The Apotheosis of ricky

“There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?” —Robert F. Kennedy

“As you know, in fashion, one day you’re in, and the next day, you’re out.” —Heidi Klum, Project Runway

We lost roberto during the auto-parts challenge, and it was a wake-up call for all of us. Until then, we’d watched the early episodes of this season of Clothes-ing Time without a real investment in the contestants nor a sense of the stakes. For example, in the first episode—in which they had to make dresses using old clocks for materials—when rebecca was eliminated, before we even knew her name, we laughed it off.

“Come on,” Andrew said, “making a bikini top out of two clock faces and a fob chain was both unflattering and completely obvious.”

But when roberto was axed—when Heidi gave her trademarked “Your time is at a close!”—they had our undivided attention. The judges, who had delivered their judgments in the earlier challenges with compassion, as if breaking bad news to children, now spoke with thunderous severity, as if... still breaking bad news to children, but now like terrible, sadistic parents. “We’ve all seen circle skirts made out of air filters using the corrugation to simulate pleating a million times. That’s not going to get you anywhere in this competition,” Isaac blasted, and though his remonstrations were directed at roberto, we all felt implicated. Even karen, who won the challenge with a dress that used part of a chrome grill for its dramatic back, was given only faint praise. “The back was a ‘wow’ moment; but it still looked like you took a bunch of auto parts and glued them together,” said Nina, and from karen’s face you’d have no idea she’d won the episode. We watched roberto slink off the stage, and it struck us: the bullets were live. One of these remaining ten was going to win, and join the elite pantheon of Clothes-ing Time champions, with all that implied. They would add to the dignity of that venerated group.

Or they would join controversial winners of past seasons in detracting from it, to our ongoing shame and anger.

As we filtered out of Dan’s apartment (the only one of us with cable), it was time to decide who we were going to root for going forward.

Some of these picks were frivolous: Dan liked Dom because, “She looks like this girl I had a crush on in high school...though at the time I didn’t know I was gay, so I’m not sure what that means for her as a design prospect.” Tony liked karen because, “She just seems like such a mess. I feel bad for her. Like a spastic cat, you know?” (Full disclosure: few of us knew.)

Other picks, though more calculated, were still based on personality and not aesthetics. Maddie liked cornelius because of all the shit he talked about other contestants, and Marty liked amanda, not for her clothes, but because, “She seems like someone who always has drugs on her and would be willing to share.” No one liked sandro, but Andrew respected him. “He’s the only one who appreciates the absurdity of the system he has entered into,” which several of us thought was a typically Andrew-esque way of making yogurt thrown at the camera crew seem political rather than petulant.

A few contestants were popular not for the clothes they made, but the way they articulated why they made them, as with ken (Gwen’s favorite) who described every garment he produced as “sexy”—even the jumpsuit he made out of an Oldsmobile’s upholstery, which, as cornelius pointed out in his cutaway interview, “would only be sexy if you wanted to fuck a couch”—or char (whom Michelle supported) who described everything she made as a reflection of “where she was from,” which made some sense during the auto-parts challenge, given she was from Detroit, but was a non sequitur in the food challenge when she made that hollowed-out pineapple bustier.

The more serious among us focused on the clothes. Molly liked chloe, touting her unwavering competency. “She makes things that aren’t clothes look like clothes. I know that’s supposed to be the baseline, but I still think it’s impressive,” while Juli was all-in on emily, whose aesthetic was described as “street-punk,” even if this was only reflected in the clothes she wore herself.

More polarizing was erin, who only Alia was rooting for. “She zigs when others zag,” Alia said.

“If by ‘zig’ you mean ‘she makes ugly things,’ and by ‘zag’ you mean ‘tries to make clothing,’ then you’re right,” said Gwen, speaking for most of us. (Thus far, every piece erin had produced had been a muslin sheet draped with the precision of a child’s ghost costume, and adorned with a few appliqués reflecting the challenge in question: watch hand chevrons; diced carrot polka dots, etc. That she had managed to survive this far seemed at best an oversight, and at worst, a grave injustice.)

“She doesn’t give a fuck about traditional norms,” said Alia, undaunted. And we mostly let it go. It was early, and, surely, erin wouldn’t be with us much longer.

And then there was ricky. Poor, overwhelmed ricky, with his long blue hair (dyed with the proficiency of a teenager experimenting with Koolaid) hanging over his sad eyes. He seemed completely out of his depth. He had been in the bottom three of every challenge so far, emerging to fight another day, but probably not much more than that. Some of us felt sorry for him (even the judges seemed to take it easy on him, perhaps realizing that nothing they could say could punish him more than he was punishing himself), but, given his precarious position on the show, no one really gave him much of a thought.

Except for Paul. Paul saw something in ricky. That’s even how he would say it: “I see something in ricky.” And he’d say it over and over. We’d try to warn him. We’d say, “Paul: Did you see the raw food challenge? Those tomato skins were never going to hold up to being topstitched,” or “Paul: what about the clock challenge? ricky barely got his fob chains braided in time.” But nothing would dissuade him. “I see something in ricky,” he would repeat. When pushed to clarify what exactly he saw, he said, “A spark. I see a spark. I’m not saying he’s got it figured out yet, but when he does, he’s going to show us something new, and nothing will ever be the same.” Seeing our skeptical faces, he was undeterred. “Just you wait. It might not have been tonight, and it might not be next week. But one of these days, ricky is going to have his moment. ricky is going to blossom. He’s going to show everyone. ricky is going to have his apotheosis. And it is going to be beautiful.”

We didn’t take him seriously. For two reasons.

First, you have to understand something about Paul: he didn’t have a practical bone in his body. It’s what made him so great to watch reality shows with. For example, during the last season of Hands on the Prize— where contestants have to keep their hands on things for delineated periods of time—paul was the only one of us who thought that guy had a chance to keep his hand on that rhinoceros for five whole minutes. The moment they announced the challenge, it sounded impossible. In hindsight it absolutely was impossible—and, frankly, criminally negligent. But, for the few minutes where the parameters were being outlined and the rhinoceros was being moved into position, we were all swept up with a powerful sense of miraculous possibility, as if Paul’s faith was enough to will this accountant from Toledo to become a safari wrangler, or to will this rhino—who had clearly been pre-agitated by the producers—to substantially chill out. And yes, that feeling was short-lived—there were

maybe ten seconds between when he first put his hand on the rhino and the sound of the ambulance—but in those ten seconds we felt like all the limitations we took for granted might be artificial, and maybe, just maybe, our lives could one day equal our dreams for it. And this feeling was inseparable from our feelings about Paul.

But, this belief in the impossible could also make Paul obsessive and myopic. Like the time we were watching Dude, I Can’t See Shit—where contestants are blindfolded and asked to perform basic tasks—and Paul became convinced that the walking-up-a-steep-staircase challenge was the most powerful available metaphor to understand the rigged struggle against oppression, and that, by extension, when we laughed at the contestants for falling, we were reinforcing violent inequality. The moment he got up to go to the bathroom we exchanged looks, and Gwen spoke for all of us saying, “I don’t think laughing at a guy falling down the stairs means I’m a bourgeois sellout; I just don’t.” All of which is to say that we had seen the highs and the lows of Paul becoming enamored with a contestant before, and had, in the process, developed sufficient critical distance to be wary of his pronouncements.

Second, though many of us wanted to believe Paul’s prophecy (if only to feel momentarily spiritual, to witness an event that defied secular wisdom) there was nothing in ricky’s week-to-week performance to suggest that this promised apotheosis could possibly be coming. He barely survived the children’s toy challenge—he got lucky that Dom’s board game box pants suit was more poorly received than his own doomed “stuffed animal medley cape”—and though he wasn’t singled out for criticism in the used books challenge, nobody was really excited by his “dust jacket” jacket. Sure, there were small sparks here and there—he was the only one during the sporting goods challenge with the courage to make a dress that would actually inflate on the runway, even if the final product, predictably, obscured the model’s figure. But it isn’t enough to have ideas; this was not our first time watching the show—our pragmatism was hard-earned. As Andrew put it: “This isn’t some high school drag show; this is motherfucking Clothes-ing Time. Inspiration doesn’t matter if you can’t get shit done!”

But none of this fazed Paul. Every voice of skepticism was met with the bemused dismissal of the truly faithful, shaking his head with a wry smile as if to say Forgive them, ricky, for they know not what they do. And we wanted to smile at Paul’s optimism, and we wanted to laugh at his naiveté and we wanted to cry at his openheartedness, and we wanted to cry over our own cold cynicism, and we loved him for his loyalty, and we hated him for making us seem fickle. We felt all of this at once, and the result was that we mostly didn’t know what to do with our faces and ended up making a lot

of weird expressions. But though we were conflicted on how we felt about Paul, we were resolute in believing he was wrong about ricky.

One thing we couldn’t dispute though: Paul was right about erin. From the outset, we viewed her as a strange outlier, lauded by the judges for her terrible, applique-heavy muumuus (“I want to be on the record here,” said Gwen, “I have nothing against a muumuu per se. But this is Clothes-ing Time, not Muumuu Time”), but surely her success was just a glitch that would be corrected as the show went on. Only Paul saw her for the threat she was. When she won the book challenge with her hideously basic silhouette— recognizable as an entry into a design competition only by the gold leaf letters that she had cut out of various leather-bound books and arranged on her fabric to spell out the word duchess (“It’s like Princess, only more mature,” she said smugly)—we were laughing, but Paul was shaking his head. “This isn’t funny,” he said, “This is terrifying. This is the silhouette of the future.” (Note: we were unsure if he meant this as a metaphor, or if he was pointing out that these kinds of garments, hospital gown-ish as they were, might look at home in an indie dystopian film with a minimal costume budget). We dismissed him then (Maddie claimed that ricky was in his head), but halfway through the season, it was getting harder to write erin off. Still we held onto hope that the judges would come to their senses, or, as often happened with one-note designers, grow weary of repetition. And if not, we had faith in the other contestants (particularly chloe, who was winning us over with her consistency and competence—i mean, the exquisite tailoring of her Encyclopedia Britannia trousers) to take erin down. But not Paul. Paul thought the only chance we had to stop erin was ricky. Deus ex Apotheosis. In ricky he trusted.

And so, the experience of watching the show fell into a pattern. Every Tuesday night, the same routine:

1) Paul gets to Dan’s apartment early in a great mood. As everyone arrives, he greets them with a declaration or rhetorical question about ricky. For example:

a. “Apotheosis night: get your popcorn ready!” (Note: this confused Dan, who was only half-listening, and then spent five minutes rooting around his cabinets looking for some microwave popcorn. Then, upon finding it, he debated the pros and cons of serving expired popcorn versus offering no popcorn of any kind.)

b. “Make sure you get a good seat. You’re not going to want to miss ricky tonight!” [Note: it occurred to Tony that Paul had made this suggestion to more people (five) than there were objectively good seats in Dan’s apartment (four at most, and that’s if you include the spot on the floor in front of the couch, which Tony did not). That he

did not point this out to the group as a whole spoke either to the sensitivity we all felt toward Paul, or, more likely, to the fact that Tony coveted one of those three unquestionably good seats, and did not want to bring their scarcity to the group’s larger attention.]

2) The episode begins with ricky immediately in the weeds. See:

a. In the sex toy challenge, it was clear immediately that interlocking enough nipple clamps to make chainmail for an entire dress wasn’t feasible (“There’s no shame in settling for a crop top and then making some pants out of bondage cords!” said Gwen), though ricky refused “to compromise his vision.”

b. In the coffee shop challenge: we get that you want your garment to utilize aroma, but this is first and foremost a visual medium; bite the bullet and treat that fucking burlap with something so it doesn’t look like your model is wearing a sack! c. In the live animals challenge, ricky refuses to harm any of the animals, forcing him to spend two hours trying to figure out how to “humanely” glue chickens together.

3) Paul interprets this early failure, paradoxically, as evidence of ricky’s greatness. See:

a. His response to Gwen: “There may be no shame in a crop top, but is there any glory?”

b. His defense of untreated burlap: “ricky doesn’t want to disguise his materials. His medium isn’t burlap; it’s the truth!” c. His silent but emotional response to seeing ricky refuse to compromise his principles for the mere convenience of making clothing (on a clothing design show): one hand wiping tears from his eyes while the other hand forms a raised fist.

4) ricky does just enough to survive—usually aided by the otherworldly failure of one of his competitors. See:

a. ricky’s short nipple clamp dress edges out amanda’s black leather jumpsuit made from braided dominatrix whips, which is judged to be “too on-the-nose.”

b. ricky’s burlap romper does enough to get by cornelius’ hideous Athleisure look, which used electrical cords from the grinders for piping down the pant legs. “Yawn,” says Nina. (“If Nina ever said that to me, I would have to leave the country,” says Molly, not completely joking.)

c. ricky’s live animal dress—which did have “movement on the runway” but the detriment of that movement owing to several of his chickens waking from their sedation mid walk and squawking in horror—is not viewed to be as offensive as ken’s attempt to use frogs to simulate a graphic print for some separates. As Isaac said,

“I don’t care how many frogs you killed. But I absolutely cannot forgive that bust-line peplum!”

5) Paul gets upset, taking one of the following forms: a. Criticizing the designers who did better than ricky. Often unfairly, and with increasing agitation. Examples: i. Re: char, who won the live animal challenge with her shawl utilizing several different species of duck feathers in order to produce an impressive ombre effect: “She barely did any work on that! The ducks did all the work growing the feathers! She didn’t do shit!” ii. Re: chloe’s coffee challenge winning jacket which used layered tea bags to simulate fringe: “It’s a coffee challenge! Not tea! Also, fringe is so ten years ago.” iii.re: emily’s sex toy challenge topping red carpet gown which used various flavors of lube to treat the fabric, giving it shimmer: “I can’t believe they rewarded using actual fabric. If you can’t make your own textiles out of random trash you have no place on this show.” iv. (Note: Re: erin’s garments: Paul would not only refuse to dignify them with comment, he remonstrated us for doing so. “She isn’t a serious designer. Don’t validate her. And stop saying muumuu-chic; it’s not that funny.”) b. Criticizing the judges for their ricky-specific decisions, but also for the general aesthetic principles, which he felt were increasingly slipping. Examples: i. “The old Heidi would’ve been into a really short skirt made from nipple clamps. But now she’s famous, she’s lost touch with what the people are into.” ii. “Isaac is getting old. Usually I don’t understand what he sees in things, but now I think he literally can’t see. Like, maybe he thinks those hideous appliques are just cataracts, and he ignores them.” iii.“nina is just bitter that her spin-off, Nina Doesn’t Like You, tanked.” c. Criticizing us for anything ranging from: i. Alia: “I can’t believe you ever rooted for erin.” ii. Gwen: “You own a muumuu? They are, like, the objective correlative of the decline of social norms.” iii.dan: “No, we don’t want any fucking popcorn!”

6) There is a moment of awkward silence, filled with some combination of:

a. Dan asking if anyone would like any food or drink (hence, the popcorn incident). b. Andrew identifying logical fallacies in whatever commercial had come on. (e.g. “Why would it matter if there’s vitamins in that pudding. If your primary source of nutrition is pudding, you’re still fucked!”) c. A beeline of people sitting near Paul heading to the bathroom. 7) The commercial break ends, and we are treated to scenes from

next week’s clothes-ing time. Now, seeing the theme of next week’s challenge, Paul begins explaining why it is uniquely suited to ricky’s skills, and claiming, rejuvenated, that “the conditions for an apotheosis are favorable,” or “apotheosis threat-level has been elevated to imminent.” Or sometimes just, “Fuck yes!”

8) We breathe. Deeply.

There was no doubt: this cycle was starting to take a toll on him. His once-youthful features now seemed to age a year per episode: his forehead wrinkles charting the highs and the lows he experienced every week. It wasn’t that he was becoming cynical (his zealotry never wavered) only that he was becoming increasingly impatient with those who didn’t share his beliefs, and the larger, ricky-dismissing world we represented to him. In fact it was fair to say that this cycle was taking a toll on all of us. People started showing up later, and leaving earlier. Marty didn’t even make it to the sex toy episode (and if you knew Marty, you would understand how shocking this was). Some of us worried that the group dynamic was at legitimate risk of collapse, though most of us counseled that soon enough ricky would be eliminated, Paul would go through a brief period of mourning, and things would get back to normal.

And, frankly, eliminating ricky might have been an act of mercy at that point, for no one seemed more exhausted and broken by the dramatic swings of his Clothes-ing Time candidacy than the poor man himself. If his hair had at first seemed unkempt, it now seemed almost despondent, covering his eyes not because he couldn’t control it, but because he was a man who had seen too much. Even the blue dye, which though unprofessionally applied had at least been reasonably vibrant at first, seemed to have faded over the course of the season in the way that presidents go gray in their first year in office. And while Paul (increasingly unable to separate reality from his own premonitions and prophecies) referenced how Christ looked before the resurrection, the rest of us thought ricky looked more like the models did during the Christ paraphernalia challenge a few years ago.

But here’s the thing: ricky was still there! And we had to admit, though his execution and time management left much to be desired, ricky did

show glimmers of potential, of representing a new approach to a classic problem. Andrew summed it up like this: “Most contestants attempt to transform things that are not clothes into clothes. ricky is suggesting that our original perception of what clothes are is what should be transformed.” And though we weren’t sure if we completely agreed, we were starting to see why Paul was so invested, though maybe we were seeing what we wanted to see, what Paul wanted us to see, or as Maddie quipped: maybe we were watching “the Emperor’s new reality clothing design show.” Maybe our fragile but developing belief in ricky was really just a reflection of our belief in Paul.

Though, did that mean that if ricky waivered, so too would our faith in Paul? And if so, could we survive it if Paul fell from grace along with him?

The Civil War museum challenge changed everything. From the jump, ricky seemed revitalized. He knew immediately that he wanted to make a dress-coat retaining the original Confederate epaulets in order to contrast hard and soft, and, for once, he seemed likely to complete it. In the end, while it was unclear how it functioned metaphorically (Andrew and Maddie quibbled over what it implied about the era of Reconstruction), the way ricky braided Union and Confederate musket straps together into a cohesive belt won praise from us, and, more importantly, the judges. ricky didn’t win the challenge—that honor went to chloe, whose high-risk/ high-reward decision to burn holes in a Confederate flag to make it appear like lace was universally lauded—but he did finish in the top three, and, most impressively, receive one of the highest pieces of individual praise Nina is capable of offering: “I’m starting to see who you are as a designer.” The only question was who was smiling brighter: ricky, or Paul?

As were we all! And not just for ricky, but because erin was finally on the bottom. Her standard muumuu silhouette was this time adorned with musket balls, but the glue wasn’t strong enough, and several of them fell during the runway show: their small plunks representing what we hoped was the balloon bursting on her offensive candidacy. She didn’t get eliminated—it was emily’s time to go...that broadsword was never going to stay in place...thankfully the model wasn’t seriously injured—but erin did seem at least wounded. Her interview, predictably, claimed that she was the subject of persecution from those who don’t get her work, and we all reveled in the schadenfreude of her whining—particularly when contrasted with the grace emily showed in defeat, admitting that it was possible that used Civil War memorabilia simply wasn’t her medium, and this didn’t mean she was doomed to comprehensive failure in life.

The mood in Dan’s apartment was amazing that night. Instead of shuffling out as soon as the episode was over, we stayed late into the

night. Someone put on DVDS from season one, and we relived some of our favorite moments. Paul was buoyed by ricky’s improvement. “That was just a glimmer!” he said. “Now ricky has a little confidence, his full apotheosis cannot be stopped.”

“Wait, that wasn’t the apotheosis?” Dan asked.

Paul scoffed. (Or guffawed. Interpretations were split.) “When the apotheosis happens, believe me: you will know.”

“You really think he can win it all?” asked Marty, and Paul smiled, replying, “My friend, winning will be just the beginning!” And we laughed like we used to (like, what would that even mean? Or like, oh, that is SO Paul) and we ate popcorn and reveled in each other’s company and we told ourselves that maybe it would always be like this.

We should have known it wasn’t going to last.

Heading into the Archaeology challenge—in which contestants could only use materials that they personally excavated from a nearby site—there were only four designers left: chloe, erin, char, and ricky. And, given the parameters, it was hard not to like ricky’s chances. Of all the remaining contestants, he was the only one who had any experience working with dirt—during the raw food challenge, he had used soil to add “texture” to his otherwise flat shallot stalk hula skirt—and besides, the challenge didn’t seem to suit his opponents: erin seemed irritated that she would have to exert herself, and her poor effort no doubt would limit the pool of available materials for muumuu appliques; char seemed uncomfortable being outside of the city, as it did not “represent where she came from.” And chloe, for all her strengths, was the kind of Clothes-ing Time contestant who was most comfortable using materials that behaved, at least partially, like fabric; this would put her at a disadvantage in this challenge. Surely, this was ricky’s moment. At least Paul was sure. “This is it everyone. Strap in!” he said, adding to the burgeoning scroll of his cryptic prophecies. But from the moment they started digging, it was clear that ricky was in trouble. He didn’t know how to hold the shovel, gripping it with two hands near the handle as if trying to touch as little of it as possible. He could barely pierce the surface of the earth he was meant to dig into, his shovel bouncing meekly off the hard ground as if enacting the hard ceiling of his potential for advancing on the show. And watching this floppy-haired boy flail in the dirt, we saw him in a new light, or rather, we saw him in the original light no longer filtered through the prism of Paul’s unwavering confidence. Stripped of the status of anointment, here was our collective evaluation: ricky was a designer who was not without ideas, but who lacked the construction and time-management skills to ever be (let’s get real: to ever have been) taken seriously as a possible Clothes-ing Time champion.

Given the garment he eventually produced—and the sad manner in which he described it to the judges—it was a minor miracle of television editing that there was even cursory suspense as to who would be eliminated. Spoiler Alert: the eliminated designer was ricky. His dress—a tarp which he took from the excavation supplies, fashioned into a basic circle skirt with a racer-back top—was so uninspired and hideous, we only kept looking at it so as to avoid making eye contact with Paul.

A full minute passed before anyone said anything. (So focused was everyone on not making a sound that we didn’t even turn off the TV before the next show started, a ridiculous program called Duck Duck Grey Goose in which contestants had to taste cocktails and decide which ones were made by celebrity bartenders, and which ones were just shelf vodka laced with duck fat...the show’s slogan was it’s harder than you’d think.)

Juli spoke first. She’d known him the longest, and was the closest to him (literally—she was sitting next to him). “He had a good run. Top four is totally respectful. You should be proud.”

Spoiler Alert: Paul was not proud.

“You fucking people,” he said.

“Woah, dude, I know you’re upset, but this isn’t about us,” said Gwen. “We didn’t do anything.”

“Exactly!” said Paul. “None of you did anything. You sat on the couch and watched as the producers and the judges protected the status quo, and in the process, you created the demand for more of the same chloe/erin bullshit.”

“Ok, that’s absurd,” Andrew intervened. “Do not create a false equivalency between erin and chloe. erin is a fucking dumpster fire in which the dumpster was filled with muumuus adorned with firework appliques. chloe is a fine designer.”

“Congratulations. Your champion will be fucking fine.” The disgust on his face was so palpable, and so was the awkwardness that fractured our previously close-knit community, it felt as if Heidi had crawled through the TV screen and had told us that our “time” was at a “close.”

The next week was the last episode before the finale. The three remaining designers—erin, char, and chloe—were tasked to make clothing from whatever they could steal from a mall, but they would only have a bail budget of $1000 so had to be careful as to which items to take. chloe won the challenge easily—no one else thought to raid the mall’s “Lost and Found.” So while char and erin were negotiating their releases from custody, chloe avoided arrest altogether and was able to get a substantial head start, and char was eliminated without much controversy—as

Isaac said, “Honey, when we said use the time you’re in jail to sketch, we didn’t mean copy the inmates’ uniforms.” chloe would enter the finale as the clear favorite, and erin? While we were disappointed that she was a finalist, the truth is that clowns had made it to the finale before (Maddie said it’s a “ratings thing”). At least seeing erin lose in the finale would give us the satisfaction of knowing that she collapsed on the biggest possible stage.

Paul didn’t come over that night. Nor did we really expect him to. He texted Marty that he needed some space.

Truth be told, we all did.

The finale was a two-hour episode. We ordered pizza and bought wine bottles that each cost legitimately double digits. Before tax. It had been two weeks since ricky’s traumatic elimination, and while enough time had passed for us to be reenergized, we were all still ready for the season to be over.

No one was sure if Paul was coming. Marty said that he’d texted him a “maybe,” but upon showing us the text itself, it was in fact a symbol that was either a slightly mistyped shrug emoticon, or a representation of a gesture that was private to Paul’s physical lexicon and opaque to the rest of us. We had hoped Paul would come, in part to put the ricky incident behind us, but in part so he could be there to witness erin’s belated, but still satisfying, downfall. No matter what he’d said about erin and chloe being the same, we knew that no one hated erin as much as Paul did; it would be a shame for him to miss her comeuppance. But the opening credits started rolling, and Paul was nowhere to be seen. Even his usual seat, front and center on the couch, was left empty (though whether the reason Tony decided not to usurp it was in deference to Paul’s status in the group, or just reflected his nervous desire to pace, was unclear and unremarked upon).

The final challenge of the season required the designers to return to their childhood homes and design a full, ten-piece collection using only materials they found there. chloe’s collection was presented first. And it did not disappoint. Her theme was personal growth and used materials from different points in her life to represent fashion trends from those specific years. She concluded with a stunning gown made from dinosaur print shower curtains that was on trend for today’s silhouettes, seemingly an outlier (“Shouldn’t the shower curtain be current too?”) until we realized that it was current, showing that chloe still used it, highlighting that throughout chloe’s journey she never lost touch of who she was and where she came from.

Was it an apotheosis? No, but it was a satisfying culmination of chloe’s arc. It was solid, wearable, and full of impressive if subtle details—like using Pogs for buttons on that one jacket. When her last model left the runway, we all actually applauded (an honor only given to three winners over the years as Gwen, the group historian, reminded us). Did chloe change the game? Perhaps not. But she played the game, and played it well. We were proud to watch a show that would give chloe its highest honor, particularly when in competition with the erins of the world.

“Send in the muumuus!” we laughed. Show’s over kids. It’s been fun, but all that was left now was to watch erin self-destruct.

Spoiler Alert: she did not.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is embarrassing to describe the mood in Dan’s apartment that night: the hubristic confidence in chloe’s inevitable coronation being slowly replaced by a dawning comprehension of the horror we were witnessing. The days and weeks after the finale were full of postmortems of the we should have seen this coming variety. But, call us naïve, call us fools (call us whatever other invectives Paul might have hurled at us if he had been there that night), we were completely blindsided. Three muumuus into erin’s runway show—made from carpet, umbrella plastic, and quilt, and appliqued with Monopoly tokens, Legos, and Lincoln Logs respectively—we were still laughing. There was even a moment where Molly draped a throw rug around her chest and sashayed through the hallway in a convincing pantomime.

“Why is Nina smiling?” asked Maddie.

“Maybe she thinks it’s funny how ugly this collection is,” Gwen joked. (And we laughed, not knowing it would be the last time any of us laughed that night).

muumuu #4: Autumnal printed wallpaper (squashes, gourds, etc.) adorned with candy corn.

“No, seriously, Isaac is nodding. Not furrowing his brow at all.” “Probably it’s edited it to make it seem like they don’t hate it for suspense.”

muumuu #5: Potholders, quilted together to make a larger textile, adorned with refrigerator magnets spelling out the word phenom.

“Heidi isn’t taking notes. She takes notes when she hates something.” Silence.

muumuu #6: Beige couch cushion upholstery adorned with coins, mostly

nickels.

“Nina just covered her mouth like she couldn’t believe how beautiful that piece was.”

“Shit, I saw it too.”

muumuu #7: Rainbow Bright bedsheets, adorned with assorted Barbie heads.

“Someone has to stop this. Isn’t there someone in the audience who can rush the stage or something!?”

“Do you realize this means she had to snap all those Barbie heads off? She’s a psycho!”

“I need more wine.”

“I need something harder than wine. Where does Dan keep the whiskey?” “I’m right here. You don’t need to refer to me in the third person.”

muumuu #8: Tinfoil (seriously?), using duct tape at its seams, adorned with star shaped cookie cutters (adhered with still more duct tape). “Why does Dan only have cheap whiskey?”

“That bottle was a present to me from Marty.”

“Yeah, I know. I totally regifted it. I have this cousin who works for that distillery. Sorry.”

muumuu #9: Striped beach towels. Plastic sand dollar appliqués. “They can’t really like these, can they?

“They’re just fucking muumuus!”

“They aren’t even good muumuus!”

“This can’t be happening.”

muumuu #10: Blue satin prom dress somehow transformed into a muumuu. Adorned with empty condom wrappers.

The judges rushed to give a standing ovation. The speed with which they reached their feet to applaud and the force of the claps exceeded that of their response to chloe.

None of us said a word for the entire ensuing commercial break. It included a commercial for a bank that now also offers drop-off laundry service (or does the laundromat now offer banking services? We were too stunned to notice). When someone did speak finally, it was Andrew, and we think that he was about to critique the commercial (we were even hoping for this one small moment of predictable Andrew-ism that might suggest the world would go on spinning). But he didn’t say anything about the commercial. What he said was: “Fuck. Paul was right.”

chloe handled the official announcement of defeat with the grace we would have expected. erin handled her victory with similarly predictable arrogance? Douchebaggery?...seriously, just fuck erin.

“I always knew I was going to win, and I did. So I guess I’m not only good at designing clothes, I’m also good at seeing the future. I should play the lottery or something, oh wait, i just won a million dollars, i don’t need to!”

Michelle was the first to start crying. But not the last.

It is a strange feeling to be heartbroken in a group setting. In that moment, we were together in our collective sadness, but also strangely alone in its specific manifestations.

For example: we were all stunned into silence, but it was only Andrew who experienced that silence physically, as if he could not stir his vocal cords into motion, as if he had swallowed sand.

And we were all thinking that we were fools for not seeing it coming, but it was only Alia who had actually liked erin at first, a truth she wished there was some way to scrub off her body.

And we were all worrying we would never care about fashion again, but it was only Gwen who thought she might never be able to wear a muumuu again, who had to add this specific grief (and the incumbent guilt of grieving something so comparatively trivial) to the broader, more-pulsating grief. And, we were all worried that we might have to stop watching reality television altogether, but it was only Dan who thought about how this was the only reason that anyone even came over to his apartment, and if we didn’t watch anymore, he would be lonelier than he was already.

And we were all thinking about how maybe we should get drunk or high, but it was only Marty who flipped through his contacts to see who he thought he could score some weed from that it wouldn’t embarrass him if they saw him cry.

And we all went through denial, but it was only Tony who actually went so far as to pay attention to Duck Duck Grey Goose still playing in the background.

And we all went through bargaining, but it was only Maddie who immediately logged onto the fan message boards and started a thread titled

if we threaten to boycott, can we get them to reverse the decision?

And we all experienced depression, felt our tear ducts swelling, but it was only Michelle who wept loudly and without control, tapping the well without worry that there might be no bottom.

And we all wanted to comfort her, but it was only Gwen who briefly resented Michelle for seeming like she cared more than the rest of us, and

then, remembering how much she loved Michelle (who if you missed an episode would spend hours on the phone recapping it for you), hated herself for that one moment of coldness, and hated the show for bringing out the worst version of her.

And we all experienced anger, but it was only Juli who actually punched the wall (perhaps because her small frame ensured she would do no damage to Dan’s apartment).

And none of us experienced acceptance.

And we all felt utterly powerless, faced with a glaring injustice but with no recourse to redress it, but it was only Alia who felt that this injustice did not compare to other injustices—child soldiers, etc.—and so the feeling of powerlessness was unearned and self-pitying, and it was only Molly who felt now, feeling this powerlessness, that she better understood what other, more grave injustices would feel like, and so she was more prepared to empathize with other victims.

And we were glad to have each other’s company, but also hated each other, hated our friends’ heartbroken faces, for making it impossible to pretend that this hadn’t happened. And in those faces we saw stupidity (to not have seen it coming) and in their stupidity we saw our own, and in seeing that people we loved had made this same mistake we forgave ourselves a little for it, and in seeing that we loved people who could be so foolish we hated ourselves in equal measure.

And we missed Paul, whose absence loomed over everything. We wanted to apologize to him because we had been wrong, but we weren’t yet ready to forgive him for having been right. And we wanted him to be here so that he could (in that way that only Paul could) tell us that things would still be all right, but we couldn’t bear for him to be here if things were so hopeless that even he couldn’t envision a way forward. And we thought of how he must be feeling—watching the finale on his own on some illegal stream like some lonely degenerate—was he thinking of us? Of how we hadn’t been there for him when he’d needed us? Or were his thoughts solely of ricky, of the collection that ricky might have produced if he’d been given the chance, a collection that exceeded our expectations not only for him, but of the show as a form, a collection that did not just turn objects from his home into clothing, but managed to turn clothing into a home in itself. And we too thought of ricky, and some of us hated him for having split the group, and hated Paul for weaponizing his absurd candidacy in pursuit of some claim to purity, but some of us now wondered if Paul had been right, not only about erin, but also about chloe, who perhaps didn’t push the envelope enough or properly read the judges and had settled for some standard of competency instead of striving for something new, something paradigm shifting and luminous. And we thought of Paul’s pain, wondering

if it was somehow greater than our own because he had dared to care more at the outset, or if it was somehow lesser than ours because he could hold his head high in the knowledge that he had not compromised his own principles and visions.

But mostly we did not care about the specific nature of our heartbreak, nor in developing a hierarchy of pain. We just wanted Paul there so that we could be whole, and so that our wholeness could be a scaffold on which to hang our sadness, and a foundation from which we could imagine healing, even if imagining what shape that healing might take was now a more daunting design challenge than any of those yet presented in any season of Clothes-ing Time.

Who knows how long we stayed at Dan’s that night going through our personal and collective exercises of grief?

At least an hour, because an entire episode of Duck Duck Grey Goose played in the background, and may have even spilt over into Juggling Priorities (a show so stupid none of us could even confidently explicate its premise) before someone humanely euthanized the television feed.

It has been almost a year now. The new season of Clothes-ing Time premiers tonight. We (the new we: the Paulless we) are, once again, gathered at Dan’s. Much has changed since last season: we are now more cynical; the moment a bad contestant is introduced we all quickly profess our certainty that they will be the eventual winner. But much is also constant: Marty is a few minutes late, but makes up for it by bringing brownies; Tony has staked out the best seat on the couch; Michelle hugs each person she sees as if she has not seen them in years, and they pretend to be overwhelmed by the affection while secretly being renewed by its warmth. And some of the things that have changed are good! Dan has purchased a movie-style popcorn maker, and Marty has brought over a nice (group approved) bottle of single malt to make up for having regifted some shitty bourbon in what seems now like another life. There is even a new judge on the show, as Isaac has retired and been replaced by someone we have never heard of but instantly have strong convictions about. The challenge is announced—something to do with bowling alleys, that we do not all even fully understand, so distracted are we by the brightness of each other’s company. All that is missing is the thing that we know is not returning, the palpable absence of Paul that we have no choice but to treat as the final member of our group and find a way to love just as we loved his presence.

And it is not as if he has completely vanished. Tony says that he saw him on the subway. Maddie says that she thinks he’s working at a video store or something (though we aren’t sure if it would be more surprising to hear that Paul had a customer service gig, or that video stores were still

somehow a thing). Marty says he ran into him at the gym and that they had a nice chat (though both avoided talking about the show). From these scattered encounters, we have developed a diverse and growing mythology about Paul’s life. Some of us think that he has been getting a giant tattoo of ricky across his back. Others think he has been trying to find ricky in real life, either to encourage him to continue his work or just to get some custom threads. Other swear that Paul is training to become a clothes designer and will not be satisfied until he becomes a contestant on the show himself.

We hope this is true. We hope that if he will not return to Dan’s apartment in person, he will return on the screen, and though it sounds incredibly unlikely—after all, that accountant never did hold on to that rhinoceros—we still hold out hope, and we know that at the very least we will continue to watch the show on the chance of one day seeing Paul reach its pinnacle. In this way, he has become our ricky. And, we know he would consider this the highest possible praise. We hope that he is somewhere out there, determined yet smiling, heartbroken yet hopeful, no longer willing to simply watch, nor to wait for the emergence of a savior. ricky had his chance. We hope that Paul (as we hope for ourselves) is now striving to bring about his own apotheosis.