Project Runway 22 trashes its own reputation for the lolz

Season 21 was “the most talked-about season of Project Runway,” Heidi Klum says at the start of Project Runway season 22, and that’s like saying the most-talked about cuisine of the year is the lettuce torpedoing its way out of people’s colons because it’s been spiked with cyclospora.

The lesson Freeform, Hulu, Disney, and/or production company Alfred Street Industries took away from the reaction is that fans and critics shitting on your show is a win. If it produces a joke or a fight or tears, that’s what matters, not the quality of the work, or the show itself, or respect for the craft.

This from a once-marquee talent competition show, which once centered the creative process while also, yes, giving us big personalities and drama and some wacky challenges. Now it’s just here to troll us for ratings and attention.

So for the start of season 22, they dragged 22 “designers” to New York City only to unceremoniously dump six of them without so much as giving them a design brief or letting them go to Mood.

The designers allegedly had unlimited time and budgets to produce their episode-one looks, based on what mentor Christian Sirano says. But based on what the cast shows up with, it seems like they all grabbed something out of their closet on the way out the door after someone from production called them and was like Oh bring an outfit too. Plane Jane brought her Drag Race season 16 premiere look; Jennifer brought her Poison Ivy Halloween costume.

It’s on these direction-less designs that the judges make their first decisions, and leave the designers confused with their criteria.

“I thought they were looking for fashion?” Bi asks, and I asked my television, Did you not see last season? Did you not see that they cast Plane Jane, who was greeted by Robby/Q with the question, “What the hell are you doing here?” (Later Plane insisted: “I am a legitimate designer” and “I went to Boston School of Fashion Design.” I think I went there too, when I lived in Boston, to use the bathroom once.)

Other designers call the winners “mind-boggling” and “boring.” Fashion is subjective, of course, so maybe the judges liked those six dreary looks the best. Yet Project Runway is completely uninterested in exploring the nuances of taste, preference, and trendiness.

The choices the show made for its premiere—and this season—don’t just deprioritize creativity and fashion design, they crumple it into a ball and shove it into a drawer. That’s why we get things like:

• Producers letting the designers watch the runway show and see the judges—but not hear them. Why let them get actual feedback when you can have them misreading the judges’ reactions? Haha they’ll be blindsided!!
• Editing focusing on Plane Jane and Q talking shit about other designers, instead of introducing us to the designers, or their work, or their process.
• Tyra Banks
• A cast full of people who know and/or hate each other, and/or who we’ve seen before, like josephmcrae. Elizabeth tells us, “I didn’t sign up for the JosephMcRae show. I signed up for Project Runway.” But that’s what Project Runway is now, Elizabeth: the stunt casting show.
• Eliminations yet again being held for the next episode, which is annoying on Netflix when they’ve dropped a whole season at once.

The cheapest and laziest producing ideas always emerge instead. “We didn’t think that they were very good,” Heidi tells six designers, pausing to give us all time to say they were great and roll our eyes that a show is still pulling this fake-out shit in 2026. “We thought that they were divine.”

Season 21 might as well have called itself Project Runway: Light because of how low its budget was, barreling through the season with one-day challenges and without Nina Garcia, as if the network told producers, “You have $250,000 and two weeks for this season. Go!”

Just like Survivor has thrown more twists into its shortened game in a desperate attempt to make sure something happens, Project Runway set itself up for drama.

And it worked, at least at first. Season 21’s premiere thrilled me; in “Project Runway has entered its villain era,” I wrote that “Project Runway is no longer taking itself so seriously, something Top Chef desperately needs to steal.” I liked the witty chyrons and the debate between the judges.

A few paragraphs later, I wrote, “I worry Project Runway won’t make it out alive if it loses focus on what brought us here in the first place: design, and the design process.”

Alas, it did, and here we are. Law Roach’s sharp edge quickly turned into a dull food processor, trying to chew up the designers with personal attacks but grinding the show to a halt instead.

I was actually most surprised by Law in the season 22 premiere. Talking to the top six designers, he repeatedly gave them simple, actionable feedback, suggesting a wider waistband to make it look more expensive, and a styling choice to turn another outfit more Prada.

Law kept his comments to the designs; the worst thing the said was that he “actually hated” a costume-y look.

Still, most of what he and the other judges offered were generic comments, like Nina saying “Your look is absolutely stunning” to Bobby or Law telling someone “That dress is sensational.” Tyra told Bryan his dress was a “marshmallow, but a marshmallow I want to devour.”

The hour-long running time of the premiere didn’t leave much time for nuance, but we also got a few quick beats with Christian Siriano giving his excellent brand of feedback, which is blunt and laser-focused on what’s wrong.

Instead, the time went to interview segments where the designers talked shit—and sometimes hilariously! “I’m Bi and it’s short for Bitch,” Bi said. “You cannot keep this mouth shut.” And that’s why they cast him, because he doesn’t, and a few minutes later says something just unnecessarily cruel about a type of person who’d wear another designer’s outfit.

As with last season, this is all a matter of balance. Even with a shortened production schedule, the episodes could be more focused on creativity rather than cruelty and chaos.

Once we get past the obvious ringers and cannon fodder, I am interested in what some of the designers can do, and in them as people. Naheim shared that he wanted to bring back his dad’s fashion brand that died in the 2008 recession, but that was more than halfway through the episode and he disappeared after that.

Another designer, Dani, told us, “I think that the worst thing I could do is bore the judges, though. I’d rather overwhelm them than underwhelm them.” That’s the approach Freeform’s Project Runway is taking, and I certainly don’t want to be bored by a show. What Project Runway needs is a Christian Siriano to help it dial back its excesses so the good stuff can shine.