Did those women look that young to you? Not to me...those designers need some eyeglasses!

OK, we're getting down to the wire (and as you probably know, all of the remaining six actually showed at Bryant Park last week.) Finally I have a couple of favorites, and sadly there are a couple of folks who just really need to go now.

One of whom is Suede. Suede seems like a nice guy, but Sueded can't even stick to his schtick...which annoys me. And his "taste level", as Nina "no hola" Garcia calls it, seems to be sorely lacking.

But I'm getting way ahead of myself. We start without the´pointless model "this is a competition for you too" moment, because they bring out a bunch of middle-aged women (who Leanne kindly refers to as old ladies) and who Jerell quickly deduces aren't relatives of the contestants, seeing as he sees noone who looks related to him or Korto. Which I think is very limiting of him, since I know plenty of families with multiple races in them, including my own, don't you?

But I digress.

These are the moms of 6 young women who have just graduated high school. For some reason the designers are calling them little girls and talking about how young they look...when some of the designers aren't that much older, and the girls look like perfectly normal 20-somethings to my eye. Whatever, it was weird.

They are each assigned a graduate and told to give her a professional makeover. On $100. Not an easy task. Much is made of having to work with both the mother and daughter, and how mothers and daughters can never agree, and how challenging that will be. Which might be true in a lot of cases, I suppose, but still bugged me as incredibly stereotypical.

-Jerell gets Caitlin (who reminds me of Web 2.0 woman Gwen Bell...anyone else?) who is tall, slender, and is into androgyny (although frankly, in the end, I didn't see the androgyny everyone else saw just because he had her in a long sweater.)
-Kenley gets a little mini-me named Anna, and plans to dress her in yet another floral, vintage-looking print.
-Korto gets Megan, but more importantly declares that s=now that Stella is gone, she will be "the queen of leathah now"! Yay!!!
-Leanne gets Holly, and gets hung up on the school marm idea. So much so that her attempt to make her look "older than the kids" actually makes her look like Heidi from the Swiss Alps. i.e. not old.
-Suede gets Avital, who is a little hottie on the runway, but should have made Suede "go down the pant road" even if he didn't want to.
-Joe gets Laura, who is kind of a downer and seems very sad to leave the goth phase of life.

Tim visits, the clients visit, Kenley does more of her "I don't need to listen to anyone" schtick, causing me to want one of our heads to just explode...preferably hers.

On to the runway...(and oyu can check out all the designs at BravoTV.com here.)

Our guest judge, for no apparent reason, is Cynthia Rowley. She is one of the judges on HGTV's Design Star, and she was just coming up as a designer when I worked in the Garment District in NYC lo those many moons ago. That's about all I know about her, wasn't that interesting?

1. Joe puts Laura in a "power suit" from the 80s. Complete with pinstripe skirt, a plain blazer with pocket square and the only nice part of the outfit: A purple and navy wide striped wrap shirt. It was just Bo. Ring. I mean, it was actually pretty flattering on her, and very wearable and reasonable. But it needed some whimsy or creativity or innovation somewhere. It had none.

2. Leanne put Holly in a really quite boxy, unflattering and infantilizing blue skirt with a 3-button taupe jacket with elbow sleeves. This ws also boring. Once she took off the jacket the blue skirt was revealed to me a fairly cute dress wit a purple panel down the front and a wide waistband. But with that taupe jacket on the effect was deadly dull.

3. Jerell put Caitlin in a high-waisted pencil skirt, coppery, shiny blouse with a patterned sheer inset and ruffles along the neckline, and a long brown sweater jacket. It was pretty damn cute, and Jerell is ramping it up at exactly the right time.

4. Korto put Megan in a green patterned dress with an odd tan jacket over it. The jacket fastened at the neck and below the boobs, with a keyhole effect between those two fastening points, and an opening below the second fasteners. To me it looked messy and unfinished. And not at all cohesive, which has really been one of their buzz words this season. And I can't believe not a single person commented on how short that dress was. Way too short for a professional setting, and way too short to be flattering on this particular girl. Is it just me? Because I didn't like this at all.

5. Suede put Avital in a Pucci-style Purple and orange patterned dress with a braided back, and with an olive jacket with flared cuffs with purple piping. Avital took to the runway like a fish to water, more than any other girl, and she looked confident and happy in that dress. Frankly no one in my living room really understood why later Suede was trashed over this dress. But we take the judges word for it, I guess.

6. Kenley put Anna in a floral full-skirted short-sleeved dress, with a brown vest and a wide pink vinyl belt. Tulle peeked out around the hem of the dress. I thought this was been there, done that lame. She looks ready for a square dance, not a job. I was so hoping Kenley would go home, but my hope was to be dashed.

In the end they like Kenley, Korto and Jerell.

And they didn't like Joe, Leanne or Suede.

Given I couldn't stand Kenley's, and didn't like Korto's, where as Suede's didn't bother me that much, it's no surprise that I was a little bummed out by the judges.

Still, it was the totally right call for Jerell to win and Joe to lose, so the bottom line worked out OK.

But what did you think?