Saturday, September 19, 2009

PR S6 Ep5 Pt. II: Whoa, is that Carrie's prom dress?!

This week, we get to see footage of some of the initial sketches from the designers, which is cool.  Christopher immediately feels ambitious, and is going for a solidly-structured bodice with a long, full, feathery skirt.  Wow.  I'm immediately reminded of Chloe Dao's leaf dress and wonder whether Chris will be able to finish in time.  Althea has sketched a dress and a jacket, but is unsure about how to handle this material, so is up for some experimentation.  Carol has sketched something that reminds me a lot of the dress she designed for the avant-garde part of the Surf'n'Turd challenge.  Nicolas feels that he's going home tomorrow because he has no idea how to work with newspaper.  (Newsflash, Nic: no one else has worked with newspaper, either!)  Irina's initial thought is to give the look of mixed materials, and use prints to do a dress.  She's painting a dubious-looking base design.

Shirin is going to papier-mâché a bodice , which made me do a double-take.  I'm wondering how she's going to get it off the dress form and then get it onto her model.  We then launch into a montage of Shirin being chatty and bubbly and generally going on and on to amuse herself while she works.  Nicolas interviews that she's so annoying and childish and he wishes she'd shut up; we get edits of the designers in the workroom pointedly ignoring her and/or rolling their eyes, which could be reality or could be the Magic Elves.  Aw, come on, she's so adorable, how could you not love her?  Maybe if I was under that kind of stress and trying to concentrate, it'd be irritating, but watching from home, I can't help but find her incredibly likable.

Cueball gets the idea to do an origami dress with origami cranes "holding up" the shoulders.  He begins painting it red and OH GOD IT LOOKS LIKE CARRIE'S PROM DRESS.  Remember that?  When the Mean Kids dumped a bucket of pig's blood on her?  Abattoir Chic.  Fuck, I have to move on or I'm going to need to lie down.

Relief!  Unnecessary Apostrophe has some pattern-cubism-origami ideas and is working on coloring his "fabric" lovely shades.  Louise has an idea to do a Headline dress.  Oooh cool!  So far, she's the only one who's thought to use the newspaper's secondary ingredient: words. 

Before we know it, it's time for Tim's walkthroughs!  Gordana's going to make two garments, one making a political statement, the other a pleated, colorful dress.  The "kooky crazy" music starts as she explains her political-statement idea, and Tim gently discourages that whole thing by encouraging her to stick with the dress she's created.  She hasn't used any muslin; it's all paper.  "I love you," Tim says.  We here at Chez Boogie do, too.  Althea, who has immunity, is talking about shoulder pads and wants to drape red-dyed paper in a fabric-y way.  Tim is unimpressed, and gives her the excellent advice to look at the paper upside-down -- a technique for creativity-jogging that's served many an artist and will serve Althea well here, too.

Irina has made two garments that she's not satisfied with, and has an idea to do a trench coat.  She's concerned that without muslin, it won't work.  Tim assures her it will.  I like the idea.  What I don't like at all is Cueball's pig-blood dress (one snark on which I agree with Nicolas), and Tim doesn't like it either, pronouncing it "a craft project gone awry" and "like a bunch of kindergarteners made it."  Cueball explains the bit about the birds looking like they're holding up the dress, and Tim responds that it looks like the birds have attacked the dress.  Poor Cueball; I can see exactly where he wants to go and it's a cool idea, but he just doesn't have the execution skills to pull it off.  After Tim leaves, he crumples his dress into a ball, tosses it towards the wastebasket, and decides to start over.

I'm going to put on the Dr. Boogie hat and notice that Cueball is highly sensitive to Tim's criticisms; almost every time Tim hasn't liked something he's done, rather than alter or expand it, he trashes it totally.  Poor guy is so insecure and I'm labeling it the byproduct of the addiction issue.  Okay, enough psychoanalysis.  Let's get the models in here!

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