Undressing Project Runway: Race & Sexuality 

While in Atlanta visiting friends, I sat down to a home-cooked southern meal: collard greens, black-eyed peas and baked beans (into the beans a can of peaches had been poured -in heavy syrup, of course. I highly recommend this culinary fusion). Conversation entailed the usual sex nerd talk, but was cut short so that my hosts could excuse themselves and we could all watch one of the final episodes of Project Runway, the Lifetime reality-television show in which designers compete for the opportunity to start their own clothing line with the cash prize given to the final contestant. Whether Bravo (the network Project Runway was originally on) had set out to create a show that would be beloved by so many queer folks is difficult to say, but, ghurl, it happened.

I got the opportunity to talk with Gabriel Solorio – anti-nationalist queer person of color and burgeoning sexuality studies/critical race theory scholar – about the most recent season of Project Runway. This season’s final three contestants were Andy South, Mondo Guerra and Gretchen Jones: two queer men of color (Laotian-American and Mexican-American respectively) and one white woman. Gabriel had a lot to say about the coded messages of race and ethnicity and the politics of sexuality in the season’s final episode.

Virgie: What are your thoughts about the way that Mondo and Andy impacted this season?

Gabriel: Mondo used this particular media platform to get a dialogue going again on HIV and its effects on not only the gay community but on queers of color. And I thought that was brilliant. I don’t know if he had the particular intention of doing that when he first signed up for the show or not, but that’s really irrelevant because he nonetheless brought up a topic that has not been foregrounded enough as of late. Beyond that, two men – two queer men of color – used the show as a way to talk about matters of ethnicity and racial background by incorporating particular aesthetic elements into their final collections. Both of them produced ethnically-inspired fashion collections for the season finale. Everyone seemed to appreciate their lines.

Virgie: But Mondo and Andy did not win the final challenge.

Gabriel: What I found troubling was part of the criticism they received. Their inspirations - their ethnic and cultural backgrounds - were used against them in some ways by some of the judges.

As already mentioned, Mondo as a Mexican-American and Andy as a Laotian-American brought elements of race and ethnicity to the show by explicitly incorporating elements of each of their cultures into the clothing they created. They had culturally-inspired fashion collections. All three of the final contestants were very capable and obviously talented, and what's interesting is that all three of them were actually influenced by aspects of their respective cultures, even Gretchen by white, hippy, bohemian culture, but Mondo’s and Andy’s use of cultural imagery, colors and styles were focused on as such while Gretchen’s was not.

What I see as problematic was the way that some of the judges looked at Andy’s and Mondo’s work. In the case of Andy, one of the judges basically said that his clothing was ‘too influenced by oriental’ aesthetics, and recommended that some of these more culturally-influenced aesthetic impressions would pair well with more ‘modern’ and ‘edgy’ pieces. It seemed to me that what was being implied was that Andy's collection was out of sync with modern times, sort of caught in the past.

And then there was the case of Mondo’s clothing line, which was influenced by his Mexican and Catholic backgrounds. He brought a lot of Mexican iconography and bright, vivid colors that pop, Catholic imagery, crosses, the imagery of Day of the Dead such as skulls, etc. And it’s interesting that although the judges liked it, a couple of them also used elements of it in order to criticize his final collection. Some of the complaints came about because of the combined effect of the skulls, the colors, the crosses, the head pieces, etc., that it began looking 'too young and teenager.' In this regard, I couldn’t help but make the theoretical leap that what was in part being criticized was Mexicanness as 'too young.' His collection - and ethnicity - was infantilized. I also couldn’t help being reminded almost immediately of the critique that was given to Andy for being ‘too Asian.’ In both cases there were essentially 'too many' ethnic elements according to some of the judges.

The judges used words like 'costumey.' However, it seems that whenever you’re talking about 'high fashion' in general you’re talking about costumery and maybe looking costumey, which of course isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Virgie: Were these criticisms extended to Gretchen's collections, in your opinion?

Gabriel: Gretchen had that sort of hipster, hippy, bohemian aesthetic: a very particular look that put in mind white culture and style. Though Gretchen didn’t state white culture was an inspiration to her... she never explicitly said that, but it was clear, at least in my mind, that she was inspired by parts of white culture, which was never brought up by anyone - perhaps because of the invisibility of whiteness. It seems to me that in some ways because she didn’t explicitly talk about white culture, she didn’t open herself up to certain types of criticisms that Andy and Mondo had received from judges. However, her visual inspiration was clearly derived from these (largely white) movements' aesthetics.

Virgie: Final thoughts?

Gabriel: Despite some of the Project Runway judges' assessments, Andy and Mondo brought to mind José Esteban Muñoz's book Cruising Utopia and the potential of queer utopia in the everyday, of which for many television is a part. In Mondo and Andy I saw traces of queer utopia, of potentiality, of a world in which we could be ethnic and play with style and aesthetics - and in which all of this could be talked about and celebrated.