Last night I dreamt in French. I was entering a rich house with servants in the kitchen via the sewers connected to the dryer.

You’ll see how this is a really important metaphor.

Project Runway-love this show. I watch it on my tablet while working out 90 minutes each day (it’s not a boast, it’s a medically-necessary drudge for another post…)

It’s not a sewing show.

That would be PBS with bad bandaid breath and spectacles with a chain.

If this is anyone’s grandmother, I’m sorry. Google made me do it…

It’s about managing ego, talent, time and money.

The designers and designer judges can have massive yet fragile egos. Some are abusive-yelling and screaming -eventually they get kicked off the show. (How on earth could they expect run a design-house business with no ability to work with a team or communicate their ideas and vision?)

Nothing scares me more than a designer’s dark side.

Except Houston traffic.

And “low fat” cookies.

And nothing cracks me up more than Michael Kors waxing poetic:
“looks like she’s going to a buffet on a cruise and is about to put cookies in her pocket” or about “poopy pants” having come down the runway. He was gone for a season but is now back and I’m so glad.

Click the link.
It’s funny.

http://m.hitfix.com/starr-raving/michael-kors-stops-by-project-runway-to-bag-on-poopy-pants

But what can Diva Designers teach us about money?

turns out a lot.

Most contestants still live at home and are burdened by debt from design school.

$10,000 would absolutely change their lives.

The cost of the tats on some of them probably cost half that.

I digress.

Lesson 1:
When others control the money, you cannot see your vision. The stress blurs it.

Case in point:
One challenge offered a $10,000 prize.
A young designer, who normally had good, fashion-forward design, kept talking about her student loans. “I could pay off my student loans!”

Facing her dress-form, she should have been inspired to create, instead she broke down in tears, lost in despair.

Designers’ block.

What she sent down the runway was a disaster, akin to “poopy pants”.

The $10,000 went to someone else and she was sent home.

Lesson 2:
You attract what you feel. She became a victim of that $10,000 because someone else now held the power. She felt poor and powerless and that negative energy and sadness expressed itself in clothes. Designer “Ken” yelled at the producers, created angry clothes and was kicked off. When the designers are having fun, they make beautiful, amazing things.

Lessons 3&4: Fabric and notions (buttons, zippers) cost $ and people care less about spending it when it’s someone else’s. Cash or a debit card makes a person “feel” what they are spending, a phone or credit card might not. In the 2013 season, designers were allowed to use the gobank card and app with $10,000 on it for the entire season. In the challenges, instead of cash, they were given a suggested amount to buy materials-several bought double the amount. I’m one who loves gadgets and technology but I wonder if these designers really “felt” the money. Regular challenges cost about $250 in raw materials.

I have a new appreciation for why creations in Vogue are so expensive. The “avant garde (haute couture)” challenge is usually expensive in raw material-about $500. Several designers spent nearly $1,000 this time. One designer who did this was sent home.

There are other non money lessons here, like don’t shave your eyebrows and redraw them in orange. And don’t purposely dye your hair bright blue-that hair is tired.

Do:
Do dream big.

Or in French:

as I came up the dryer into the French-speaking kitchen I could swear I heard “mon Dieu! poopy pants!”