Project Runway: Andy hits emotional bottom

Lifetime photos
Andy spends the day with his mom.

Tracking the progress of Hawaii’s Andy South:

Since Ivy Higa was sent home last week, our focus now is on Andy’s status. Episode 10 should have been fun and exciting, bringing back the opportunity for the designers to create their own computer illustration textiles—good marketing for HP. Except the whole episode, titled “There’s a Pattern Here,” turned out to be a big tear fest.

The garments they were to create could be anything, but the graphic was supposed to evoke something personal, and to get started, the designers’ computers were loaded with their childhood and family images. Just as they were missing their families, Tim Gunn prepared them for welcoming visitors, which some assumed would be new models who might hate their prints. Instead, each welcomed their mom, other family or loved one. That was just the start of the tear fest.

Of course who could work after that, so Tim sent them all out to enjoy the day with their loved ones.

They were back in the workroom the next day, but Andy couldn’t focus after the emotional experience of the previous day, and he wasn’t inspired by his own gray print of memory bubbles, although it was actually quite pretty, which you really can’t see in the picture, which makes it look sort of granny. “Seeing my mom took me way off my game,” he said to the camera. “Like, I’m kind of just done.”

Andy’s print comprised memory bubbles, but after an emotional day with his mom, his mind was more on family than the competition.

I don’t know if Hawaii is rubbing off on Tim after having had Andy and Ivy Higa on for the past nine episodes, but when it came to his critique of Valerie Mayen’s work, he said, “You don’t want too many construction details happening. I don’t want it to become like a pupu platter of different construction methods.”

Artists being sensitive to begin with, it turned out a lot of designers, like Andy, were not able to separate analytical ability from the emotions that triggered their designs, so the runway wasn’t all that impressive.

I think a lot of them also aren’t accustomed to working with prints, so turned out the most pedestrian designs. It figured that Mondo, who’s terrific at juxtaposing all kinds of prints, would be the winner.

He also revealed through his print that he is H.I.V. positive, a secret he’s kept for 10 years. More tears on the runway.

On the bottom were Valerie and Andy, but in the end, the judges decided that she had repeated herself and her overworked design was worse than his, even though they had deemed his short and top ensemble “unwearable.”

Andy explains his work on the runway.