Project Runway
"Make it work." Heidi Klum's double air kiss and "Auf Wiedersehen," Tim Gunn pacing the Parsons workroom, Michael Kors and Nina Garcia on the judging panel, and a dozen designers sewing cocktail dresses out of grocery-store finds against the clock. Bravo's 2004 sleeper hit turned fashion design into a sport and won a Peabody for it.
Created by Eli Holzman, Project Runway premiered on Bravo on December 1, 2004, with twelve designers and a format that eliminated one most weeks: a challenge with limits on time, materials or theme, a runway show, and a verdict from Klum, designer Michael Kors, Marie Claire fashion director Nina Garcia and a guest judge. Tim Gunn, then chair of the fashion school at Parsons, was the mentor rather than a judge, roaming the workroom with his catchphrase "Make it work." The designers shopped at Mood in the Garment District, lived together in an apartment building near Parsons and were barred from pattern books and the internet. The finalists got twelve weeks and $8,000 to build a collection for New York Fashion Week in Bryant Park, and the winner took $100,000 to start a line.
The first season grew from a quiet debut into a sleeper hit, earned an Emmy nomination for competitive reality series and gave Bravo one of its biggest shows since Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Jay McCarroll won and turned down both the prize money and the Banana Republic mentorship, while fan favorite Austin Scarlett was eliminated and then asked to show a decoy collection so the real finalists would stay secret, a ploy the show kept using. The challenges became the folklore: garments from apartment furnishings, recyclables, plants, party-store supplies and, in the opener of season five, the aisles of a grocery store. Being eliminated became known as "being auf'd." Chloe Dao, Jeffrey Sebelia and Christian Siriano, the youngest winner, followed McCarroll, and in 2008 the show won a Peabody "for using the 'television reality contest' genre to engage, inform, enlighten and entertain."
The fifth season, in 2008, was the last on Bravo. The Weinstein Company had announced a move to Lifetime, NBCUniversal sued and won an injunction, and after a 2009 settlement the show spent eleven seasons on Lifetime, briefly relocating to Los Angeles for season six. It returned to Bravo in 2019 after the Weinstein bankruptcy, by which point Klum and Gunn had left for Amazon's Making the Cut, with Karlie Kloss hosting and Siriano as mentor. Klum came back as host in 2025, when the show moved to Disney's Freeform. More than 30 international versions have been made.
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