PR10EP6: You've Got A Friend .... But It's Not Ven

All right then so this is the episode where Ven goes down. Not out. But down. It’s the “Here’s A Client, Now Dress Her” episode, and that’s always a treat because it separates the true designers from the Barbie’s Playhouse designers and the human beings from the, well, Vens of the world. And I’m hoping there aren’t a lot of Vens because I’m depressed enough today as it is.

This episode was all about taking the everyday woman who needs a makeover in her hair and makeup, and in her clothing, and those are some of the best kinds of shows because the transformations are, sometimes, amazing.

The only great transformation for me was my impression of Ven, but let’s wait for that, shall we? I need to build up steam if I want to eviscerate him……

ALICIA 

The PR lesbian, with the dreads and the plaids, got the girl who wanted all the men to marry her and all the women to be jealous of her. Uh oh. Mismatch.

But Alicia stepped up to the plate—Get it? Plate? Stepped up to it? Lesbians? Softball? I’ll stop—and took a risk, going all pink and girly and sexy.

I liked it. It might have been too simple for a win, but I think it showed a different side of Alicia. That said, I cannot picture, right now, Alicia at the tents, but then, after the first episode I pictured Ven there, and now that sentiment is shifting.

Anger building……

ELENA

WTF happened to her? She was all sweetness and light this week, after last week’s performance as the PR longshoreman unloading crate after crate of whup-ass on the other designtestants.

But she dropped the ball—No lesbian softball reference—this time. Her client loves color. Loves.It. She’s brassy and bold and colorful, so Elena put her in a bland [pinkish top and a, for me, too tight black skirt. And that weird shape of the top, one length from the front and then curved up and over the client’s ass from the back.

The line of the night, though, goes to Elena for saying she‘d lost all respect for Ven with how he talked to his client. But, he didn’t say she looked like she was ‘taking a sh*t’ and he didn’t tell anyone to stop ‘f**king talking to’ him like that.

Anger building.....

MELISSA 

There was immunity involved. In Melissa’s challenge and in her dress. I don’t know if it was awful, and I don’t know if it was good, because all you saw of the dress was the scarf-slash-car cover draped over it. It was a meh. And it was back to black for Melissa, too.

CHRISTOPHER 

Um, let me get this queer. His client said at the beginning that she wears dresses and blazers to work so he decided to makeover her by designing a dress and jacket? Huh? And then his client, apparently less than thrilled by the jacket, whipped it off the second after she hit the runaway and carried it like a dead cat in her hand.

The dress was pretty, though it didn’t look like a work dress, unless work is in a cocktail lounge; albeit a chic cocktail lounge where a beer costs twelve bucks. And what was with the weird hemline; it’s like he took the mullet dress and turned it around. It was longer in the front and shorter in the back.

Not good. Safe, but not good.

TOP THREE

GUNNAR

Okay, I’m been mean to Gunnar all season, and I’m sure, after this week, I’ll be mean to him again—you just know there’s another team challenge coming up—but this week I was happily surprised at how sweet he was with his client. He’s quite the diva, but this week he was a Good Diva, not a Bad Diva, so I didn’t want to drop a house on him.

And I kinda liked his dress, though I wonder if I liked it so much because his client rocked it down the runway with that fabulously over-the-top walk, or if I liked it because it was good.

I think it’s the former.

DMITRY 

His client usually wears flowy, so he gave her form-fitting. He reminded us again that he does high fashion and then proceeded not to show us high fashion.

I’m learning to like Dmitry, but this is a look we’ve seen before. Tight, but not too tight, sleeveless, and with some kind of structured detail at the top. I do think he should have gone top three, but no matter how much he reminded us that it was his time to win, he was not gonna win with a retread from a few weeks back.

Step it up, Dancer, or you can Shuffle off to Buffalo.

FABIO

Again, in a rare display of honesty, at first I didn’t like Fabio. That whole eating out of garbage cans through me. But then I agreed with Kors who told him that he needs to design like he dresses, with that urban sense of style, and this week he did just that.

He was paired with an Asian Lumberjack, in plaid and jeans—and I wonder if Alicia wasn’t like, “Dayum! That should’a been my girl!”—and he convinced her to cut off her hair and wear a dress.

And not some girly dress, but a very urban, and yes, lumberjacky, kind of dress. He really brought his sense of design onto the runway, and, as Kors said, best of all, “It took a boy in a dress to get his girl in a dress.”

I loved the not girly dress, with all the patched pieces of gray, which could have looked like one of Peach’s hippy dippy dresses, but instead looked like a dress a woman who never wears dresses would wear.

His client was really transformed, from the hair to the outfit, and yet it was still her. Very cool. Fabio gets the win, and I think it was well deserved.

But I still have trouble with that eating out of the garbage thing.

BOTTOM THREE

SONJIA

Her client was a tomboy who wanted a dress. Her client should have been given a dress similar to the one Fabio made, but instead she got some drapey, too short dress with a giant knot below the boobs.

I’ve seen it before. In fact, that very dress was in the window at Kohl’s last week and it was 50% off. Sonjia really missed the mark this week; she designed what she likes, but didn’t quite get her client all the way in there. She does get props for taking a tomboy and making her look feminine, but I think, as Kors said, she turned the dial a wee bit too far.

NATHAN 

His client is a singer and wanted a stage outfit, with some sex and some swagger and some skin. Totally not the kind of dress that sophisticated, and cute, Nathan normally makes. This was the perfect time for him to gently prod her from Long Island Prom to Beyonce, but he let the client dictate what the dress would be. He became, as Heidi said, the seamstress to the client-designer.

As a result, he made some horrific dress out of blue satin—sidenote: that color blue only looks good on cars, not people—and sheer black arms and sides. It was slutty, not sexy, and the only swagger I could see would be when the client bent over to talk to her pimp through an open car window.

His dress was cheap, and not Nathan. It was, sorry to say it, Snooki. Well, it would have been Snooki if it was in leopard, and covered in vomit.

Nathan, cute, adorkable Nathan, get's Auf'd.

And now, to the main event. I sometimes try to save the best for last, but not this time….

VEN

What a dick.

The way he spoke to his client, to her face and behind her back should have sent him home instead of Nathan, but, alas, this isn’t Project Don’t Be A Dick.

He promised his client—Promised!—that he would make something fabulous and comfortable and wonderful, and that his dress would be the next step up from his client’s usual outfit of jeans and t-shirts.

Then he looks at us and says he was "in shock" and "disappointed" when he saw her for the first time because he was “full figured” and “plus sized.”

Um, Ven, haul your fat ass off the couch and look in a mirror. Pot.Kettle.Full-Figured. Bitch.

I so wish, though I know it would have no bearing, that the judges could have seen him talking to, and about, his client:

“I don’t do plus sizes.”“OMG she’s like a 14!”“She has no shape, she’s not fashion forward, she has no sense of style, the before is a nightmare.”“I’ll ask for bigger belts.”“I was surprised yesterday [after the hair cut] at how beautiful you looked.”

Dick. Dickdickdickdickdick.

Even on the runway, trying to defend the horrific dress he made, he complained about not having designed for “real women” as though he mostly designed for coat hangers and maybe his sister’s Barbie. And the whole workroom stopped, and stared at him in shock the way he spoke about her, and to her; I mean, when Elena thinks you’ve gone too far, YOU’VE GONE TOO FAR!!

 Ven's look was a mess. It was office on the bottom, with that weird zipper, and cocktail party in the suburbs on top. He couldn’t be bothered with giving the client what she wanted—a dress—because he was too busy complaining that everyone else got models as clients and he was given a “full figured” woman.

Oh.The.Humanity. That he wasn’t Auf’d.

In front of the judges, to make matters worse, his client completely bashed him. She was not happy; it was not what she wanted. It got so bad that her friend, who suggested her for the makeover, began to cry over what Ven had done. And Heidi took one look and said, “We love Teri [the client] but we don’t like your outfit Ven.” She said the dress wasn’t hip, and it wasn’t Teri. The fabric was wrong, the criss-crossed top was wrong, the zipper…what the hell was that about? Kors said the mix of colors—the “cropped turquoise smock” and black skirt—effectively chopped his model in half, which made me think it was deliberate. I mean, if he’d chopped a Size 14 in half, he’d have two 7’s and he could probably work with that. Nina did like the skirt, but said it was bad from the waist up.

I thought it was bad from Ven’s mouth out. And, when Heidi hinted that maybe two would be Auf’d I so wanted him to go.

And I still do. Although I think he may have a tough time being a designer now that he has viciously, and continuously, bashed most of the women in this country. He’s the Todd Akin of fashion.

Good luck with that career Ven

So, what did YOU think?