell’s was some goddess-y dress with a big pattern and lots of straps across the shoulders and lots of accessories and lots of hair and it looked like a mess coming down the runway to me, but he was safe.
- Kara made a dress with a bodice halter and like an empire waist, the skirt composed of (sloppy) tiers of pinks, browns, and red. (Her flavor was “chocolate cayenne.”) The skirt ended up a little bulky, and the new host whose name I can’t remember because she’s not Heidi so who cares, sounded kind of apologetic in the judging when she said: “I also wrote down…’pregnant.’” That’s the death knell. Kara was in the bottom two, and I thought her time had come.
- But April. Poor, sweet, April. This week she made a dress that was not black and the gods struck her down for it. That said she had some construction issues, but I liked the original concept and the colors she chose were beautiful. Too bad she couldn’t pull it off. She went home.
Kara’s time is coming, though.
I must’ve been the only viewer who liked last week’s Miss Piggy challenge. I thought it was a cute challenge to have fun with. For this week, I loved the idea of a gelato-inspired challenge, though I wish they had more time allotted for it.
I hated Mila’s dress. I thought it looked clunky and the proportions were off. Her styling choices didn’t help either.
Angela Lindvall (the host) was right about April—good ideas, struggles with execution. I think April needs a few more years to grow so she can become a stronger designer. I liked the idea of her dress, but there were a lot of missteps in it.
I agree that Kara’s time may be up. She got a great gelato flavor to be inspired by—the sweetness of chocolate with the spiciness of cayenne pepper—but bombed.
Actually I encountered a few other people who were bigger fans of the Miss Piggy challenge…but I don’t know, I guess my problem with it wasn’t so much the general silliness or the fact that Miss Piggy doesn’t exist (I do actually like her, by the way!), but that that challenge also seemed a little poorly-defined. It seemed like it was basically just ‘design an over-the-top dress.’ Since it was a more gimmicky episode, I wish they’d gone a little further and been forced to make a pig-sized dress, or at least shown us what it looked like at the premiere. That would have been fun.
I thought Mila’s dress was a little more fun than her usual stuff…my biggest issue with it besides the styling was that it seemed a little badly made; it didn’t look terribly neat where the red met the white.
Yeah, that’s how I’ve felt about April the whole time. I used to make fun of her a bit about the endless string of black dresses, but that’s not quite fair to suggest she was so one-note — she had some very interesting concepts, just execution problems. And I did wish she would have branched out just a little more.