Embracing Color - Mizrahi Style - Project Runway All Stars - NO SPOILERS

This week's Project Runway All-Stars episode celebrated designer and judge Isaac Mizrahi. Meeting at the Jewish Museum, the designers were treated to a personal tour of the Museum's celebratory exhibit of Mr Mizrahi's designs and influence over his lifetime in fashion, an exhibition called "Isaac Mizrahi: An Unruly History". He assigned each designer a specific color - red, purple, yellow, blue, green, orange, teal and pink. Each designer had to choose one complimentary color to pair with their primary color, had a budget of $150, and had to make a party look for spring for yet another one-day challenge. Yikes! This should be fun. 

Color in the workroom. It was a far more difficult challenge than
it really should have been, but apparently designers (at least this
set of designers) are afraid of color. Shame on them! 

The default colors for designers are not really colors at all - the usual choices are black and white, sometimes with a grey accent. These aren't colors, they are considered neutral in a palette. Remember, we're dealing with fabric here, not light. Black is either the total absence of light, or a complete saturation of color. White, as the opposite of black, is either the totality of all light or a reflection of all colors. Black and white are termed "achromatic" colors - a color without hue. The designers aren't allowed to use either one in this week's designs. It should be an interesting 24 hours. 

Anthony's assigned color was lavender and he decided to pair it with yellow - usually a great color combination. If nothing else, it will be bright. His final dress made yellow the focal, though. His lavender was just stripping along the edges. It looked nice, but I graded him down for minimizing his assigned color. 

Merline was assigned blue, and she chose yellow for her accent - a pale yellow that almost looks like beige. She was playing with shapes again, this time working on triangles. Her problem is that she never really has much of a plan before starting her design, so she wastes a lot of time just folding and refolding her fabrics. 

Helen's color assignment was purple, so she chose an eggplant color, pairing it with a bright sapphire blue. Once again, she trended to the dark, when going into a brighter purple would have been stunning. 

Ken had red, which he paired with an afterthought stripe of pink. Hmmmmm. The dress itself was a dream from the front, but the back fit poorly and the zipper was a disaster. 

Edmond was assigned orange - a really spectacular color. He chose a satin and paired it with a scarlet red. That was a great choice in fabric and color, but satin has no structure, it drapes and swishes. He wanted structure, but ended up with a glorified nightgown. Great fabric choice, poor design decisions. 

Stanley went with a geometric folded top of aqua (think the aqua of bathrooms from the 1950's - that greenish aqua) paired with a slightly flared-over-the-hips pencil skirt of coral. OMG, this was a stunner! The color choices were perfect, and the design was edgy. It wouldn't work well on anyone larger than the size 0 of his assigned model, but yeah - some great choices this week. 

I'm not really sure why, but this rather simple challenge seemed to have defeated many of the designers. It's not that hard - they just had to work with color - but apparently thinking outside of their coloring box is almost impossible for them. Anne's critiques, as she walked around the workroom, were a bit scathing, and many of the designers ended up with lackluster designs because they chose the wrong fabrics for their initial thoughts, or because they just couldn't work past their color. 

For me? Bring it on! I adore color and even though I wear a lot of black, that's more a matter of practicality than love for the dark. I usually pair black with some sort of color, only wearing it solo for funerals and such. 

My go-to website for Runway photos doesn't have any this morning, so I'm leaving today's post where it is and I'm going to try to find final outfit photos for tomorrow's spoiler post. Today, since it's Friday, why not try to find some color in your life to celebrate the fact that we don't live in a world of white, black and grey. Color - embrace it!