A Bad Lesson Learned on “Project Runway”

You wouldn’t know it to look at me (daily uniform: jeans and American Apparel t-shirts), but I adore fashion. After nearly 19 years of being married to an artist, who is also the world’s best web designer, I have become a design snob. Everything from fashion to architecture to interior design to website design will be judged, often harshly. Heck, I’m even a font snob. (Perennial favorite: American Typewriter because it reminds me of the old manual typewriter I used to write my stories on; House Industries’ fonts are beyond cool; but don’t even get me started on the over-use of Exocet and Papyrus!)

I’m usually not a fan of reality shows or contest shows. Quite frankly I could literally not care less about the hair-cutting or cooking contests. But I loves me some “Project Runway!” Last season was rather lackluster and my favorite (Carol Hannah) didn’t win, but this season is shaping up very well indeed. I mostly like Emilio; Amy seems to be quite original; Seth Aaron is as cool as Jeffrey without all the distracting tattoos; but my favorite is Mila Hermanovski.

Mila is awesome–she’s cool, attractive, hip, and around my age. Her designs are strong and interesting; she knows how to draw inspiration from the tiniest of clues and seems to have a real sense of vision. However, she doesn’t get a lot of respect from the other designers. Every twenty-something on the show sees him- or herself as a wunderkind, the next Christian Siriano. Anybody approaching or firmly in middle-age just cannot possibly be any good! You know what? Christian was a one-off. Very rarely do these youngsters have a firm design aesthetic, they simply haven’t had the time to develop one.

So Mila’s first “mistake” was being a middle-aged woman. Middle-age is far more acceptable on a man than on a woman, so men around Mila’s age or older aren’t looked down upon as too old to be hip or cool or fashion-forward. Women, on the other hand, are often dismissed as “too old” and past their “use-by date” when we reach middle-age. It’s ok to ignore us and diminish our accomplishments if we aren’t fresh and nubile anymore.

Mila made a bigger mistake. The inexcusable crime of being self-confident while female. When a man is self-confident or over-confident, people will use words to condemn his behavior–cocky, arrogant. If a woman exhibits the exact same traits, people will use words to impugn her character, her very person–bitch, whore.

If we, as women, don’t diminish our own accomplishments, there will always be others only too happy to do it for us. If we achieve and excel we are expected to be coquette-ish about it. We adopt an “aw-shucks” demeanor, looking at the ground as we dig a dainty hole in it with a dainty toe. We bat our lashes and give all the credit to providence, luck, and all the other people without whom we would be nothing. If we say, as men would, “Hell yeah, I’m good!” we are reviled and someone needs to make an example of us.

This week, poor Mila stated that none of the other designers were interested in how well she was doing before, but she’s getting along with them in workroom now because she’s “more centered” whatever that means.

I think something happened, maybe not a big something, maybe a series of small somethings. There are petty but cruel ways others have to let a woman know when she’s stepped out of line. The lack of congratulations when you do well, the blank stares when they see you’re still there, the likely shunning in communal spaces.

My hope is in all this “centering” that has taken place, Mila hasn’t become humbled, that she hasn’t lost her self-confidence. I hope that she’s simply learned to conceal it a little better, as so many of us have learned to do. It’s a bad lesson to learn when we find out just how different the rules are governing women vs. those concerning men.

Mila Hermanovski is a talented, strong designer and I hope she wins. I hope, out of support and sheer cussedness, that she shows up all the young doubters.

Yeah, go Mila, win this for the cool-middle-aged-woman team!