Project Runway 411 Recap: "The Art of Fashion"

If there's one lesson to be learned from this season of Project Runway, it's simply this: Under no circumstances, including actual defeat, should you ever count out the unstoppable force that is Chris March.

No, darlings, he didn't win the challenge. What he did was… well, I'm getting to that.

Last week saw Team Gay down one member as Ricky went home after offering up a tangerine spandex bathing suit instead of World Wrestling Entertainment diva-wear. This left us with only five designers competing in the last runway challenge of the season: Rami, Sweet P, Christian, Chris, and Jillian. And in this week's challenge, two of the designers were going to be eliminated, leaving us with only three who would go on to the next level of competition and present an entire collection at New York's Fashion Week.

And what a challenge it was. The designers were turned loose, before opening hours, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and told to find inspiration for a design of their own creation from the European painting, Roman and Greek sculpture, and Egyptian Temple of Dendur exhibits.

The designers were awed. Tim Gunn was awed (which I'm going to guess doesn't happen every day.) Even I was awed, as all my previous visits to the Met have been in the company of ten or twelve thousand t-shirted tourists and bored schoolchildren. It was, well… it was awesome.

It was fascinating to see the designers select their inspiration pieces. Rami, as anyone who has been following this season would have predicted, went right for the Grecian statues and their marble draperies, and chose a first century statue of Aphrodite.

Christian picked himself a brooding, black-garbed 1600s Spanish military nobleman with his hand on the head of a mastiff, which I think tells us a great deal about our boy Christian.