AS TERRIBLE AS AN ARMY WITH BANNERS: You know, it’s kind of amazing to look at this week’s Project Runway and ask, “What does this show think a bride should be–or, at least, symbolize?” What does it mean to be a bride?

My take: Leanne’s dress makes the bride a force of nature. She is carried forward by the tide. It’s an amazing, innovative dress whose ultimate symbology is nonetheless completely traditional–maybe even more gendered than I would want it to be!–and its impact comes from that symbology.

It’s perfect. And it’s intensely conservative. It is the PoMoCon of dresses!

Kenley‘s dress comes close in its awesomeness. It also draws from nature (swans–not that I would ever want to be a swan’s bride!). It also seeks that place where a woman is analogized to the animal world at precisely the moment when she’s exercising a sacred choice. I question Kenley’s ability to translate that insight into a beautiful dress, but her insight is absolutely real, and makes her dress unquestionably the second-best of the challenge.

Korto got that woman = curves. She got that woman = abundance. Seriously, so much of the history of fashion can be summarized in those two equations!

But she made her model look lumpy. Curves in “all the right places” are sexy, whether the curves are from an hourglass figure or from pregnancy. Curves somewhere else fall into the Uncanny Valley of femininity: not masculine enough to have the sexiness of a chick in a suit or a motorcycle jacket, but feminine in all the wrong places. Korto created a wedding dress for The Twilight Zone.

Jerrell, whom I love (his Olympics costume was so amazingly perfect that I thought this equally costumey-but-plausible-denial!-we’re-not-costumey challenge would really let him shine), hid the woman under layers of soiled sheets and jeweled frippery. Both aesthetic choices are basically the definition of wrong for a wedding.

I don’t always agree with the judges. But here, I really think the Leanne-Kenley-Korto-I’m sorry! order was about right.

[eta: Oops! Of course, the judges picked Kenley over Leanne. I can’t agree with that from what I can tell from photos, but yeah, I do think both of them did well.]