And the Winner Is...

The best part of
the show this week never made it onto the show. It’s
a clip you find on Bravo’s site now with Tim
Gunn and Christian competing in a model walk-off.
Christian, whose hips are made of ball-bearings, wins
handily, causing Heidi to tell Tim Gunn that he needs to
loosen up his sashay a bit. This is like telling Tim
Gunn that he has to shop at Wal-Mart for the rest of
his life. The stick up his ass is part of his charm.
But Heidi won’t give it a rest and takes this
opportunity to lunge at Tim Gunn and tickle him in a
way that infuses fresh new jolts of sadism into the
word merciless. Tim Gunn turns a deep red and
giggles uncontrollably in the clutches of the Aryan Queen of
Doom, who for her part doesn’t stop until she
has nearly asphyxiated him. It’s staggeringly
good. So of course it’s not airing on actual TV.

They don’t
waste any time with the
where-you-are-and-what’s-happening in this
episode. The first thing we see are bottom-of-the-screen
words:

3 DAYS UNTIL
RUNWAY SHOW

Shit is all
serious now. Christian says, “I’m nervous.
I’m scared.” The next thing we see is
Rami, on interview cam, talking about how he noticed
Christian noticing his collection and becoming concerned.
And he has no choice but to say this with an air of
smug superiority, like, “Clearly I am the
sophisticate and this child is a clown and now you at home
can all see that I am the true number 1 man now.
Triumphant!” Then he stares and stares as Tim
Gunn comes in and tells Jillian that her
muppety-striped-explosion-of-Raggedy-Ann-curls sweater
doesn’t look like it fits in the collection.
Christian concedes that both Jillian and Rami are
great designers and that it “messes with my
head.”

So now, after all
this time, we get to see a touch of insecurity from
Christian, even if it is just a way for the producers to
make a last-ditch attempt at suspense now that
everyone with a computer and reason to care has seen
all five of the final designers’ collections at
Fashion Week. We’re not going to see Sweet P’s
or Chris’s here, by the way. The show has
decided to pretend that they’re not in New York, in
the next room even, getting their shit together for
the shows, even though we all know they were. Did they
have to room together? Or did the show just toss them
out onto the street and say, “Decoy collections fend
for themselves! Banished!”

The three of them
go to a model casting and all of them want the same
girls. “Let’s see the hair,” says
Jillian to one of them. The model unravels her clearly
unwashed, unstyled hair. This, I’ve learned, is
common. Model pal Elyse said so, telling me, “You can
go straight from the plane to the shoot. You just
splash some ice water on your face. Easy. But
there’s nothing you can do about your greasy-ass
hair. That’s the hairstylist’s
problem.”