Good news for Uli fans:She made it to Olympus Fashion Week.Good news for Laura fans:She made it to Olympus Fashion Week.Good news for Jeffrey fans:He made it to Olympus Fashion Week.Good news for Michael fans:He made it to Olympus Fashion Week.Bad news for fans of logical consistency:Nobody gets booted this week. Even though a couple of designers deserved to.You know, Heidi Klum had been making the talk-show rounds dropping such vague hints as "maybe all four will show at Fashion Week," so it wasn’t like it was a real surprise. But still, I can’t help but think of some of the other designers who never got a gimme, especially with so much at stake.Jeffrey interviews what we’ll hear variations of through the entire episode: Each designer is very different. If you like "peasant blouses, big and flowy," you’ll like Uli. "Run-of-the-mill, friendly fashion," that’s Michael. "Mothballs and chicken soup," that’s Laura. If you want to "live dangerously, I’m in," he says, and then does the most "dangerous" thing any 12-year-old girl can do: He flips off the camera. So edgy! I bet he listens to old-school Avril Lavigne and really gets it, you know?Here comes Heidi with the Black Velvet Bag of Chance. It’s been a long time since we picked models, and there are four designers but seven models littering the stage. Laura sticks with Well-Spoken Model, but Uli steals Michael’s model Nazri, she of the wild hair and jagged teeth. Michael says, "I’m going to kill you" and picks someone else, and Jeffrey stays with his model. Goodbye, Scary Jia Replacement, Talkative Model, and Heavy-Lidded Model. …The designers meet Nina Garcia in the Elle offices, and in a bit of not at all foreshadowing, she talks to them about editorial fashions while standing in front of big blowup versions of the magazine’s The Look pages. Back at the work room, they learn the challenge is to create a look that conveys their point of view as a designer. They’ll have to come up with three words that describe themselves, and thus the look.Jeffrey decides to really mix things up and make something very romantic, and thus he will make a red, white and blue dress. I think he’s mixed up "romantic" with "patriotic." Laura says she’s not going to be crazy and different, but instead will "do what I do best, better than I’ve done since I’ve been here." Indeed, her sketch looks just like every other Laura dress that’s trotted down the runway.Michael’s having some grief because none of his sketches have the "wow factor" that usually inspire him. Uli’s got a sketch and a description: "print, colorful, flouncy … Uli." They head to the fabric store.Four hours left in the first day, and Michael’s still sketching. Suddenly inspiration strikes and he says his words are "sexy," "sensual" and "sophistication." His sketch looks quite nice.Meanwhile, Uli has decided her dress looks like a house dress, so with one hour to go on the first day, she cuts it up into pieces to start over again. In a funny bit, she pretends she’s doing the voiceover announcement as they cut to commercial: "Coming up, Uli doesn’t finish her dress, but watch what happens on ‘Project Runway.’"Tim gathers the designers for the big "surprise": The winning design will be featured in Elle magazine! On one of The Look pages! Photographed by Gilles Bensimon. The bad news: Their work time today has been cut by six hours. They’ll be given a camera and photograph their model somewhere that tells a story. This causes Uli consternation at first, but she whips into high gear and pulls through with a pretty sexy dress.Michael’s, though, has taken on a tawdry tone: Uli says it "looks like one of those ads, I’m alone at home, please call me at 1-800 … sex ads." There’s a keyhole slot in the middle that is way too open, and the wrap detail at the waist doesn’t carry through up to the top as it was supposed to.(During commercials, I see a model that makes me flash back to living in Colorado: I found a photo of Trish Goff in an Elizabeth Arden ad, and haunted my stylist with it for months as I begged her to re-create the color on my own head. "See how it’s light brown without being reddish?" I’d say. "And there’s dark underneath? I want that." Never quite realizing it would never work, since the photo had been retouched and color-corrected and I didn’t have the straight hair that looks good with highlights and lowlights. Eventually my hair started breaking off because it had been bleached and straightened so much, and I buzzed my hair into a military style to get all the damage off my head. Anyway, now she has long dark hair again.)Back to the show!Michael seems blissfully unaware of how cheap and sleazy his dress looks — he loves it and says, "I even made a white girl look like she got some ass." (As in "baby got back," not "baby got action.") Nonetheless, let me reiterate: Keyhole is way too wide in the middle; it looks like it’s cheap material, which is bad because they got $250 to spend on this challenge; and even the model’s hair and makeup is like Kimora Lee Simmons for Maxim and Girls Gone Wild. By the way, his official three words are "sexiness," "sultry" and "sensuality." My suggested three words: "porn awards ceremony."Laura’s dress is a very light pink with a plunging V neckline and lots of beading and even I, a huge Laura fan, am getting sick of seeing the same thing week after week from her. There is a difference between classic and repetitive. Her three words: "glamour," "confidence" and "elegance." My suggested three words: "same old (starts with S)."Jeffrey’s dress … well, it came out better than the sketch, anyway. The blue is actually a cornflower, which I like, but the skirt looks like it has a couple of elastic-gather drawstrings in it, one at the waist and one at the hem. His three words are "provocative," "irreverent" and "romantic." My suggested three words: "shut up, Jeffrey."Uli’s dress is the clear winner: The shape is different from anything she’s done before (Laura!), yet it’s clearly recognizable as an Uli garment (Jeffrey!) and the keyhole has what the guest judge calls "a teaspoon of skin," not a couple of running-over cups (Michael!). Her three words: "fun," "life," "adventure." My suggested three words are actually her three words from much earlier in the show: "print," "colorful," "Uli" (since "flouncy" doesn’t really work here).The judges deliberate: Heidi says there’s nothing provocative about Jeffrey’s design, and in fact, if the photo had the model "milking a cow, I could understand it." They say Laura’s outfit is another "little dress with a spare bare neck" and "not a surprise," and they’re particularly disappointed in Michael, who usually does so well not only in the creation of the garment but its presentation.Uli, of course, wins, and is elated. They tell Laura she needs to expand beyond her one-note designs, but she’s off the runway. It’s down to Michael and Jeffrey, who are … both in.On one hand, I’m kind of pleased, because usually Michael does such a good job and he’s one of my two favorites. On the other hand, his was a pretty egregious misstep, one worse than what got other designers kicked off, and just because they liked what he did before that doesn’t seem to be a good justification for keeping him on. Especially because it means that he was free to unleash the following two looks upon the runway at Bryant Park:I can’t begin to tell you how disappointing these are. Look how chubby the model on the left looks, and you know she’s a size 2 at most. That is the most unflattering dress I’ve seen trot down a runway in a long time. And that pink lace-up outfit with the gold belt … I’m going to skip over the logistical nightmare of getting it off for a bathroom break and go straight for the fact it looks like a costume in a low-budget sci-fi pirate movie.Laura, meanwhile, showed a little bit of range beyond the norm. I mean, it’s not like she rewrote the book, but …I think that’s Alison’s "zaftig" model Alexandra on the left. She looks a lot skinnier without a ridiculous hair bow on her head. Do you think that means Laura picks Alison to help her out?Uli had some outfits that were totally her, and others that were a total surprise.And Jeffrey … well, thanks for showing up.And if you missed ‘em, there are other pics here.

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