PR #2, it leaves me blue

Yeah, I'm still sick, do you care? No, because no one is reading this. Well, that's okay, I'm writing it anyhow, albeit several days later than I meant to. And then I'll go on to work on Thanksgiving dinner. Yes, I'm serious; because of illness, we put the turkey-making off. You don't care about that either. It's okay, I forgive you; I wouldn't care either.

Anyhow, I want to take back everything I said about thinking Elisa should've gone home last week.

Yeah, that's right. I decided I love her. She's outré, and she knows it, but she's willing to take a left turn into our world and see how it works for her. It's great. And while I still wasn't thrilled with her outfit this week, I see that she does know what she's doing, and want to see what else she's going to do. If she wins the whole thing—which unfortunately I suspect is unlikely—I will laugh and laugh and laugh. Also, I take back any comparisons to Vincent. She's crazy, but she's actually a) talented and b) not scary so much as just... odd.

Okay, let's talk about the challenge. I don't have the serious love for Sarah Jessica Parker so many others do, mainly because I've never seen "Sex in the City", but I have seen her in interviews and such and she does strike me as an interesting person... and she was super-nice on the show, obviously thrilled to be part of it. I don't really know anything much about her clothing line, but it looks like it might be decent enough, and if their profit philosophy really does boil down to "we'll just take a fair profit and make it up on volume", then I really like them even if the clothes are more or less another Wal*Mart alternative. (They look like they might be better, though.)

Even without that in mind, the challenge was a great one... the idea of restricting these guys to $15 worth of fabric and making them make something reasonably fashionable and everyday out of it is just a terrific way to see how creative they are, IMO, and that's what all challenges should be about. Love the reactions people had to the budget, it was funny.

So, let's skip past all the work and to the clothes, except for mentioning that watching Elisa work and Sweet P's reaction to it was really, really funny.

First off, let me say, given the constraints, I am surprised that several designers managed to do the jacket/cap/vest thing and keep it under budget. That part was impressive. The clothing? Less so.

Once again, VictorYA (working with Kevin) made a shapeless dress, and bogglingly, won with it. I didn't like it. I liked the idea of a dress with a vest, but not the execution. Plus if you're going to make a black dress, why not give the vest a more intense colour? I did like the racer-back on the vest, but I think it hung oddly on the model.

The other contender for the win was Elisa's dress. She went with blue again, and I wonder if that's her signature colour or just a concidence? She paired it with a nice mid-tone grey for the cape. I don't like capes, and I'm not sure how practical it is to have one. The dress itself was not bad, nothing special though. But between her and VictorYA I'd rather she had won. Neither was my personal favorite.

So who did I like?



Ricky (working with Jack) gets my favorite of the week with this dress. I'm not too sure how well the butchy '80s styling would work for some people, but I actually kinda liked it, and aside from that, it's a cute dress in a pretty colour—not sure I'd look good in that colour myself but it's still a nice one. And I like the belt, though it might work better with a different one. Maybe it was a little too intense for the Bitten line, I don't know; most of what I've seen of it is in calmer colours. I'm not sure I like the sleeves, but overall it's nice.

In terms of actual cut and style, I also liked the top+capri outfits that Kit (with Chris) and Rami (with Jillian) put together, but I wish both of them had used something besides all-black. I hated the hair on Rami's model, too. Still, they're both the exact type of thing I could see myself going into a store and trying on, nice, normal, semi-sporty, inexpensive clothes. If they'd gone with some different-coloured shirts it just would've had more oomph, and maybe given one or both teams a better shot at the win.

The bottom two? Yeah, they deserved to be the bottom two. Marion (working with Steven) produced a depressing, stretchy, misshapen outfit, and Christian (working with Carmen) made a completely mind-boggling jacket, though the dress itself seemed fine. And as much as I hate to say it, since Marion seems like a nice enough guy, the aufing was deserved, because at least in Christian's case you could see the design and the construction and fabric choices were all fairly good... I don't know if anything could've salvaged Marion's other than starting over from scratch. I'm hoping Christian got a bit of a wakeup call there, but I doubt it. And someone please cut his hair, okay?

All in all I wasn't terribly wowed with the outfits this week... which makes two weeks in a row where I've been wondering why Tim Gunn keeps saying this is the best group yet.

BTW, I don't think we saw enough Tim this week but he looked extremely dapper (as usual) and seemed pretty happy to have SJP as the guest, though with him sometimes it's hard to tell if he's truly pleased or just being polite. And I loved his suit.

I think I'll throw together a 'what if' recolouring of the two all-black capri outfits later today, and to be fair I'll do one for Marion, though honestly I'm not sure it'll matter.