After a fashion – The Boston Globe

“RuPaul’s Drag Race” isn’t the only runway show clamoring for your attention on Thursday nights. In what seems like the most ill-advised game of gay-audience chicken ever, Bravo’s reclaimed, rebooted new iteration of legacy reality competition “Project Runway” airs Thursday at 9 p.m., head-to-head against VH1’s “Drag Race” — which explains why it’s seven episodes deep and I haven’t caught one.

But if “Project Runway” has taught me anything over the years, it’s to make sure your hemlines are finished, and that “Project Runway” is itself the little black dress of reality competition shows. Each season is a slight variation on the others; each episode a perfectly reasonable, functional answer to the eternally pressing “what to watch” question; each scene tailored just-so, with each contestant like an extraneous detail waiting to be edited. You know what to expect.

So you can imagine I was as surprised to find the fit of the new “Project Runway” so ungainly as you are that I’m proceeding with this dress metaphor.

“Ungainly” was the kind of descriptor former mentor Tim Gunn (who walked) might deploy back in the old “Runway” days to destroy a trembling contestant hanging onto their spot in the workroom by a septum ring. It’s the kind of paternal shade that can’t quite be replicated in his current replacement, “Runway” champ, legit fashion designer, and erstwhile squeak-toy who released “hot mess” into the mainstream lexicon, Christian Siriano. He’s pushy and concerned like Tim, but inspires no particular urge to satisfy.

Also glaringly absent is the absent glare of former host Heidi Klum, who could set a less-than-stunning dress aflame just by staring at it like an offensive math problem. Her replacement on Bravo, Karlie Kloss, is just as friendly and pleasantly distant, but she doesn’t strike the fear of some Nordic god in the bottom of your soul. You never get the sense that she could cast you into the void by crumpling her brow.

There are enough familiar hallmarks of the show to restore your “Runway” bearings — there was a glamping challenge with the requisite unconventional materials that felt like whatever the word for deja vu is when it happens 18 times. And this season’s Social Awareness Moment was a late but welcome epilogue to #gamergate, challenging the designers to create female video game characters — a move that frankly seems lifted from Ru’s mood board.

For a fashion show, “Project Runway” has survived in part by never changing, and by selling the proverbial look no matter how shaky the proverbial construction. (Remember the Belk accessory wall? What is a Belk?) But without the old core crew of “Runway” personalities, what once felt reliable now feels like anachronism, and the show comes off rather like a knockoff of its former self — although, I’m pretty sure that’s still an authentic Nina Garcia.

Michael Andor Brodeur can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @MBrodeur.