The Fashion Show Express Lane Recaplet: Prostitution Famewhores

Hello loves! Before we begin, I wanted to take a moment to thank those of you who wrote to let me know that the blog had disappeared on Monday during the great Blogger Blog Blitz of 2010. Without you, I might not have noticed until late Monday or early Tuesday, and then God knows when it would’ve gotten resolved. With your help, I was able to report it Monday afternoon and it was back up by 2 a.m. Tuesday.

Look, I have insomnia and an antsy kitten who’s alone all day and wakes me up at inappropriate hours to play and/or punch me in the face. So yeah, sometiems I'm awake at 2 a.m. to check and see if 5 years of my life has been returned from the void yet or not.

Anyway, the two people who read The Fashion Show recaps and I owe you a debt of gratitude. And on that note: let’s push our cart to the Express Lane and pretend we think that three paragraphs on the same topic counts as one item.

1) The designers dress in their “Sunday Best” and meet Isaac at Daniel on the Upper East Side. Their challenge is to design a ball gown for a charity gala, and their clients are. . .the Real Housewives of Orange County and New Jersey.

I was excited about this episode from the moment I heard about it, despite the fact – and this is true, not just me trying to sound classy (speaking of shutting the barn door) – I have successfully gone cold turkey on the Housewives. Yep. After the last season of New Jersey, I just couldn’t take it anymore. It was too toxic and too hateful, and there’s too much information about these women’s real situations out there for me to feel comfortable watching them put on a front for the cameras and be rewarded with both money and attention for their bad behavior. I did cave and watch 3 or 4 episodes of DC, which was just as boring as crap, but quit before the Salahi’s crashed the White House, and haven’t tuned in for a single neck-rollilng, finger-waving, autotuned moment of Atlanta.

I feel pretty good about myself. But that’s not to say I haven’t missed some of these broads.

2) Calvin sizes up the ladies perfectly, saying “one side [OC] is spahkuls and esstreemlee blonde. One side [NJ] very dahk hair and all about BOO-zum and BOO-zum summore.”

Ladies and gentlemen, from now on, I will always refer to tits as BOO-zums. You are warned.

Calvin also makes the trenchant observation that the New Jersey ladies don’t need to “dress down, they need to class up.” Calvin has his finger on the pulse of Bravo’s housewives, that’s for sure.

3) Team Emerald gets to choose first since they won the last challenge, and they make the predictable choice of selecting the closer to sample sized OC wives. Jeffery takes Lynn the grifter because she’s got an amazing body (which will probably be reposessed by her plastic surgeon because it's bought but it ain't paid for. That's if the creditors can catch up with her family as they bounce from rental property to rental property without ever paying. . .rent). Cindy takes Lauri, who wasn’t on the one season of OC I watched, so don’t count on my having an opinion of her. Ditto for her daughter Ashley, who is Cesar’s client. I wonder why these two broads are there instead of Vicki and Tamara. And where’s Alexis “Jugs for Jesus” Bellino? (answer: in foreclosure. Zing!) I want to see someone have to design a dress to encase her godly (but not God Given) silicone BOO-zums. Golnessa gets Gretchen, who is a gift in terms of being closest to sample size, but less so in terms of having brought sketches with her.

On the other team, Eduardo takes Dina – who, like Lauri, is technically no longer a housewife, but I’ll forgive it in this instance because SHE’S DINA. I love her. She has an invisible husband and a hairless cat with its own twitter feed (seriously, if my cat had a twitter account, she would spend all day every day fangirl stalking Grandma Wrinkles and Winston while I work my ass off to earn her kibble). Also, if they didn’t have Dina, their only other option would be to have Danielle. And you just know that’s not going to happen.

Dominique takes Jacqueline, who is suddenly concerned about modesty because she’s a mom or something. David gets Caroline, and makes the catastrophic mistake of telling her she has the same build as his mother. And Calvin gets Theresa Giudice, a horrible, horrible person with a fairly good cookbook.

I can’t even begin to comment on what a match made in reality TV show heaven and sane person hell the two of them are. One of the other designers later mentions the possibility that they’ll end up throwing tables at each other, and frankly I was surprised when that didn’t happen. (Un?)fortunately, the only casualty of their partnership is the English language. Calvin sums up Theresa’s style as “boob hang out, butt hang out. It like my kind of girl.”

4) We get a consultation with Isaac where he loves Emerald’s ideas and hates Nami’s. Then we get about forty minutes of Emerald seeming on top of things while Nami falls apart. That’s your first clue that Nami’s going to win. Also, Calvin starts alienating his team again, calling their ideas retarded and shooting them down with a “hell to the no.” Who does he think he is, Whitney Houston circa 2005?

Quote Parade!

5) Isaac: “you’re working with real women who have anatomy. Models don’t have anatomy.” This is one of those sentences where the words the person is saying do not mean what he thinks they mean. I suspect there are a lot of those moments in Isaac’s life.

6) Jeffery: “for Lynn’s dress, I really need to find the perfect color to go with her skin tone.” I know exactly what he means – I used to have a skirt in that exact shade of worn in baseball glove-esque leather, and it was really tough to find tops to wear with it.

7) Cesar: “Ashley’s beautiful. She’s got a natural breast and that’s more challenging than a fake breast because they move a lot.”

8) Calvin finishes early and sits around talking about how slow everyone else on his team is, and how he’s bored. What a douche. He decides to make another dress to give Theresa some options. Oh, Calvin. You don’t want to give Theresa options. You’ll only confuse her.

9) 3 p.m. on day two. The Housewives arrive for their fitting. Lynn clearly hates her dress, which is like something made for Norma Desmond’s frumpy, budget conscious sister. She cons Jeffery into cutting the smotheringly high neckline into a deep V. Now she looks like a whore, which she’s much more comfortable with

Lauri and Gretchen love their dresses, but Gretchen accidentally splits the seam of hers. On the other team, Dina compares Theresa’s first choice of dress to “a very pretty Scores dress” and Caroline’s to “Peter Pan.” She worries that the OC’s collection is more cohesive, and plots to “knock Lynn over the head and join their team since they’re all blondes anyway.”

I would appreciate it thoroughly if Bravo could find some way to integrate Dina Manzo into all of their programming. It could be like the 30 Rock episode with Seinfeldvision. Or frankly, they can just send her down to DC and have her narrate things for me.

Theresa and Calvin have their inevitable clash over which of the two dresses she should wear.

10) Dominique starts to sob in preparation for their team losing and David going home. They spend a grotesque amount of time this episode on Nami falling apart generally and Dominique falling apart specifically. Emerald gets overconfident.

11) Some designers edit their dresses. Eduardo gives David his leftover chiffon to make an overlay for his “Peter Pan” dress. Golnessa adds a pleat to the side of her dress to cover the torn seam, and cracks up because it looks like a “side vajayjay.”

12) Showtime! Emerald goes first. Cindy’s dress is good. Golnessa’s has a weird poof at the bottom and a side vagina panel. Jeffery’s is awful and Cesar’s is cute on top but the skirt is too short in the front.

On Nami, Calvin’s accentuates Theresa’s pooch in a horrible way, but is otherwise pretty good. Dominique’s is dull. David’s dress looks shockingly nice, and Eduardo’s is just sheer glam. Their show is also better produced than Emerald’s, and the Jersey ladies work it way more.

13) Deliberation. The guest judge is Susan Fales-Hill. They pick apart the OC’s dresses except for Cindy’s. On Nami/Jersey, they go hard on Dominique and Calvin, but they love David’s and Isaac wants to hire Caroline to run his studio after hearing her take-charge comments. Falls-Hills calls Eduardo’s a “beautiful celebration” of Dina’s curves, but the other judges point out that it’s very much like his previous efforts.

14) The winning house, of course, is Nami. And the individual winner is Eduardo, who gets another $500 if he makes it to the finale, bringing him to a $1500 total.

15) On Emerald, they allow Cindy to stay. Iman tells Jeffery his dress “might have worked at poolside, but it is NOT the Upper East Side. Don’t Move.”

Yayyyy, we’re back to “Don’t Move!” And Iman's sneered "poolside" is a thing of beauty.

Golnessa’s is awkwardly constructed and the flounce is terribly wrong. She’s told not to move. Cesar can stay. And Golnessa, of course, is out. She takes it well saying that since Cindy is still in it feels like she’s in too. That's sweet. It makes me glad that she wasn't on long enough for their friendship/partnership to fall apart under the harsh glare of the Bravo cameras, no matter how entertaining that might've been for the rest of us.