Project Runway Season 8 Thoughts (Plus Holly-gate Revisited)

We’ve reached the end of another season of Project Runway on Lifetime, and one thing that stands out to me about this season is the almost unprecedented reluctance of the season 8 designers to change models. Because of this, the designers had to be required to switch models prior to the week 11 challenge and stay with them the rest of the way!  I suspect that this turn of events may have been a reaction to the fallout over some of what happened in Season 7 of Project Runway earlier this year.

If you missed Project Runway season 7, one of the most shocking developments was the chain of events leading to the earlier than expected exit from the competition of one of the best runway models to appear on the show, Holly Ridings. 

Holly Ridings, a tall, blonde LA-based model who hails from suburban Chicago, was one of 16 models chosen for season 7 of Project Runway and was possibly the one PR model with the biggest supermodel aspirations.  Originally paired with designer Emilio Sosa, Holly got off to a great start, winning the opening challenge and being named “best model on the runway” by the judges.  Holly was also in the middle of a battle between Emilio and fellow designer Amy Sarabi for her services. 

Suddenly, in the week seven hardware challenge, things went horribly wrong for Holly.  In that episode, Emilio sent Holly down the runway in a washers and yarn creation that was originally intended to be a cocktail dress but instead became a bizarre cross between a fringed mesh camisole and a bikini.  Emilio ended up in the dreaded “bottom two” for the first and only time that season, and in the subsequent Models of the Runway episode, he dumped Holly.  To his credit, Emilio did give Holly a positive reference, but she found no takers and would have been eliminated right then had it not been for Amy having the last pick.  When Amy did pick Holly over Alexis, there was jubilation among the models backstage.

The celebration would be short-lived, however, as Holly went back to Amy at a time when she was doing very poorly, landing in the “bottom two” in three out of four mid-season challenges before being eliminated. Emilio, on the other hand, won the week nine challenge and had a chance to take Holly back.  Instead, Emilio chose season-long judges’ favorite Lorena Angeli.  Some message board posts commented on the “bitch face” Heidi Klum supposedly directed towards Emilio, but what did she expect?  All season long, Heidi and the judges kept telling the designers and the TV audience that Lorena was the best model on the runway.  Didn’t Heidi think Emilio would at least consider working with Lorena, who didn’t have nearly as much negative baggage as Holly by then? (Interestingly, Holly was the only model to openly complain—in her confessional—about how the judges kept favoring Lorena.  And Holly was eliminated soon afterward.  Hmmm.)

As for Holly, despite her excellence as a runway walker, she found no takers, and Lorena, who stood to benefit most from Holly’s early exit, called it the biggest shock in the competition.  Most of the public sympathy rightfully went to Holly, based on message board posts at Television Without Pity, Reality TV Games and other forums.  Yet Holly deserves some major criticism for not handling her elimination a little more graciously.  By refusing to say (or wave) goodbye to the designers upon being “auf’ed,” she violated an unwritten Project Runway rule and probably got herself on Heidi Klum’s bad side for all time.  (And we were so busy being mad at Emilio that almost none of us picked up on this back in March!) The designers didn’t say goodbye to Holly, either. Was she really that unpopular with the designers?

At the season-ending reunion shot in February 2010, Emilio said to Holly, “When I [first] had you, everyone wanted to work with you.”  That may have been true in week two, but by weeks seven to nine, no one (other than Amy) wanted to work with Holly, possibly because of a model selection/elimination system that not only gives the designers exclusive power over the models’ fates, but also sometimes degenerates into a popularity contest if every designer gets to pick before every challenge.  When every designer picks before every challenge, the models popular enough to be picked by four, five or even six different designers during the course of the season (i.e. Matar in season six and Lorena and Monique in season seven) will tend have an advantage in getting to do a non-decoy Fashion Week show over relatively unpopular models, such as Holly. Since most of the season eight PR models only worked with one designer all season, the model popularity contest of seasons six and seven was thankfully absent.

But why was Holly so unpopular? Some believe her height (I think Holly, despite a listed height of 5’11”, may actually be close to 6’1”) was problematic in terms of getting adequate material, but I don’t buy that.  While it’s anyone’s guess when designers and models have access to the confessionals done during the shooting of Project Runway, some of what Holly said in those confessionals, once word got around, probably didn’t sit well with most of the designers. For instance, in the Models of the Runway season two opener, Holly said that she ultimately saw herself becoming a superstar as a model.  And I suspect designers don’t always like it when their models make it all about themselves.

This may have helped spur the demise of the Project Runway spinoff, Models of the Runway.  For years, Project Runway was almost always all about the designers, and now they had to share more of the spotlight with the models!  (The season two Models of the Runway opening had model Megan Davis saying at one point, “It’s all about…me!”) And there was a lot of “me-first” posturing among the models on Models of the Runway.  Ironically, the winning model in PR7, “Quiet” Kristina Sajko, was the least self-promotional of that season’s models.  To her, it was all about the modeling work, and she wasn’t that interested in spitting out one-liner insults of designers and fellow models on demand.

Then there’s the matter of the Week 13 “playoffs” held in four of the last five PR cycles when not all the finalist spots had been decided yet.  In seasons four, seven and eight, Heidi Klum and Tim Gunn instructed the designers battling for finalist slots to create full ten-to-twelve piece collections for New York Fashion Week, then select what they felt were their three strongest pieces to put before the judges. (In season five, the final four had to add to their collections a wedding gown and a bridesmaid gown.)  In three of these four playoffs, the designers got to use their chosen muse models plus one or two previously eliminated models.  In season seven, however, for whatever reason, Jay Nicolas Sario and Mila Hermanovski didn’t get to use any “in-house” Project Runway season seven models other than their muses, instead using “outsider” models such as Holly Kiser--Mila had the wrong Holly walking for her in that playoff--and Shannon Pallay from Make Me A Supermodel.  Now what was up with that?

You can’t explain season seven away by using the decoy collection responsibility angle, because in the season just ended previously eliminated models such as Eyen got to walk for the final four in the playoff despite musing for previously eliminated designers in decoy collections.  I think it all comes back to Holly Ridings.  Not only did she show some lack of grace in her exit from the competition, which was filmed in August/September 2009, but she may have violated a reality show rule against revealing crucial details about the competition by spilling the beans about her pre-finals elimination in a December 2009 interview with the Beloit Daily News. (Holly, possibly on the advice of her agent or publicist, put a mostly Pollyanna-ish spin on her Project Runway experience, with nary a hint of how angry she was over how she thought she was treated.) I’m guessing Heidi Klum and other Project Runway producers were livid over this breach of reality competition protocol and may have decided that Holly was not going to get any more air time in any post-elimination Project Runway/Models of the Runway episodes other than the reunion shot in February, which Heidi was conspicuously absent from!  This is purely speculative, mind you, but after deciding to replace Holly Ridings in the Jay/Mila playoff with an outsider model (Holly Kiser), the producers were probably thus forced to bring in other outsider models out of fairness.

And great as Holly was as the breakout star of Bravo’s Launch My Line, I think she probably hurt her chances on Project Runway by doing Launch My Line immediately before Project Runway in the midst of the feud between Lifetime and Bravo over Project Runway.  (Yes, I know Launch My Line didn’t start airing until after PR7 had mostly finished shooting, but the PR producers had to have known all along that Holly did Launch My Line for Bravo and couldn’t have been that happy about it.)

I am glad, however, that for really the first time in Project Runway history, the show brought back previously eliminated models for a couple in-season challenges requiring the designers to create more than one look; I hope this practice continues in the future, along with the possibility of those eliminated models earning the right to get back into the competition based on their performance. This comes too late for Holly Ridings, however.

Holly Ridings came to the Project Runway/Models of the Runway project hoping to do well enough to finally achieve the supermodel status she has coveted for a decade.  She instead came away from the experience disappointed, humiliated and somewhat bitter.  Post-Project Runway, Holly has mostly retreated to her current professional home base of Los Angeles, where she has enjoyed a measure of success.  She doesn’t seem to have found New York-based representation since PR, nor does she seem interested in even trying New York again anytime soon. I personally think it would have been smart for Holly to pick a designer other than Emilio or Amy in the week two burlap sack “Fashion Farm” challenge, that way she could have had a chance to establish goodwill with another designer, but she was understandably thinking in terms of staying with the designer she won the week one challenge with.  Still, I hope Holly can somehow achieve her supermodel dreams one day.  Maybe she’ll appear in an upcoming Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, just as the 1980s supermodels she admires did!

Baldwin Grid's New Old Look

This past Saturday (October 16, 2010), The Baldwin (NY) Bruins football team celebrated homecoming by running out onto the field wearing beautiful old gold jerseys with navy blue numbers, letters and Northwestern style sleeve stripes.  Unfortunately, the Baldwin Bruins may never wear these jerseys again after being routed by Farmingdale, 33-6.

Nevertheless, it is something of a rare treat to see a football team wear old gold jerseys at a time when old gold has all but disappeared from football uniforms.

Saving Bridget Hall: Updated Information About Her DWI Case

Since my original post last month, I have found out some extremely disturbing new information about Bridget Hall’s DWI case.  On the day I first wrote this blog update, I came across an article in the September 8, 2010 East Hampton Press (page 6) that said that Bridget Hall was charged with both driving while intoxicated and aggravated driving while intoxicated. This seems to imply that either Ms. Hall was flat out lying to the New York Post about not having had a drop to drink the night of August 28/29, 2010, or someone may be trying to railroad her.

I’ve been doing some research on DWI laws, and I found that in New York State, one can be charged with aggravated DWI if his/her blood alcohol content is 0.18 or higher, and the penalties include a fine of no less than $1,000 and no more than $2,500, up to a year in prison, and loss of license for at least one year…and this is just for a first offense!

Bridget Hall and her lawyer, Salvatore Strazzullo, have their work cut out for them in trying to clear her name.  Under the circumstances, a plea bargain to a non-criminal offense is almost out of the question, and it will be almost impossible to convince a judge or jury that the breathalyzer had a “false positive” reading or was not calibrated properly.  Still, it is possible to build a “false positive” DWI defense even with a blood alcohol content of 0.18 or higher according to a Brill Legal Group article.

I am not in a position to say for sure whether or not Bridget Hall has a drinking problem, but if she does, she really needs to address it…before it is too late to save either her modeling career or herself.

If Bridget Hall is convicted of the top charge of aggravated drinking while intoxicated, she could potentially lose everything: her modeling career, her freedom, her friends, her dream of opening a restaurant in the Hamptons and much of her career earnings. It is really sad to see her once-thriving modeling career potentially end in prison time for alleged drunk driving. 

I really want to believe Bridget Hall is innocent, but things do not look good for her.  As I said in an earlier post, Bridget Hall can use your prayers and support.  Try e-mailing her in care of One Model Management of New York.

Last updated October 19, 2010

Saving Bridget Hall: Ramifications of Her DWI Case

On September 30, in a courtroom in either East Hampton, Central Islip or Riverhead, NY, a young woman will answer to a drunk driving charge.  This woman, once one of the hottest models in the fashion world, has seen her career fizzle to a barely faint pulse in the last five years or so, leading the mainstream press to mostly ignore this story.  The model’s name is Bridget Hall.

In the early morning hours of August 29, 2010, Bridget Hall was pulled over by East Hampton, NY, cops who saw her swerving. Ms. Hall, by her account as given to the New York Post’s “Page Six,” apparently passed the field sobriety tests, but flunked the Breathalyzer test, leading to her arrest and a Driving While Intoxicated charge.  Though this happened in East Hampton, Long Island, NY, Newsday and News 12 Long Island to date have not done a single story about the Bridget Hall case. 

Now Ms. Hall, once the face of Ralph Lauren and Anne Klein, is not only battling to save what’s left of her modeling career, but she’s fighting to stay out of prison. She’s not the only female celebrity to have run afoul of the law recently.  Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan have also had DUI and other arrests in recent years, but they’ve been treated with relative leniency, possibly because they’re still at or near the peak of their fame. 

Bridget Hall, however, has fallen into near total obscurity, and her situation could become a test case of how the legal system treats someone who has enjoyed a measure of past fame but whose star has dimmed. There’s a chance prosecutors may treat her more like an everyday citizen (i.e. more harshly).

In New York, DWI as a misdemeanor is punishable by a fine of $500 to $1000 and/or up to one year in a state prison. If, however, the prosecutor or judge bumps the charge up to the felony level, the convicted driver faces a $1000 to $5000 fine and/or 15 months to four years in prison and/or five years’ probation.  Bridget Hall apparently faces the misdemeanor DWI charge. 

Bridget Hall apparently passed the field sobriety tests and claims she did not drink any alcoholic beverage that night.  I fully believe Ms. Hall’s side of the story, but the Breathalyzer evidence will be extremely difficult to refute. (One blog article links to a Houston Chronicle report about some 1200 wrongful drunk driving convictions that have resulted from erroneous Breathalyzer tests, dramatically illustrating how difficult it is to refute Breathalyzer evidence in a DWI case.) Nevertheless, there is some reasonable doubt about the Breathalyzer results.  First of all, how do we know the Breathalyzer reading wasn’t the result of Bridget eating a dinner or snack prepared with wine, such a rum cake or cherries jubilee?  Maybe the Breathalyzer by chance picked up something she drank more than 12 to 24 hours earlier, which seems possible since the average woman metabolizes alcohol more slowly than a man.  Also, did she take cough medicine that night? This is all assuming that the Breathalyzer was in perfect or near-perfect working condition. There’s also the possibility of a false positive, possibly coming from an acid reflux condition side effect. Because the mainstream press has almost totally ignored the Bridget Hall story, her exact Breathalyzer reading is not yet known, but most states require a minimum Blood Alcohol Content (BAC) of 0.08 for a DWI charge and conviction, and a Breathalyzer BAC reading is considered positive at the 0.02 level.

Based on what I know about the case, even without the Breathalyzer “smoking gun,” there appear to be grounds for a reckless driving charge, or at least a failure to exercise “due care” violation, against Ms. Hall because of the swerving.  Since she insists she had nothing to drink that night, she would never willingly plead guilty to DWI unless absolutely forced to by New York State Law.  However, I can see a scenario (though quite unlikely in New York State) in which Bridget Hall pleads guilty to reckless driving or failure to exercise “due care” in exchange for a dismissal of the DWI charge and little or no jail time.  She would almost certainly have to pay at least a $500 fine and accept the suspension of her license.  Plus, a judge may impose other conditions on Ms. Hall such as community service, drug and alcohol rehab, an anti-drunk driving public service announcement and/or a pledge to stay out of trouble with the law for a year.  Lacking a plea bargain deal, if Ms. Hall continues to fight the DWI charge and is found guilty and is sentenced to significant prison time, her modeling career could suffer.  Since Ms. Hall is 32 and hasn’t been all that visible as a model in years, particularly here in the United States, I don’t believe her modeling career can survive even one year in prison.

Once Bridget Hall’s legal ordeal is over, she faces the difficult task of redeeming herself publicly.  As I said, I believe Bridget is innocent of the DWI charge, but many people will need more convincing. Even if she is exonerated, I think Bridget Hall should still voluntarily seek drug and alcohol counseling.  I also think she should still voluntarily attend a Victim Impact Panel that New York State drivers convicted of DUI/DWI offenses are required to attend.  By doing these things, Bridget will show everyone that she’s not merely “sorry she got caught,” but sorry she got herself into this situation in the first place.  She’ll also show a public commitment to sobriety.

Then there’s the even more difficult task of reviving her modeling career…if she really wants to model anymore.  Last fall, Bridget appeared on the cover of Italian Elle, her first fashion magazine cover anywhere in five years!  This should have been the springboard for a US market comeback.  If Ms. Hall doesn’t have to serve any prison time, that comeback can still happen.  I’d like to see her get into the leanest, buffest physical shape possible (i.e. as close to her 2002 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue physique as possible) and adopt a short, closely-cropped haircut.

I also think Bridget Hall should give back to the fashion industry in some way by actively working with the next generation of potential supermodels.  How?  She should request a meeting with Bravo’s Andy Cohen with an eye toward co-hosting season 3 of Make Me A Supermodel…if Bravo revives the series.  And that short, closely-cropped haircut I suggested, combined with an MMAS wardrobe consisting mostly of tasteful sheath, shift and wrap dresses, can make Bridget Hall look like an authority figure in the eyes of those 16-to-25-year –old women she’ll be teaching modeling to. 

But the best thing Bridget Hall can do to redeem herself and set an example for her MMAS charges is to show a public commitment to sobriety.  I believe in her, and I believe she can do it.

Finally, Bridget Hall could use the prayers and support of her fans worldwide.

Postscript October 2, 2010: As of this update, Bridget Hall’s DWI arraignment hearing should have already taken place.  If anyone knows how that hearing went, please post something using the Comments link.  Thank you.

This article was last updated October 2, 2010.