Katy's Take - "Black and White"

BPR welcomes back Season 3 alum Katherine Gerdes for her unique persective on Episode 10: "Black and White". Apparently, all of our fawning over her at OFW didn't scare her away...

While I don’t think it’s practical in the real world, I like the concept of using all the fabric for this challenge! It’s something that has got to be really difficult to do and I’m pretty sure none of the designers have ever done that before, so they all needed to be really creative and couldn’t fall back on something they’ve done in the past. Personally I thought there was going to be a lot more gathering, rouching, pleating, etc because those are all techniques that you could get away squeezing some excess fabric into. I hadn’t even thought about making a purse until I saw them working on them. I think that’s a pretty good idea to get rid of the extra fabric, although I’m glad they didn’t all go that way. I also liked that they defined the color palette for the challenge. By making everyone work in black and white, it really makes you focus on the design styling and silhouette and you can compare the dresses side-by-side more easily.

Angela (OUT, part deux): Okay, so I don’t know what everyone else thinks, but I kind of liked Angela’s shrug/bolero piece. I thought she took a big risk with it (and in their position, she and Vincent needed to take big risks) and while I don’t think it worked that well with the black dress, I thought the shrug was pretty cool. I could see it on a runway with some jeans and a fairly simple top. I think the contrast between easy/casual and over-the-top would be nice. Maybe I’m crazy? Who knows. It’s hard to see all the details in the photos of these black dresses, but the silhouette of Angela’s looks pretty nice and it seems to fit well. I think there might be a bit too much embellishment, but I like the little ruffles around the hem. I don’t like the arm cuff things very much, but they might have been an effort to use the excess fabric? Speaking of which, I didn’t like the way she stuffed the fabric in the purse, but my guess is that she ran out of time to actually make a purse with the scraps and this was a last ditch effort to follow the challenge rules?

Click here to continue reading Katy's take as she reviews all of the designs from "Black and White".