WHERE’S ANDRAE? Celebrating The Best ‘Project Runway’ Designers Ever

It’s 2004. Bravo is in the middle of a radical transformation away from being that classy station that shows Inside the Actor’s Studio, art house films and ballets late at night into a reality television juggernaut. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is a national sensation and Survivor is the apex of what reality television can be. So, Bravo launches a show that is essentially Survivor, but for fashion design. How can fashion fans take this show seriously? How can middle America be expected to be interested? Is this show even going to work? 

Thankfully, the very first episode took designers out of the fabric store and asked them to design a dress out of supplies from a grocery store. While everyone else created garish designs out of plastic bags and tablecloths, 22-year-old Austin Scarlett made a gorgeous ready-to-wear look out of corn husks. Over the course of the season, Scarlett swanned his way into our hearts with his dramatic personality and gorgeous dress designs. And lo, Project Runway was born.

No one would have taken Project Runway seriously as a fashion design competition if it wasn’t for Austin Scarlett’s ambitious corn husk dress, but you could also argue that Project Runway would never have taken off as a realty show if there wasn’t a loathsome villain to hate. In any other season, Wendy Pepper, a middle-aged mom from Middleburg, Virginia, would have been the underdog. She was less experienced than the other designers and her taste wasn’t as tapped into the zeitgeist. However, Pepper transmuted her obviously insecurities into Machiavellian ruthlessness. She wasn’t there to make friends and she wasn’t there to make fashion. She was there to win the game and she came crazily close. Pepper still designs clothes, but according to Wikipedia, she moonlights as a barista. 

Austin Scarlett might have been a diva with designer chops, and Wendy Pepper might have been a ruthless competitor willing to do anything to get ahead, but Season 2’s Santino Rice was all of this and more.  The staggeringly talented designer entered the competition blowing everyone out of the water, but he ultimately lost out to the impeccably tasteful designs of quiet Chloe Dao. Still, no one ever hated him as much as they hated Wendy Pepper. It’s not because he was a dude and she was a woman, though. It’s because he could make everyone laugh. His impression of Tim Gunn squabbling with Andrae at Red Lobster remains one of the show’s most popular moments of all time. 

Sure, we knew that the designers on Project Runway could make a great dress out of newspaper and some chicken wire, but did any of them have the chops to be legitimate designers? In Season 4, we were introduced to an extraordinarily cocky 21-year-old student named Christian Siriano. He was quick and sassy and emotionally immature, but he was a spectacular sewer and had a distinctly modern design aesthetic. He ran away with the Season 4 crown and has since become a recognized fashion label. He’s dressed stars like Christina Hendricks for the red carpet and has collaborative lines with Payless.

Season 4 also introduced us to Chris March. If Siriano was a tad bit prickly, then March was a warm, fuzzy and endlessly endearing. March gave the competitive show an injection of much-needed joy and his whimsical designs stood out from a sea of designers who wanted everything to be serious, chic or “modern.” 

Kenley Collins might be one of the most polarizing contestants in Project Runway history. Was she super annoying or was she just brassy? Was she a good designer with strong retro-inspirations or was she a copycat? WHY DID SHE THROW A CAT AT HER BOYFRIEND? One thing is for sure and that she made for great television. She was a shinier, snappier and more talented Wendy Pepper. Oh, and she is totally the woman responsible for Ariana Grande’s style.

We at Decider completely realize that most casual Project Runway fans probably don’t remember Stella Zotigs, and we want to rectify that. Stella was the one obsessed with “leatha” and had a boyfriend named Ratbones. She designed clothes for rockstars and described her own aesthetic as being perfect for “hookers or pimps or whoever’s tough enough to wear it.” Now, she’s faded into the fashion ether, but it does seem from her twitter that she’s still very much into leather and that she became a mom. Stella Zotigs isn’t just that contestant that would have blown up in the era of gifs, but she’s also the platonic ideal of a Project Runway filler contestant. Meaning, she was too one-dimensional to ever take the top prize, but she was a capable designer and she was an absolutely wonderful character to watch interact with recent fashion design school graduates.

Bravo lost the rights to Project Runway after Season 5 and many fans lost interest in the program once it moved to Lifetime. The designers were less talented and less interesting. The challenges seemed like hollow replications of what already happened on earlier seasons. Things perked up in Season 8. On the one hand you had the seemingly unbeatable Gretchen Jones. The tetchy Portland designer’s aesthetic blended all-American ready-to-wear styles with hipster flourishes. Her biggest rival? The quirky to a fault Mondo Guerra. Guerra slowly, but surely built up momentum over the course of the season and just as Jones lost her inspiration, Guerra seemed to open up. He won a fabric design challenge for a pattern inspired by his experiences discovering that he was HIV positive. Jones eventually took the crown, but many fans and critics (including Project Runway‘s own Tim Gunn) have argued against the judges’ decision with the understanding that Mondo should have won. 

Season 9 might have been the weirdest season of Project Runway ever (and we know all about the disastrously uneven “Team Challenge” season).  How else do you explain how a beauty queen who had only been sewing for less than a year ran away with most of the challenges and the top prize? Anya Ayoung Chee figured out the most important part about fashion was that it was a show.  Not that Project Runway was a show, but that fashion is a show we put on. Sure, some of her hemlines were never finished. She might not have known how to make a pattern. She did know how to pick a pretty fabric and how to drape it in a comely way that would make any woman look good–and that skill made her look better than any of the other designers fretting about seams and peplums and inspiration.  And she was winsome! She had a laid back island vibe you wanted to root for! 

It’s easy to say that Project Runway lost its heat after it moved to Lifetime, but Season 10’s Christopher Palu didn’t get that memo. He didn’t just serve up some absolutely exquisite designs; he also provided some of the show’s most gif-able moments ever. His wonderfully catty takedown of one contestant describing a color as “blood orange” lives on forever in internet memes. “‘Blood orange?’ She’s so pretentious. It’s fucking red.”