‘Project Runway’ has typically been called an “un-reality” reality television program since it purports to be a contest literally based upon one’s skill, yet it is also a reality television program intrinsically bound up in the industry itself – that is, whatever skill you may have, you have to be marketable, and marketable to a specific audience that ranges from Nicky Hilton to the “sophisticated” women who shop at Banana Republic. As if it’s not blatant, the marketable audience is a white audience. Therefore when I saw several reruns of the second season, I paid specific attention to the token black designer, Zulema Griffin; it may also be key to note that Griffin is a dark-skinned black woman, not light-skinned. To note: Asian women are often featured, though they are edited to appear docile, hardworking, and relatively silent (Season 2 winner Chloe Dao had perhaps one sequence, which focused on her feelings on being referred to as a "patternmaker (aka seamstress)" rather than a designer – so despite her chops, which garnered her the win, she was not flashy enough to be a persona of note). It is two specific episodes that I think embody the idea that a television program bound up in fashion, where black womens’ bodies are commodified as objects, it is the occupation of the creative position that dredges up messy questions of gender, race, sexuality, and class, and how the reality machine works to create biased, contrived portraits of their contestants.
In doing some background work on Griffin, I discovered an interview she did with The Advocate in which she talks about how her lesbianism was completely written out of the show, yet, when she applied as a contestant, they required dating history “10 years back.” She stated not thinking it was of any import whether she was a lesbian or not, but in the assumption that the male contestants on season 2, including Tim Gunn, their mentor/critic, and Michael Kors, one of the mainstay panel judges, there is no shying away from the fact that there is an unspoken norm that gay men seem to inherently “belong” in the fashion industry. In a telling scene, Griffin is pitted as hooks’ “Sapphire” (hooks, 202) against fellow contestant, and gay man, Nick, wherein he continually refers to her as a “bitch” for stealing his model. In yet another episode, Griffin is teamed with fellow white female designer, Kara, and Griffin’s incessant nagging and hard-assing reduces her to tears, and near inability to function. In short, rather than being played off to soften an [absent] black man, Griffin was shored up as a controlling Sapphire, and relentless at that; however, it seems merely to me that she is forced to fight to be taken seriously as a black lesbian designer in an industry that wants their designers largely white, and often men, and their gay designers almost solely in the form of white men.
The episode in which Griffin is “Auf-ed,” the challenge is to use “inspiration” to make a garment. She photographs a black woman on the street wearing a dashiki, and utilizes the inspiration of African form and tradition to make a dress. She is chastised for its “frumpiness,” stating that it doesn’t – altogether now! – make the model look thin[ner], as it just a "sack (aversion to not specifically Euro-Western design)" and is therefore criticized for being technically inferior. Tim Gunn states that her failure was in using “another dress” as her inspiration, rather than something wholly new (denying the meaning behind her inspirational choice as a black woman). The most telling parallel for me in explaining this aspect of design is in the 3rd season when Michael, the token black designer and crowd favorite (as opposed to Griffin as Sapphire), is continually told that his skill is in “sportswear,” and that he shouldn’t bother with “evening wear.” This brings up the argument Ann duCille makes in saying that the “Black ain’t yar; it’s yo,’” and that the black body “is quintessentially cast(e) as...the ‘low-Other.’” (duCille, “The Colour of Class: Classifying Race in the Popular Imagination,” 412) In short, Griffin was in a way doomed to be relegated to designing street wear at best, and her attempts at high fashion, or haute couture were misunderstood because it is simply unimaginable to think of couture as anything but white (it was the couture challenge that nearly “Auf-ed” Michael). (Ibid, 410)
To speak of lesbianism for a moment, if “fashion” without any addendums is read in part as gay, what would lesbian fashion look like? According to Guy Treaby of the NY Times, “It is the subtle incorporation of butch femme dualities...into mainstream fashion that most clearly signals the influence of gay women in the garment industry,” and the mixing of “street and high-end fashion,” creating a “tomboy glamour.” (Treaby, “The Subtle Power of Lesbian Style,” 1-2) It is the same trite notion that being gay implies being able to draw equally from masculinity and femininity, and that gay/lesbian fashion will be a natural incorporation of the two: yet, while lesbian designers (I’m assuming these lesbians are white) are apparently working over womenswear to make it meatier, gay designers (at least on PR) are given free reign to glam up women (since menswear is not part of the competition in general). So, where does Griffin fit into this industry? In my mind, the competition gives her a canned role as a controlling black woman unwilling (or incapable) to sway to the demands of the show and its prescribed “level” of design, yet it also seems a result of simply, not quite knowing what to do with her. If high fashion is so strictly white, male, and by extension gay, then where is a black woman lesbian identity to fit? Relegated again to the lower echelons, she is booted off the show as an example of the ‘low-Other’ whose inability to ‘pass,’ or fit into codified notions of the industry, simply cast her aside.
