There was a little girl who had a lot of curls...

We said it last week: when Korto goes off the rails, she really goes off the rails.

At her best, she produces interesting, sometimes eye-popping, innovative designs, but in her quest to be different, she sometimes winds up with designs that aren't so much eye-popping as eye-searing. With Korto, it's either amazingly beautiful or insanely ugly. We think there's a reason for that.

We said that Leanne has an intellectual approach to design. When Leanne fails, the result is usually bland or boring. At the opposite end of the spectrum is Korto, who has not so much an intellectual approach as an emotional one. She needs to produce something amazing, something different. So when she fails, she fails badly but when she succeeds, the results are vibrant and amazing.

Unfortunately for her, she failed badly on this one. She wanted to produce a wedding dress that was different and unusual and she certainly accomplished that.

The end result was certainly different but it was ugly, overworked, and almost unwearable.

We're all for the idea of producing a wedding gown that goes against conventions and we love it when a designer or a bride goes for the nontraditional non-white gown. Unfortunately, this color is drab.

And the silhouette is just plain weird.

But the real crime is that it's way overdone. She worked that fabric so hard it looked like it was going to burst into tears of exhaustion at any moment. And is it us or are those ruffles on the shoulders uneven? There are way more on the left side than there are on the right. Not that symmetry is required, but going asymmetrical on a dress that already has so much going on was yet another bad idea.

The bridesmaid dress was at least a little better but we have to say it's somewhat notable that she completed this dress in the company of her peers and with the advice of a mentor. Much like Jerell, she may have needed the guidance to produce better work.

It's pretty. We think this one's also a little overworked but compared to the wedding dress it's the picture of simplicity.

We like the pleating in the bust but the two sides look a little uneven to us.

We like the fullness of the skirt and the layered hem. We also really like the belt but that's at least in part due to the fact that it's the only color to be found on either of these dresses.

Which brings us to our final complaint: the overall color scheme.

We got a little flack for saying that Kenley's dresses didn't look like they go together and Leanne's did. People mistakenly took that to mean that we thought the dresses should have "matched" somehow. What we meant was the dresses needed to look like they were going for the same feel. Both of Leanne's dresses had that ethereal dreamlike quality to them whereas Kenley's wedding dress was an over-the-top fantasy dress paired with a basic party dress for the bridesmaid.

We can at least admit that these dresses look compatible but the problem is with the color scheme. If you're going to put the bride in a somewhat drab neutral, it kind of behooves you to put some sort of color on the rest of the bridal party. Not only are both dresses colorless, they're virtually the same neutral tone. This would have been the most depressing wedding ever.

We would have been very upset if Korto had been auf'd over these dresses but we certainly would have understood why. The judges looked at the whole of their output and the potential for their runway show and decided that Korto had more going on than Jerell did. Having seen both of their runway shows, we have to say we agreed with them on that.

[Screencaps: Projectrungay.blogspot.com]