Did Project Runway walk so that Next in Fashion could run? Netflix’s reality television fashion competition effort certainly seems, on the face of it, like a course corrective for Project Runway. The cult favorite Bravo show, rebooted in 2019 on Lifetime, struggled to produce any real fashion stars beyond red carpet good Samaritan Christian Siriano, and the one-time host and mentor Tim Gunn, whose “Make It Work!” mantra transcended its cable TV environs to become a sort of Rosie-the-Riveter “We Can Do It!” for pop culture addicts in the late Bush era.
Next In Fashion arrives with a familiar premise—contestants compete in weekly challenges to create the best looks, which are presented in a runway show judged by a panel of fashion cognoscenti. But there the similarities end. The pool of contestants, for one, have a bountiful room of fabrics at their disposal (and are reminded that the hosts can get them anything else they might need). And all are already ensconced firmly in the fashion world, if somehow behind the scenes: contestant Kiki launched Fubu’s womenswear; another is an Italian designer who offers Philipp Pleinian utterances and leads a sort of softcore Dolce & Gabbana brand; and two graduated from Central Saint Martins, which is the fashion-world equivalent of “I went to school outside Boston.” The prize is $250,000, courtesy of Net-a-Porter, which is to retail what Netflix is to Hollywood—the glittering, glamorous disrupter who figured it out before anyone else knew things were changing at all. So within the first five minutes, it’s clear that we’re playing on a whole different level. Plus, nearly every challenge includes producing a men’s look as well as a women’s—it’s got its finger on the pulse of the industry. Everything is in place for the next McQueen, the next Christopher Kane, the next Prabal Gurung or Pyer Moss, to emerge.
Project Runway’s first hosts were decidedly of their time: Michael Kors, then in his post-Celine it-bag prime, offered deep fashion knowledge; Nina Garcia represented tough heart of a keen editor; and Victoria’s Secret angel Heidi Klum brought chirpy glamour (“One day you’re in… the next day, you’re out!”). Next In Fashion updates its judges for the social media era: we have Tan France, the Queer Eye host who wears Off-White belts like Oscar de la Renta sashes, and Alexa Chung, a cool girl, which is what you were before influencers existed. Chung doubles down on the commitment to “real fashion”—the show opens with her strutting through the studio in a Christopher Kane “Rubberist” minidress printed with big fetish gloves, which is probably way weirder than anything the average Netflix subscriber has ever seen on television.
What emerges is a more realistic vision of fashion than even the show itself seems to realize. Contestants—the show begins with 18—are put into pairs; many of them know each other (or went to Central Saint Martins together, old chum!). Those who don’t are paired off by opaque means, including Nasheli, a Puerto Rican single mother who designs her own line, works as a technical designer, and serves as the chair of the fashion department at Moore College in Philadelphia (a detail the show mysteriously neglects), and Isaac, a Pakistani-American designer who runs a New York-based streetwear label called Mercy x Mankind. Each episode revolves around a two-day “challenge,” and the first episode’s is the construction of a red carpet look, demonstrating the show’s savvy perception that the spectacle of celebrity, not the ballyhooed fashion show, is the real runway of the world. Nasheli and Isaac struggle to reconcile his need for “not just a ballroom gown” with her technical skills. (He lingers while she sews, implying that his talents, like those of many contemporary streetwear designers, are found somewhere afield of the needle and thread). Instagram’s Eva Chen and Hollywood super-stylist Elizabeth Stewart, who styles Cate Blanchett and Julia Roberts, join as guest judges—another cue that this is not your mall mom’s reality competition! (The industry star power continues to ratchet up throughout the 10-episode season, with major American designers like Christopher Kane, Prabal Gurung, Philip Lim, and, in perhaps the show’s most essential episode, Pyer Moss’s Kerby-Jean Raymond.)
Nasheli and Isaac’s white satin dress with a collar and sleeves sculpted from snakeskin and chain—just as weird as it sounds—is deemed one of the two worst looks, which leaves them up for elimination. In a recurring segment that reflects the show’s worst impulses, Tan France asks them what they’d do differently and what the competition means to them, sad violin included. Nasheli says she would have used different materials. “If we go home today, it’s just another day,” Isaac counters, speaking in the lingua franca of streetwear in 2020: an unconquerable bragaddocio wielded at always-unspecified haters.
The soundtrack SLAMS. “This is not just another day,” blanches Tan France, and reminds us all of the cash prize on hand. “Nasheli, how would that change your life?” She stifles tears. “It can be different. I have three jobs right now, so.” Isaac raises his eyebrows, like, Whoa, bro. The piano tinkles in sympathy. And then they are sent home.
How many times have you followed this narrative arc around a designer? A human-interest story hooks our attention, we take in a story of struggle under the guise of an industry shift, and then this “angle” is strangely milked until it borders on insincere. Then, when the designer is no longer “new,” we move onto the next. And at the end of the day, the streetwear king brings down the woman who can actually make the stuff, and the people who know “someone”—even if it’s just a friend from school or a former colleague, no more successful than they—move ahead.
The show is filled with these unintentional revelations: basically, the investment in narratives over design talent, and the pop culturification of the fashion industry. Everyone who has a fashion brand refers to it as luxury, for example: “luxury streetwear brand,” or “luxury holiday brand,” neither of which is a real category. The judges are obsessed with suggesting that celebrities would wear something—“I could see a Zoe Duetsch moment!” or whatever—as a testament to a look’s worthiness. In the “streetwear” episode, Tan France gestures to himself in a sheer robe and sweatpants as an example of the genre. In an arc you really have to see to believe, the extremely talented duo of Minju, from South Korea, and Angel, from China, are driven to tears by a lingerie challenge, ostensibly because their designs—and by extension, they—are not sexy enough. Tan France weirdly suggests they are dating.
Of course, reality television reveals human nature—its inadvertent divulgences are often more brilliant than the most pathos-seeped moments of The Sopranos. The Bachelor can help us decode the unhinged mundanities of political discourse. Survivor debuted six months before the 2000 election. The Kardashians’ deadpan confessionals are the defining contradiction of our time—so much feeling, so little felt. Reality television gives us pop culture’s most obvious and boneheaded tea leaves. But the fashion industry—unlike the Kardashians—has become less accessible in the process of the so-called “democratization” that brought a global audience to runway shows and made everyone watching the Oscars into fashion critics. It is rarely granted this kind of window into the soul.
Perhaps the strangest element of Next In Fashion, though, is the moral fiber that seems to power every contestant. Over and over again, designers, judges, and hosts talk about expressing themselves. Self-expression, in other words, is considered the highest form of achievement in fashion, its ultimate or even divine purpose. And here it helps identify perhaps fashion’s most serious problem, one of the reasons there are too many brands, too many collections, too much fashion: too many people think the desire to express yourself equals the need, or the right, to make clothes. But there is a difference between wanting to express yourself and having something to say.
Look at the two bad boys of fashion who still serve as the paragons for emerging fashion designers. Alexander McQueen didn’t just want to speak, he wanted to make us think (and it got him into a lot of trouble!). The anti-semitic rant that got John Galliano fired from Dior has been forgiven (or at least brushed aside) because his Maison Margiela has challenged our ideas about gender, about our disturbing need to buy and consume, about the “projection” of reality that Instagram has created. But you see these qualities in a less conceptual designer like Ralph Lauren, too: a desire to see the world in his clothes, sure, but also a message for us about how the American dream isn’t about “making it,” but the neverending process of aspiring to. You also see it in more contemporary agents of urgency like Kerby-Jean Raymond and Telfar Clemens, actively dislocating American luxury from its chilly rich white girl attitude and showing us new modes of performative power. They don’t merely want us to buy their bags and double-tap celebrities in their clothes. They want to tell us something about who we are. Who needs self-expression?
I’ll stop beating around the bush: if you care about fashion, this is must-see television. After I finished the show, I reread an old Kennedy Fraser piece from a 1983 issue of the New Yorker, when Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo, and Kansai were unfamiliar to all except the realest fashion heads, and were engaged in a competition of their own for America’s attention. In a car ferrying them from one grand Tokyo fashion event to another, Miyake is complaining to Fraser about how young people in Japan “‘don’t know how to find their lives,’ he said. ‘They think it is just given to them.’ He was silent for a time. ‘You must fight in life,’ he said with sudden force.”
The struggle, Next In Fashion suggests, is real—or real enough for ten episodes of reality television. The fight, on the other hand, is ongoing, ever-present, and never-ending, and the next great fashion designer knows they must pick up the sword along with their scissors.
