rinue | Romie Hawkins and Tim Gunn

I watch Project Runway, to the surprise of no one and without much need for explanation. The show, now in its seventh season, is necessarily in decline; while the shift in production companies didn't help, one also runs into the law of diminishing returns - the ideal contestants and challenges have already been used, and one must work harder to mine the limited resources available. This being reality television, a genre created to maintain low overhead, nobody wants to work hard, and so the show moves along familiar lines, more slowly and with fewer flourishes. Don't get me wrong; the designers are putting in tremendous effort. But we all know what to expect. Heidi is going to reject anything that's bad for boobs. (Incidentally, I love Heidi. And her boobs.) Nina is going to make random whimsical judgements that are partly based on a narrative she's invented for the designer. If someone makes a phone call home on camera, they're out.

The designers themselves know the score. They no longer present themselves as designers but as reality personalities. I don't know how many of them I believe will be designing ten years down the line. Not that I blame them for their vaugely shell-shocked natures. As the judging becomes less and less connected to aesthetics, the marketplace, effort, or creativity (and includes such gems as "blue and orange are not complimentary colors"), all you can do is be entertaining or catty - it's what keeps you around. The alternative is to exhaust yourself with ambitious and challenging work that pushes the boundaries of what is possible on no time and no money . . . and run a higher chance of being sent home because you didn't leave yourself time to create some kind of narrative (and/or you used color, which is verboten).

I still watch, of course.

I watch for Tim Gunn.

Tim is like the final civil servant working to keep the water running while the city is swarmed by a luddite provincial army tearing the buildings to pieces. And I'm like "Tim, you beautiful man, get in the helicopter," and he's like "no, I have to stay as long as I'm doing good here." And the helicopter guy is like "we can't wait or we'll all die!"

And we take off and Tim is in his office calmly telephoning people, impeccable in his gray suit.

In other words, I sympathize with Tim, who, like me, has spent most of his life working as a student and teacher of a subject that is at the intersection of art, function, and commerce. The longer you stay in one of these fields, whether fashion, film, comedy, whatever, the clearer it becomes to you that although they appear on the surface to be mostly a matter of taste, there is an unambiguous meriotocratic underpinning - a genuine difference between what is good and what is bad, one that can be explained and not merely felt. Once you see it, you can't stop seeing it; it's like knowing what salt tastes like. Knowing what is good does not mean you can apply it successfully all the time, but this is partly because one of the strategies for getting better is to continually attempt things that have never worked before, to see these rules as challenges rather than barriers, to try with all seriousness to write a song that is a single note, to try in a thousand different ways before you decide for a while that a song needs at least two notes (until you figure out another way it might work with one note and try again).

I watch every week, and I watch Tim immediately zero in on what isn't working in a garment, when a designer is pushing too far or not far enough, when there is potential to be explored. And I read Tim's blog every week, on which he says in the nicest possible ways: what were the judges thinking? How could they praise this design, which was so calculated and indifferently executed? How could they hate this design without seeing the ways it was innovative, the signals that tell an attuned eye this designer has the possibility of becoming great one day - not today, and maybe not ever, but maybe someday because they have the ambition and the point of view? The judges used to see it, I think. (says Tim) Maybe I don't know anything.

Please, Tim. Get in the helicopter. I love you for staying, but get in the helicopter so we can leave. There has to be a place, somewhere, that we can land. Maybe with our special eyes we can see it.