My wife has been binge watching Project Runway recently.
I’ve caught bits and pieces of it as I pass through the room while she’s watching. It’s a competition show for up-and-coming fashion designers. They compete in challenges to create designs to whatever that week’s criteria is handed down from the judges.
The critiques are sometimes painful to watch. Let me preface this by saying that I am NOT the person to ask for fashion device. I’m pretty basic when it comes to clothing. As long as it is a basic color and functional I’m probably good with wearing it.
The designer’s show off their designs when the models walk down the runway wearing the designer’s creations. I don’t see anything wrong with most of them. Some of them I like. I think maybe I’ve seen one or two that I’d say look really good.
The judges look at it differently. They run down some of the designs and are nasty in their critiques. Instead of providing constructive criticism, they tell the contestants how horrible their designs are. Others they gush over. I can’t see what they see because I don’t see much wrong with any of them.
I have to look way back at the dawn of mankind, when people lived in caves and struggled just to survive each day. They got up, hunted, killed their food, prepared the food, and ate. They had to make whatever they could from the animal leftovers and plants they could gather to have tools that would let them eke out one more day of living.
How did we get from that to something, that to me at any rate, is pretty hollow?
Maybe I’m being unfair. Mankind has to create, to express their inner world to the outer world, to bring forth their own singular perspective out into the open. They strive to make something new and unique. Artist paint, writer tell stories, musicians compose. Designers use fabric as their medium of expression.
But like most creative endeavors, it is subjective. I guess I find it similar to seeing one star reviews of books by people who read a romance book and complain in their critique that they hate romance books and thus the romance book they read sucks. It’s a competition, and not everyone can win, but I don’t see the need to be nasty in the judging.
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