'Project Runway': Kini Zamora scores another win with soccer ball dress

Lifetime photos
Kini Zamora was teamed with Amanda Valentine in this week’s challenge.

‘Project Runway’ Season 13
Episode 11: The Highest Bidder

This week the designers were led to a Navy Yard where they are paired up as teams, each with $500 to bid on storage containers of random merchandise, which seems to indicate they are real storage lockers being auctioned off.

Some are packed with stuff. Others look near empty. This is a team challenge and the other designers want to be paired with Hawaii designer Kini Zamora because of his speed. He’s teamed with wacky Amanda Valentine and their easy-going natures seem compatible. Her rationale for bidding on one container was because it contained a colorful Yeti painting and he was willing to go with the flow and have fun. I don’t necessarily like her aesthetic, but as time goes on I like her more and more as a person.

Their locker is otherwise filled with children toys, and they say it’s as if someone threw a party and stuck everything in storage afterward. It turns out to be their only win and it dawns on them that they now have no fabric to work with. They must make their own fabric with objects such as the canvas Yeti painting, soccer balls and plastic pool toys. They are simultaneously nervous and relieved when mentor Tim Gunn introduces a twist to the challenge, which is coming up with a third design of fabric, which they can shop for at Mood.

Zamora starts making a skirt with the soccer ball fabric and he and Amanda are happy with themselves, but during critique, mentor Tim Gunn fears they are dressing a teen-age hooker. So they rethink their designs and Zamora turns his skirt into a mini dress

Kini’s soccer ball dress scored him another win.

The judges, including “Project Runway’s” biggest star, Christian Siriano, love their inventiveness and sense of color and play. The soccer ball dress gives Zamora another win.

Both the other teams have problems, but Korina Emmerich and Char Glover, from two different teams, find themselves on the bottom for looks judges deem “too old” and “too hoochie,” respectively, and face a second challenge. They are given an hour to complete another dress.

Emmerich can’t get over her resentment that Gunn had saved Glover before, and never believed she belonged in the competition. Instead of focusing on her work, she focused on her anger and resentment. Her teammate, Emily Payne was allowed to help her, but Emily says Korina’s comments and “bad energy” make her “not want to help her.”

Emmerich believes she is the better designer and anything she puts on the runway will be better than Glover, but her negative attitude does flow into her work and when Glover’s smart choices end up in a pretty jersey dress with chiffon cape by her teammate Sean Kelly, she’s saved and Korina goes home.

Judges felt Korina Emmerich fell back on Southwest style too many times.

———
Nadine Kam is Style Editor and staff restaurant critic at the Honolulu Star-Advertiser; her coverage in print on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Contact her via email at nkam@staradvertiser.com and follow her on Twitter, Instagram and Rebel Mouse.