A Lesson from Project Runway

Can you believe we used to watch The Real World? We would watch hours of people just sitting around on and talking out of their asses. Those days are gone though. More and more, to get on reality TV these days you actually have to be good at something.

So recently I've started watching Project Runway because I had heard so many good things about it. One of the commentators on Slate's Culture Gabfest sold me on it when she talked about how enjoyable it was to watch people "do their craft." That's just the kind of thing I love on Top Chef, so I thought Project Runway would be fun to watch.

I downloaded season one and although I found it to be a well produced and thoughtful take on the fashion industry. The contests aren't too game-showy, and there is a level-headedness to the whole affair which one wouldn't expect from a reality show about fashion.

One thing I found strange was the extreme time constraints the competitors had to stick to, such as designing a dress in 3 hours. At most they got one full day to complete their projects and I could see that some of them were really suffering from these rules. You could tell that some of them, like me, just work at a leisurely pace and don't force things to happen. Often if you sit with a project for a day or two the solution reveals itself more elegantly than just pushing through.

If you want to watch the first season don't read any further cause I'm going to spoil it pretty good.

I was struck by the final episode, in which the designers actually had 3 months to design a full fashion line. At last we could see how good they really were if given enough time to think through their projects. One of the finalists was in LA where she worked professionally. The other, the loveable Jay, was from the middle of nowhere Pennsylvania. One of the hosts of the show went and visited the finalists and it was really amazing to see the kind of place Jay came from. It really was a one horse town filled with the kind of people for whom the fashion world was as far away as Mars. Jay's workshop was in a dreary one level pre-fab house set on concrete. And out of this severely depressing corner of America this bright, bold designer had bloomed. Here's some of Jay's fashions from throughout the final competition.


In the final exhibition all the finalists showed well, but there was a zing to Jay's fasion that the other competitors didn't bring, and he came out on top, winning the season.

When the judges were discussing the merits and weak points of the finalists, it came up that the lady from LA's fashions looked "very Gucci." She protested that she had been designing that way for years, but the judges were looking for something that surprised them.

The judges all marveled at how original and personal Jay's looks were. One of them said something like "Jay is just sitting in the middle of nowhere, and he's got nothing but himself for inspiration. So we're getting pure Jay."

Now I believe that the other competitor was also designing from her heart, but, perhaps by living in LA her ideas were somewhat muddled by the proximity to a major fashion center, and the overall impact of her designs suffered as a result.

So what am I getting at here? What does this have to do with anything?

Well, living in Japan, I often feel much like Jay in his little brick house. No one over here is particularly into the kind of things I'm doing (wellness and design) and my only connection to people doing that kind of stuff is through the web or months old magazines. I feel like this has given me a lot of freedom of thought that allows me to draw on my own resources without a bunch of cross contamination. It's tough in that I have to self-start everything I do, but freeing in that there's no one telling me it shouldn't be done, can't be done, or has already been done. I just plow ahead in my ignorance and things usually work out.

So my advice for anyone who really wants to live the creative life is to not think that simply moving to New York or wherever is going to automatically jumpstart your imagination. In fact, it might do the opposite. You might end up just following the crowd, and wondering where all those good ideas you had went. Give yourself some distance from the people trying to succeed in your field, and you won't fall into the habit of groupthink. When you come back from the wilderness you will have armfuls of fresh ideas and everyone will be like, "where was this person hiding!?"