Project Runway Season 15 Recap: “Seeing the Light”

Image via Lifetime

In this week’s episode of Project Runway, the contestant are asked to create outfit that go from White Light to Black Light without losing coolness points.

This week on Project Runway, Heidi and Tim insist on acting like freshmen in college who just discovered weed and the properties of blacklight. Why are they giggling over having lacquered nails look white against Heidi’s blue skin? Because it’s a blacklight challenge!

Of course it’s not *just* a blacklight challenge. There’s some idea of making this a “day to night” challenge. (Newsflash, blacklight =/ nighttime.) There’s another reason they’re doing the challenge too, and it has nothing to do with fashion or stoner dorm rooms: it’s Tim’s marketing deal with transitions lenses! They’re the ones sponsoring this challenge and even have paid for the winner to appear in Marie Claire Magazine.

There is a trip to Mood with a budget of $200. This is a relief, because for a long minute I thought that the table full of blacklight paint, neon rope and every color of gaff and spike tape from the production department was all they might have to work with. Instead it’s time to go and attempt to buy reflective and ugly fabrics based on how the react to the “find the cat pee” flashlights the contestants are carrying through out the brightly fluorescent lit floors of Mood.

Image via Lifetime

In true Project Runway style, we have the “branded sponsored technology assisting to video calls home. We on the other hand will indulge in our time honored tradition of skipping over all that nonsense and heading right to Tim’s walk through.

• Erin: Our two time top look haver is going babydoll dress made out of gauze. It’s a choice!
• Kimber: She’s using ugly prints. She not used to prints. This should go well. Tim calls it thoughtful.
• Cornelius: He’s threatening to cluelessly spray paint white cotton. “That’s confidence!” says Tim.
• Sarah: She has a nun’s outfit that’s surprise snowflakes. How un-nunny!
• Alex: He’s going with neon neoprene. Say that five times fast.
• Dexter: He’s going full fringe. Never go full fringe
• Rik: It looks like 1970s Lost In Space wear, or maybe 1990s CD era scifi.
• Nathalia: She has a jacket which looks like a 1950s poodle skirt dress made out of pink and blue neon and bright yellow leggings. Tim is blinded.
• Laurence: She not only is the first one making clothes rather than a costume, she’s actually been thoughtful about how orange disappears completely under blacklight.
• Roberi: He has torn bits of chiffon and insists they are high art. Tim calls it electrified.
• Brik: He’s sporting his third hair style in as many episodes, this one a Game of Thrones type braid creation with a topknot. Oh was I suppose to care about his outfit? Sorry, distracted.
• Mah-Jing: He’s making his fiancee a costume wedding gown. It’s going to be awkward if it gets him sent home.
• Tasha: She has fabrics pinned to her dummy because she’s not far along enough yet to have made anything.
• Jenni: Her top is very old lady, and like it belongs to an office wear challenge. Tim shakes his head and catchphrases it as a “make it work moment” before retiring back to making insurance commercials.

And that’s another episode where we checked in with every last designer! Helpful, in that it continues to reinforce faces to names, but not useful in that no one is guaranteed so uninteresting as to be safe this week. In the room the models come and go, but not talking of Michelangelo, as nothing here is artwork of that magnitude.

Day of runway, and this is the first time we’ve seen Erin (who cuts these things down to the wire) genuinely worried about time. Jenni’s dress is still a complete disaster and all her design band-aids peel off faster than she can stick on new ones. But that’s nothing on Mah-Jing who scrapped the wedding dress on Tim’s advice and is now reduced to markering up muslin. There’s never going to be enough time for him to fix this. All the visits to the Product Displaying Make Up People and the Name Dropping Hair Salon just will never be long enough for him to dig himself out of this hole.

All we can do is head to the runway.