Althea

Oh, right. THIS one.

So Lo says to T this morning, "T," he says, "We still have another dress to do!"
"Are you sure, Lo?" says T. "I can't even remember. Who's left?"
"Althea!" said Lo in his excitable Lo way. "We forgot to do ALTHEA!!!"
"Oh," said T. "THAT one."
Look, nothing against the girl. She's done her share of solid work all season and she certainly got the judges' attention. We're not arguing that she doesn't deserve to be in Bryant Park. We're still stinging over the bizarre judging that rewarded a dress the judges called a "mess fest" and sent home the designer the judges said made a "beautiful" dress.

Which, if we can take a second to return to Gordana, seems to have been misunderstood by some of our readers when they saw our ranting on her "Auf Wiedersehen" post. It's not that WE think Gordana should have gone to Bryant Park; it's that THE JUDGES completely overruled their own assessments to justify not sending her. It's not about whether WE thought her dress was beautiful; it's about the fact that THEY did. And the flipside of that, what made it doubly frustrating, was that the judges clearly hated Althea's look.

Anyway, architectural inspiration, blah, blah, blah. Not a bad idea, but hard to pull off the technical details.

Model: Tanisha Harper

Like the judges, we'll give her a lot of credit for the effort. Unlike the judges, we didn't let that blind us to the obvious problems.

The actual design of the skirt is great. The choice to use that particular fabric? Not great. The fact that the design of the skirt was so obviously time consuming that it left her just barely enough time to stamp out a formless tank top with no design interest to it at all? HUGE mistake.

And the fact that the skirt itself isn't even completed to what Nina would normally consider her satisfaction? FATAL mistake.

Or it would have been if the judging didn't have the sweet smell of crack hanging all over it.

That is an unfinished mess topped of by a tank top so barely made it's practically imaginary. She should have changed course early on when it became obvious she wasn't going to do the design justice in the time allotted. That's what other designers have done when the chips were down.

But for whatever reason, all of this was overlooked. Actually, that's not true. It was all addressed and critiqued by the judges, who then promptly forgot about it when it came time to send people home. We still don't get it.

Extended Judging:


Tim Gunn's Workroom Critique:




[Photos: Mike Yarish/myLifetime.com - Videos: myLifetime.com - Screencaps: Projectrungay.blogspot.com]



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