Confessions of a Runway Junkie

Due to time constraints, Miss Luxie was unavailable to offer her input on this particular interview. In her place, I asked the lovely Sarah Norton to assist me.

Sarah is a design student along with me, in the greatly miniscule theater department here at UMBC. The costume design students are limited to, maybe, 6 or 7 people. It's not a very large field of study, especially not at a science and math... and computer.... school. Sarah, along with 5 other theater students, spent Wednesday nights at the beginning of the fall semester watching Project Runway, so she was the perfect person to talk to for this interview, although not the initial choice.

Sarah started watching Runway during the second season, about halfway through. At that point, she mostly watched it alone, duking it out with her brother for the right to wield the remote. "It was really the only show I liked, the only show I even tried to watch," she explains. As a budding designer, there was something captivating about this show. Seeing people get to design garments and then have the opportunity to make them on someone else's tab and have them critiqued by industry experts... it was like watching a dream.

"When you watch things like Survivor or Real World, it's not real. It doesn't seem like reality, because nobody is ever really put in those situations. Oh, stuck on an island? In a house with 6 other carefully selected, relatively attractive, constantly drunk twenty-somethings? It's just... it's silly. It's not realistic. But with Project Runway, it was something I'd seen before. I've worked in costume shops, I've built garments, I've drawn designs. I know that what they're doing is a real task, a real challenge. I know that creating a dress in 8 hours is... well, it's impossible!" Sarah mentioned that she entertains the idea of one day possibly being a contestant on Runway, but is unsure of whether or not she'd want to go for it.

When it comes to the personalities of Project Runway, Sarah has much the same things to say about them as others. She enjoys mocking Heidi Klum: just because she's a model doesn't mean she's charming! Tim Gunn and his catch-phrases were one of the first things she mentioned. Although she's watched for a season and a half, his accent is still hard for her to figure out. The designers themselves are also a point of discussion for Sarah and her friends. On the morning after a new Runway, they discuss the craziness of Vincent, the sweetness of Michael, the cattiness of Laura.

The judges can be quite catty as well. Sarah got heated about one particular challenge elimination, where contestant Alison was eliminated because the judges felt that she had committed some heinous crime against "the female form", because her model didn't look twiggy. "It looked way better than that awful paper... thing that Vincent made! It was like a bag! He just put a bag on his model and then talked about how it turned him on!! I think that what made Alison really get out was that Minnie Mouse hairdo. That was a mistake. But the garment, which is supposed to be the important thing, wasn't that bad. I liked it. It had a design, it just happened that her model had a size 3 waist instead of a size 1." After Sarah calmed down, she remarked that she saw Alison being in the top three and never expected her to go so much earlier.

Actually, Runway has become an easy reference for Sarah. More than once, while walking in a mall or leafing through a magazine, she has noticed something and turned to a friend to comment, "Oh, doesn't that look like the dress Kayne did for the couture challenge??" Unfortunately for her, there are only two or three friends to whom that sentence will make any sense.