class(less) reunion

episode 12 posts :

• blame it on kayne : keith's secret to success
• precious moments : treasure them always
• all my alisons : a meditation
  
• behind the masks : serious ugly -- and just in time for halloween!

the unbearable cuteness of being

a meditation


the non-being in being cute

No one can be the Alison that has been created to fit the lovely creature that blessed us with her presence for those halcyon weeks at the start of Project Runway's 3rd Season. The sweet creature that loves animals and whose world is filled with rainbows and sparkles and care bears: we know she doesn't exist. Does it matter? Not one iota.



Nonetheless, Alison Kelly appears to be a sport of nature: although it feels weird to say this about an adult woman, but she actually is cute as a button.

Here is a show filled with gorgeous models including Heidi Klum, considered one of the world's most beautiful women, and yet it is Alison who has captured the imagination of so many. She is mesmerizing: it is a bit like when you are talking to someone who has those light light blue eyes: you just keep staring at their eyes because they seem so alien.

Don't get me wrong: the models are beautiful. But beautiful is different from pretty and from cute. The models fit a more contemporary standard of beauty. Less northern European. More emaciated. (You win some. You lose some). Alison's appeal is more old fashioned.

This isn't the end: click here to continue reading "the unbearable cuteness of being."

(If that link doesn't work try this one.)

Note to the reader: I am only discussing images presented in popular media, not the actual person. (Please read
For the Record if you haven't already.

precious moments

the sweetest thing
Who didn't enjoy Alison's assertion (and didn't we just know she would say something like this?) that:

"Animals make me happy."

Of course they do, sweetheart. Of course they do.
And you make animals happy too.

(see also
http://kora-in-hell-pr.blogspot.com/2006/10/all-my-alisons.html
all my alisons post.)

moving from the sublime to the ridiculous . . .

the fluff and fold tantrum
Vincent's "fluff and fold" meltdown over a laundry error (he was reimbursed for almost twice as much as the value of the item) was completely unacceptable behavior. Rather than talking him into staying they should have shown him the door. That said, it was also completely and utterly hilarious. My top three moments from that film clip are:

• When he channels Rodney Dangerfield and says, apropos of get-over-yourself, "No respect." News flash: respect is earned Vinny.
  
• When the camera turns to the producer (Rucker I believe) who just shrugs his shoulders. God love him. And just off camera we hear Vincent whine "it's not funny!" Oh, but it is, Vinny. It is.
• Vincent's plaintive cry at the end of the clip when he, incoherent with rage, emits this inchoate sound of "why why wha wha whaaaaa ??!!!!" Normally I don't find someone's suffering to be humorous, but every time I hear that it makes me laugh.

don't get too comfortable
This precious moment captured the irate Keith telling Heidi and Tim that he was the victim of a conspiracy concocted by the crew. In the pause that followed this assertion, while everyone stared at him, dumbfounded, he spat out: "Uncomfortable isn't it?"

Actually "uncomfortable" wasn't the right word. Gobsmacked might have worked better. My guess is that they were not made uneasy by his accusation in the sense that they felt implicated by it, they were simply too surprised to think of what to say. They needed time to recalibrate the new information. That new information was not his bizarre theory that producers planted the books on him. No, the new information was that Keith had become delusional if not barking mad.

as a followup:
Keith's ranting letter to BPR begins: "Seems like everyone is bitter that I might be actually telling the truth." Again, there is a usage problem. No one is bitter about this incident but Keith himself. Everyone else is just entertained. Nothing more. Sorry, Keith. It is a tv show. It is entertainment. The antics on it are just not that important.

(Click here for more on KM's "book burning"charges.)

and while we are on the subject of vocabulary usage . .

circuit circus
Because this reunion focused on Tim Gunn's fancy schmancy vocabulary (jesus wept) I have provided a brief but no less irritatingly pedantic discussion of what appears to be Tim Gunn's misuse of the word "circuitous":

At the risk of sounding like the pedant that I am, "circuitous" was not actually the right word to describe that staircase. The staircase was in a circular form, a spiral staircase to be specific, which is not the same as being circuitous. The route they were following may have been complicated and indirect and thus was circuitous. In standard English, however, the staircase was not. The etymology of the word is from circle or round but its meaning has shifted so that it is associated with indirection more than circularity. Ironically, one usage is to indicate an artificial form of speaking.

The man makes so few missteps that it is pissy to call attention to them. But I don't trust someone who appears to be completely flawless. I like him better this way.

a question of taste
Laura's response to that cheesy Publisher's Clearinghouse episode was one of the best lines of the show. We have Michael Kors -- Mr. Impeccable Taste -- impersonating Ed McMahon in order to present Michael with a check for the viewer's choice award. The sheer tackiness of it all did not escape Laura's notice and just as the excitement was hitting its peak she did what she always does: she calls 'em like she sees 'em:

I wonder if . . .

. . . project runway used a point system?

(note: you can click on the chart to see a larger version)

What difference would it make?
Of course it is impossible to know all the variables that could change the outcome. However, for the sake of argument, here are a few of the things that might have been different had they used this kind of scoring:

• Vincent would have been out in the first weeks (note how he is the lowest scorer Every Single Week! Even after he won!!
• Malan probably wouldn't have been auffed in the second week; he may have recovered from his error and stayed on quite a bit longer.
• Alison probably would have stayed on longer (and had a good chance of getting to the finals): she was tracking with the top group (Laura, Uli and Michael).
• Jeffrey could have made it to the finals but it would have been much harder for him.

What difference wouldn't it make?
If they had used a point system such as the one above this past season the following things would most likely remain the same:

• It would not diminish the role of the judges: the judges would be just as important but they wouldn't be able to make outrageous decisions that ruin the credibility of the show.
• The producers could break ties but they wouldn't be able to intervene in a way that makes the judging look like a joke.
• It still could have come down to the same final four but there would be some serious competition from "wild cards" like Alison and Malan.
• At a commenter's suggestion I'm putting up another chart (click here to view) that attempts to put the designers in the order that they would have been auffed using this system. What it actually shows is that there is really no way to predict this most of the time since there are so many ties. I think that they are all close enough that there would still be a suspense about who would be auffed. For example, with the point system Jeffrey could have been "auffed" early on or he could have made it to the end.

How this chart shows why Alison's auffing was bogus:

• At that point in the season Alison was one of the highest scorers: when she was "auffed" she was tracking in the top group with Uli, Laura and Michael.
• She had twice as many points as Vincent.
• In the epsode when Alison was auffed there were three designers in the "worst" group: Alison, Vincent and Kayne. This was Alison's first time in the "worst group." This was Vincent's 5th and Kayne's 3rd.
• Whether you like her or not, I think it is valid to say that her auffing was a bogus decision.
  

Would this system have made the show more interesting?
On the one hand the answer to this question is: "it's a matter of taste."

• I think it would have been been lighter and funnier if we had people like Malan and Alison instead of Vincent and Jeffrey.
• There may have been more focus on the reparte of Kayne and Robert and Laura.
• If Bradley had been on for longer there would have been more goofiness.
• And remember -- for the first half of the season we didn't think that Michael was very interesting but once the cameras spent more time with him everyone fell in love!

The producers obviously thought that it would be more interesting to keep people on the show who would cause a lot of conflict. I'm not convinced that those people really did make the show more interesting. They just made it more irritating. But there may be people who prefer the bickering and drama. Chacun à son goût.

If you don't want the designers' past work to be a considered in the judging then you wouldn't want to use this point system. The problem is that while the judges claim they don't consider what the designers had previously done, in fact, the do. It is just that they aren't consistent about it. The judges often commented on what the designer had previously done (for better and for worse). The problem is that they gave the "benefit of the doubt" to some and not others.

On the other hand, whether or not you liked the fighting, I don't think very many viewers were happy with the way the show was being so obviously manipulated. As a result the show lost a lot of credibility. Using a point system could be a way of making sure that doesn't happen again.

It is all hypothetical of course. It' s not like Bravo producers are going to read this and say: "Why yes! That's brilliant! Let's change something that involves millions of dollars because some random cranky blogger suggested it!"

It's just a thought. What do you think?

repeat offenders

or, getting the old in and out

The producers' defense of the episode 10 gimmick is that they didn't know ahead of time that the two returning designers would turn out to be the two most annoying (read Andy's Blog). On the other hand, it is easy to assume that the two returning designers would be those who were most recently kicked out. Presumably they would be the next best designers. Of course they were not the best designers because the producers wanted to keep around the nut cases for "drama."

Vincent and Angela's return was pointless. Everyone knew that neither one of them would win. It was also annoying. They had already overstayed their welcome. We'd finally gotten rid of them and no one--least of all the viewers--wanted to see them darken the door of Parsons and the Atlas again.

I don't say this with malice: Angela seems like a fine person who is open minded but sticks to her own fleurchon-festooned jubilee jumbles creative vision. She has been amusing and baffling to viewers but in the end she proved to be a remarkably generous-spirited person. And she lives her life in keeping with values that are very admirable. It is too bad she is lumped together with Vincent who is truly disturbed and evokes in viewers a mix of loathing and pity. (See also "for the record.")

My point is that by the 10th episode we'd seen what they could do -- they'd had more than their fare share of chances and of lucky breaks.

Anyway, it seems like in order to be "fair" they set up a criteria that lacked the flexibility they needed to have the episode make any sense at all. And I'm not sure how fair they were either.

Just for the hell of it, here are a few of the other ways they could have approached this challenge.


THE FIRST TO GO: STACY, MALAN, KATY (KATHERINE)

Why not just pick those designers we haven't recently seen?
The ones who had the least chance to show what they could do?
The ones who didn't get the benefit of the doubt?

This also deals with the "Keith Factor" : that is, the three designers who were kicked off before Keith during the period when he was violating the rules.

(This is particularly an issue for Katy.)


STACY

Look at the two outfits to the right and you tell me which one is insanely hideous?

Enough said.

Think of all the trouble wrought by this first of a series of bad decisions.

What ever happend to the old chestnut "we're concerned about taste level"???


MALAN

Malan made the fatal error of not buying enough fabric and his gown was too short.

His dress was flawed but it was also ambitious, as opposed to a basic sheath with minimal fitting and even that was done badly. It also did not have ridiculous shoulder wings. Nor did it look like a bad prom dress project from the early eighties.

He also demonstrated that he could work collaboratively and be a team leader: it was not "the biggest nightmare of [his] life".

He also is a quirky personality who could have provided the show with a great deal of drama and personal interest and hilarity. He's odd but not creepy. Or certifiable.

Malan is a talented and experienced designer who very conceivably could have made it to the final 3. He didn't but he didn't need to. He landed on the runway at Fashion Week anyway.


KATY

There is also the matter of Katherine. In the episode when she was auffed it came down to a choice between her and Keith. Keith was soon asked to leave for violating the rules.

As it happens another set of rules that Keith felt did not apply to him were the requirements for the designers that week. Katherine did.

Her dress was considered too simple.

I thought it was adorable.

it was one of my favorite designs of this season in terms of something I would buy for myself to wear. (I want one in every color!).

She didn't have time to make the hoodie but she showed a "sample" on the dog which was a cute and funny solution to the problem. And it was adorable.

But there was another dress on the runway that was even simpler and lacked any style whatsoever and a major part of the look was leggings that the designer didn't make. The look was then topped off by a beret and sunglasses that just screamed 1983.

You could put together a whole group of people who were kicked off when Vincent should have been. That would be a solid group of designers!


ROBERT

The criteria for who was chosen to return wasn't even consistent. If Angela could get another chance then why not Robert who also worked on a winning team?

Perhaps Robert wouldn't have won without Kayne but it is also clear that Angela would not have won without the help of Laura and Michael.

I'd also like to point out that Robert's design for Jackie O -- for which he took so much heat -- is really not so off base as everyone seemed to think.

Click here for more.


ALISON

Alison was the viewers choice for who to bring back. She had the most controversial "auffing." There is little question that she was one of the most talented and promising of all the designers.

If they wanted to scare the bejesus out of the remaining designers they should have brought back Malan and Alison.

Perhaps the criteria could have been to bring back the two designers who clearly had the talent and skill to be in the final three but they were cut before they had a chance to really show themselves.

In both cases they were also cut instead of Vincent and Angela -- choices that were debatable if not completely wrong-headed.


NOBODY - or - AVOIDING THE SHARK

The problem with these sorts of gimmicks is that they look desperate and run the risk of being a "jumping the shark" moment. This whole season may turn out to be the "jump the shark" year, given that it is when PR moved from being different from other reality shows to being just like them : focused on annoying dysfunctional people bickering and sniping. One might even say that the decision to have someone like Vincent on the show was a shark jump in and of itself.

One shark jump rule might be that it a reality show has jumped the shark when it reaches down to the ethical dregs and casts a person who is seriously in need of medical attention for psychotic symptoms: e.g., hearing voices, manic activity that includes comments -- or worse -- that are sexually inappropriate, and possessing delusional, exaggerated and paranoidal beliefs that are profoundly and visibly incommesurate with reality.

Just a thought.

the unbearable cuteness of being continued

old & modern / cuteness & irony

Click here to go to the first part of this article.

If that doesn't work, try this.

(i'm still working on edits and image credits and references and links so bear with me)

When I said that Alison's appearance has an old-fashioned quality, I meant that, while she is obviously considered very attractive and even quite beautiful today, her looks also recall a standard of prettiness from an earlier period and from the world of art and literature.



Her blonde smiling child-like cuteness sometimes makes her seem like she sprang from the pages of an old Dick and Jane reader.


(I think I was one of the last to have used those books -- they were switching to more updated readers by the time my younger brother came along.)

I'm also reminded of the highly sentimentalized Victorian images of cherubic children:



The lace in these photos is material that Alison uses in her fashion designs, which bring elements of Victorian style into modern urban clothing.

These cutesy Victorian images illustrate one of the reasons why ideas about looking so adorable has engendered over-the-top ideas images of Alison and various cartoon characters. It is impossible to take them seriously, or to even see them as anything other than incredibly silly.

Images of darling girls are not just kitchy products of popular culture. Victorian and Edwardian illustrators and painters often portrayed young girls (and young women) playing in the garden or at the seaside, as seen below in works by Pierre August Renoir, Jesse Wilcox Smith, and John Singer Sargent:

(Above, right: Pierre August Renoir, A Girl with a Watering Can. 1876, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.)

Jesse Wilcox Smith (Little Drops, Betty's Posy Shop)

John Singer Sargent, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, 1885-6, Tate Gallery, London.

Even if you are not ethnically from a northern European background, if you have grown up in this country then you are familiar with this blonde-haired golden girl ideal.

After all, one of our oldest and most sentimental images of a cute child is Goldilocks. (And this image makes a number of different impressions on our consciousness: when I did a Google image search for Goldilocks the images were not all "family friendly.")


Indeed all of this girly cutesy stuff can be a little creepy.

It seems rather unique that someone past the age of puberty can actually have the quality of being cute without some "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane" weirdness.

What is cute in childhood usually isn't all that cute as an adult. Just look at the Olsen twins.

The italicized passage below gets into some more complicated ideas that you may want to just skip over if you are just reading this for fun and don't want risk getting a headache!

That is one reason why the adorability of Alison -- even on the physical level -- isn't entirely real. It would be would be too much. Her physical appearance is undeniably cute, but there is also an aspect that is fictional.

What I mean is that this image of what is cute and adorable is something that we have seen over and over again in our lives; it is a history of associated images.

We see a particular look that reminds us of these previous images and ideas and we connect them together. At the most base level this is stereotyping. (See also: "For the Record".) Stereotyping relies on meanings that are only at the surface level.

The more we dig deeper into explorations about what things mean, the more we can develop meanings that are creative and significant. When we are being creative and intelligent about understanding the world then we develop meanings that evolve over time, building up layers of associations. Okay this is a subject that has filled many books and what I just said is not the final word -- but hopefully it provides a brief sense of what on earth I'm trying to prove here. At least it may answer the question of why I'd this nice "young woman on a tv show and "analyze her to death" like this? Because it isn't just about her -- I'm starting with her and digging into the layers of images in an attempt to tap into bigger ideas: cuteness, popular culture and art, memory and meaning.

Alison Kelly is cute in a way that probably -- like puppies and kittens -- cuts across cultures. There are some things, like watching the baby panda cam, that are so cute you can't help but say "awww".


The adorable girl also evokes particular images that come out of things like old story books . . . .and songs about girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes . . . (or is it white girls in gardens with blue blood relations . . . ?)

If the other people on the show have a split between the person they are and the media personality that we see, then Alison has a third persona: the icon of a lunatic hyper-cuteness, a figure that has been invented, mainly via the Project Runway blogs (fourfour has been especially brilliant in engineering this image of Alison).

This image interests me because it has taken on a life of its own that has no need to be grounded in any sense of the real person. (And, not for nothing: it makes me laugh.)

evidence to the contrary

In fact, evidence of the person named Alison Kelly actually shows her to be a rather different person from the cuteness overload image surrounded by rainbows and carebears.

Her closeness with Keith and Jeffrey indicate a penchant for the bad boys. (She's still young, she'll get over it).

I think that nice young man Emmett McCarthy looks like he could be a good influence on her.

(I believe that I just channelled my mother. My apologies.)

Anyway, when you appear that sweet and innocent it would seem natural to rebel a bit, to go against the grain somewhat, just to stake out one's sense of individuality.

Some of the various media outlets have produced something of an Alison backlash (say it isn't so!) among some of the fans.

The main source of discontent was her interview with Entertainment Weekly where she sounded rather bitter at times.

(Note: my experience with interviews is that the best one can hope for is that the person does not publish a so called quote or describe what you are saying in a way that conveys the exact opposite of what you meant. So I remind you that I'm not talking about the real person.)

In that article Alison blamed the models for being too big and having scoliosis for her not winning challenges. She blamed the stylist. She blame dthe judges. She described Laura's clothes as disgusting. She claimed that she was so innovative that she intimidated the judges.

Not surprisingly, like everyone else on the show, she has an extremely high opinion of herself.

It takes some balls to put oneself out into the public eye like this: you have to be confident about yourself. Or else you are insane. They are not mutually exclusive categories.

This doesn't make her a bad person -- no more than it makes Kayne or Laura or Robert or any of the other designers bad people. It just means that she is not, it would seem, as sweet as people originally thought based on her appearance.

Of course that image was so saccharine that any real human being would inevitably go sour. One can only disappoint. I marvel that she manages to sustain this image as well as she does. But then again, perhaps it isn't all that surprising. It would take a master cynic to not be charmed by her expressions of delight and wonder:

Alison also appears to be professionally very precocious as both a savvy business woman and a talented designer who makes fabulous clothes. In fact she is my favorite of all the PR designers (with the exception of Jay McCarroll) in terms of making clothes that I'd be most likely to wear myself. (And if I could afford to I would.)


So none of this really fits the goddess of adorability fostered by bloggers which brings me back to my first point: I don't care that it isn't real and--more to the point--I don't think it matters.

adoring adorability

For one, it's hilarious -- this mix of reverence and absurdity that adores what is adorable.

It is not mocking the world of cuteness but celebrating it's insanity. We know that there is a lunatic quality to hypercuteness: the kind of loopiness that appeals to the most imaginative of all beings: six year old girls.

All that wonder and sweetness and magic festooned in pink and lavender and glitter is, to our adult eyes, utterly idiotic.

Furthermore, if you have ever had to listen to the music from My Little Pony or some other similar thing over and over and over and over again it starts to seem demented in a way that is almost menacing.

(Even more scary is the way these things are marketed, turning evil in the hands of advertisers because they know how impressionable its young target is.)


But the giddiness that comes from cuteness overload is also strangly irrestistable. It is intoxicating to imagine what it is like to be able to transport oneself into this world -- without any cynicism and irony.

Like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, a belief in the magic of cuteness is lost along the way.

It is so lost that we don't even notice when it disappears.

And we don't even miss it when it is gone.

elvis costello's alison

The fact that Elvis Costello's most famous song shares her name (and the same spelling) is for me just one more layer to the nostalgia. He's just enough older than I am that his early albums were being released during my high school and undergraduate years: the years of unhealthy obsessions and self-inflicted melodrama that is positively embarrassing a decade or two down the line; the years when one has a penchant for bad boys; the years when one's girlhood is smashed to smithereens.

This was also the time when I attended the most concerts and in a way when popular music played its largest role in forming who I am. Elvis Costello is one of the most dominant of voices on my life's soundtrack. I wore out my tape of King of America playing it on my Walkman as I travelled through Europe in my mid-twenties.

My best friend freshman year was named Alison (also with one L) and so that song was played incessantly. She was bubbly and adorable and it seemed like everywhere she went guys would sing that refrain.

I was too cool for my favorite song to be Alison, of course. When the audience was yelling for him to play "Alison" I was calling for "Riot Act" or some such thing. It is so overplayed (and then Linda Rondstadt had to go and record it, thereby destroying the song for every EC fan) that we forget what a wonderful, sad, angry portrait it is of the way life takes its toll on what we love and how hard it is to let go of the things we love, or once loved.

oh alison my alison

The one Alison cannot exist without the other: the Alison that the world is killing (and, not for nothing, the one that we can truly love) and the imaginary goddess of adorability, bringer of sweetness and light, a lovely flaxen-haired maiden who arrives still trailing childhood's clouds of glory.

So my point is that we may know that she doesn't exist but it is so much more fun to pretend that she does. We need the laughter, for one. And the more the image is pushed to its most saccharine extreme the more enchanted we become.

And that's entertainment.

It's just a tv show after all, but with enough creative use of photoshop, hilarious employment of screen caps, and some highbrow intellectualizing it can almost become art. Almost.



Victorian and Edwardian photographs

Sherman Hines Photography Museum: Adams Family Album

Alison Kelly - Dahl Clothes

I'll provide more references soon . . .