Designers, start your engines!

       As most of the Western Hemisphere may know,Project Runway was absent as a cultural force for some time while the matter of its broadcast became the subject of a courtroom fight, which seemed to consume as much legal energy as in the case of Bush versus Gore. The dispute involved, among other things,lawsuits between NBC Universal, which owns Bravo, where Project Runway ran for five seasons, and the Weinstein Co, which produces the series. Weinstein had sold the show to Lifetime, NBC claimed it did so unlawfully, and executives from both companies displayed Bridezilla -level nastiness toward each other until the case was settled in April.
       Ultimately,Project Runway was permitted to move to Lifetime, and so it goes with a roster of 16 contestants,among them several of the standard archetypes without whom competitive reality television could not thrive.Though the setting has shifted from New York to Los Angeles, the look and feel of the show are essentially unchanged,with Heidi Klum and her Valkyrie manner still doing the hosting and Tim Gunn continuing to bring an Oxford don's comportment to his sartorial mentoring. It is season six, and I still don't know why he is advising people on how to make a halter seem less like a nappy when he looks as though he ought to be helping stalled doctoral candidates complete dissertations on Spenser.
       What's jarring is the marriage between the series and its new home.Project Runway isBarneys; Lifetime is Kohl's. The cable outfit that broadcasts Army Wives and Reba reruns maintains an ethos that says:"Viewer, I see your cellulite; I'm down with your fibromyalgia;I know your menopausal misery". Strikingly,however, while Project Runway has been decidedly non-ageist in the past, drawing from designers at different stages in their careers,the current season is loaded with the unwrinkled:nine of the 16 competitors are under 30, possibly a function of the fact that the casting is now conducted by Bunim-Murray, producers of The Real World .And yet there is no mistake that you're watching Lifetime when you encounter Qristyl, a
       41-year-old woman who designs plus-size
       clothing and makes no excuses."I don't call it plus-size," she tells us,"I call it plussexy." Qristyl is up against the likes of
       Ra'mon-Lawrence, who occupies the slot devoted to contestants whose parents must be transitioning to mood stabilisers full-time.Ra'mon-Lawrence,30, had gone to medical school to study neurosurgery but felt the world would be better served if he offered it more offthe-shoulder looks. Though he knew he would be great at neurosurgery, the passion just wasn't there.
       Self-doubt belongs to Johnny, a former crystal meth addict who has a breakdown trying to meet the first challenge, which in a concession to the Los Angeles setting involves designing something for the red carpet. Gunn has great compassion for Johnny's terror of failure and goes all therapeutic on him, asking, as if the answer weren't self-evident,"But are you being too hard on you?". When the buttoned-up Gunn tells him to "let it go, let it go", it is as though Ralph Bellamy were instructing someone to try Bikram Yoga.
       Every design competition on television seems to require the presence of a lad who doesn't want anyone making assumptions about his sexuality based on what some may consider effete interests. Here we have Logan, who looks as if he could be a hunky quarterback on Friday Night Lights , explaining that he is a strong pattern maker but implying that he doesn't spend his nights at home rewatching Sabrina and talking about Edith Head. As Logan bluntly puts it:"I'm definitely different from a normal fashion designer. I'm more of a guy's guy".
       And yet Project Runway remains a celebration of diversity, a homage to what New York's former mayor David N. Dinkins called the "gorgeous mosaic". There are three African-American contestants, along with those with Eastern European last names, Asian ones and Greek ones.Gordana, a designer from South Carolina who speaks with a heavy accent, relays in her introduction that she is from the former Yugoslavia,where had she stayed, she explains, she would have only known about corn and potatoes. The greatest and most innovative US fashion has never come from the Mayflower descended. It has come from those deeply invested in reinvention.Project Runway has absorbed the history lesson.