If you’re not playing tennis in a feather boa then you are wasting everybody’s time.
It’s sports week and coming ready for the theme is Liz in her best gender-flipped Rocky outfit
(honestly how long before we do get a gender-flipped Rocky and will it star Kristen Stewart?) Also ready for the theme are Clare and Mark who have come dressed as the owners of an Ascot winning thoroughbred stallion:
It’s sportier than a cagoule onesie. We will talk about it.
Rugby Jerseys
The pattern challenge is to make the outfit du jour for any LADSLADSLADSLADSLADS Friday Night Trip to Nando’s: the rugby jersey – you can also play rugby in it but that means grass stains. It’s certainly a step up in terms of technicality with a collar, cuffs and a placket (which they explain to me every series and every time I instantly forget what it is) as well as the fact it requires the sewers to use a variety of differing fabrics for the separate components and test their aesthetic skills. I feel this would have been a bigger challenge had the sewers had a wider array of fabrics than literally just varying shades of blue and red – can you imagine if Ali had access to anything other than naval stripes? (she does make up for this later, don’t you worry) Although saying that Nicole did manage to find this fabric:
And churned out a winning design for the Scene Girls of MySpace First Team.
It’s the placket that catches the most people out whether Hazel who gave it too deep a tuck (fnar) or Liz sewing it completely shut thereby rendering it entirely pointless – and it didn’t end there for Liz as she manages to sew the collar on upside down, which I am still trying to work out what she meant – I assume she meant upside down in terms of the fabric and not the pattern which would have given her jersey an eternally popped collar, which seems like something River Island would genuinely make. And then Peter, who has spent the entire challenge wearing his fez that nobody even remotely acknowledges, cuts out two right sleeves and doesn’t have enough fabric left to cut out a left one and instead of having a Hazel-like brainfart and just using a separate fabric to create the left sleeve and try pass it off as a design choice he just sews both right sleeves on knowing full well that Patrick is going to take one look at it and realise the arm to bending the wrong way as though the mannequin has just been whacked by the mafia.
The judging is particularly brutal as Esme compares Matt’s fabric to the dresses she owns, and it is very Rugby Jersey by way of Per Una
And then Liz has to stand there and listen to Esme and Patrick eviscerate everything about her Jersey and try not to cry
It’s… awkward to say the least.
The final ranking of the jerseys is:
- Nicole’s MySpace Queens A Team
- Clare’s Boring Burgundy
- Mark’s Rugby Blues
- Matt’s Per Una First Team
- Ali’s Yorkshire Traitors
- Therese’s Offside Seam Allowance
- Hazel’s Boring Burgundy
- Peter’s Broken Rugby Team
- Liz’s Field Injury
In celebration of her win Nicole does a dab which Patrick reciprocates by doing what is absolutely not a dab:
Bless his cashmere socks, this is the real class divide.
Cagoules
The transformation challenge for the week is to take 2 “stylish cagoules” (the full body cackle I did awoke the demons below) and turn them into a child’s waterproof onesie – WHICH PART OF THIS IS A SPORT? They even just refer to cagoules as ”dog walking jackets” for a large portion of the challenge and dog walking isn’t a sport because you can’t bet on it – that’s my only criteria for sport, if I can’t place a £5 bet on it, it doesn’t count. And onesies are never sportswear unless you’re that one girl at the gym I saw doing cardio in an old TopShop jumpsuit. Semantics of sport aside, because it is meant for a child the sewers aren’t allowed to have draw chords on their outfits because it’s a choking hazard, and for this round Peter actually listens to this advice! The outfit must also withstand child’s play so can’t be too tight or too baggy.
There’s a mad dash for cagoules with the sewers wanting to make sure they get two that go together, or if you’re Nicole you just want you child to look like the opening titles of an 80s sitcom:
This does appeal to the judges, and I’m no saying they’re old but… I can almost feel Ali’s seething jealousy as she loses out on the animal print to both Nicole and Matt who has created the most perfect Baby Pat Butcher Halloween costume:
But apparently it isn’t imaginative enough. Ali gets left with luminous orange and an XXXL black and white zigzag print and creates a onesie for a toddler with telescopic limbs:
Alternatively that would fit a velociraptor perfectly. Also having fit issues on the other end of the spectrum is Liz who keeps making mistakes and wasting more and more fabric so in the end her onesie looks like it is choking the life out of her mannequin:
The rest of the sewers knock out your standard brightly coloured onesies, Clare’s is a toddler at Pride, Mark’s looks like my character on Animal Crossing and Therese does some good colour blocking. And then we have Hazel who has created a utilitarian Princess Peach cosplay:
And best of it all it has an arse reveal that puts the girls of the Drag Race’s season 10 finale to shame:
Aquaria WISHES. The judges are divided with Esme loving it and Patrick just being utterly bemused and perplexed by every aspect of it, what a wet blanket. Although he does also think Peter’s is “Star Wars”
Honestly, if Rey had worn this it would have made The Rise of Skywalker 80% less awful.
The final ranking for the onesies is:
- Therese’s Colour Blocked Camo
- Nicole’s Sitcom Credits
- Clare’s Gay Pride Baby
- Hazel’s Utilitarian Princess Peach WUZZ ROBBED
- Mark’s Lemon Print
- Peter’s Deleted Rey Skywalker Scene
- Matt’s Baby Pat Butcher
- Ali’s Telescopic Limbed Toddler
- Liz’s Death Trap
Going in to the final challenge it’s Liz who is in need of a miracle but Peter and Hazel’s names are tossed around as well, I’m personally not sure why Hazel was in danger AND WE WILL TALK ABOUT IT BECAUSE THIS WAS NONSENSE.
Tennis Outfits
The final challenge of what we are questionably calling Sports Week is to make a woman’s tennis outfit and because the Williams sisters are such legends you could pretty much make anything as long as it’s short and doesn’t impede movement, sadly nobody recreates the best tennis outfit of all time:
CAN YOU IMAGINE?
Despite this “free rein” Esme is still hopeful that someone will make a classic white cotton pleated skirt with matching knickers, Hazel is the poor unfortunate soul that is taking on this challenge
and as such I think the judges paid much closer attention to her than everyone else because while her final dress was a little messy and not as crisp as you would want for a tennis dress it was at least a tennis dress, PETER.
Even Peter said that this dress was for the person who wants to give off the impression they do sports without doing sports and then tries to spin it off as a court-to-bar transitional moment. And then we haven’t even talked about the drawstrings that are going to whack you in the face every time you move OR the vacuumous pockets that you could keep a baby or two in, never mind an entire ball pit of tennis balls AND I SCREAMED when they did up the funnel neck and the poor model looked like she was impersonating the turtle scene from The Master of Disguise:
Following closely behind Hazel in the retro vibe is Nicole who is channelling the roller disco and sensibly not trying to pleat 2 metres of stark white cotton, instead opting for this cute ensemble:
The long filming days are getting to Therese in the background aren’t they? She is DONE.
The rest of the sewers are going more alternative routes, by which I mean Clare has found some science themed children’s fabric:
It’s very rock and roll for a woman that spends her days making tweed slacks. Therese is the closest we get a Williams sister outfit with her choice of metallic black and gold and Mark just creates a 60s gogo dancer costume
but it has pockets so it definitely counts as a tennis dress.
Because Ali was fairly restricted in terms of the colours she could use earlier she is more than making up for it with this gaudy neon pink leopard and tiger print
Ali’s dedication to hideous fabrics is the only narrative of this show I’m 100% invested in. She and Clare are both doing dresses with racerbacks and have a go at competitive “bagging out” – both of them are successful but I did love that throughout this Ali only referred to Clare as “the lady to my left” which is just gold standard passive aggression. The true winner of this racerback faceoff though is obviously Ali who creates an ensemble that looks fresh off the set of a porn film:
Maybe it’s the matching ribbons and loose pigtails but maybe it’s also the look of regret in the model’s eyes.
Also going with a loud and obnoxious print is Matt with his appropriately themed tennis fabric:
Unfortunately for Matt he didn’t think about what it would look like once he pleated it and we end up with a skirt of dildos
Which goes down very well with the judges, although his shirt is described by Patrick as “a double fault served under arm” – is that a tennis thing? Like an actual thing? Because it sounds like something someone who goes to Wimbledon but only for the strawberries would say. The main issue was that he bodged his sleeves early on and had to cut them shorter and shorter to eliminate the errors, although I absolutely don’t think having a longer sleeve would have made it much better. Liz had similar issues and it was looking like she was inevitably going home, however because of her own punky aesthetic she was able to spin the slight messiness of her outfit as purposeful in a way that Hazel absolutely couldn’t, although Liz’s outfit was still probably better than Hazel’s.
Liz gets her Rocky Balboa redemption and it’s Hazel who is sent packing, quite how that happened seeing as Peter was scored lower than her in BOTH of the first two challenges and then completely failed the third one by his own admission is, as Alyssa Edwards would say, “RIGGER MORRIS.” and then just to cap off the nonsense Ali’s tickity-tack-tack-tacky tennis outfit gets garment of the week, I mean I appreciate that they are recognising her dedication to the absolute worst fabrics imaginable but Nicole’s roller disco tennis player WUZZ ROBBED.
Next week:
The Queen Mother rises from the grave for lingerie week.