Dress My Tour Is A Reality TV Fashion Nightmare
A new reality TV competition show is here and it’s all about fashion!
Dress My Tour follows 11 aspiring fashion designers competing to win $100,000 to further their mark in the cutthroat industry. Hosted by model Kate Upton, the designers will face challenges and tasks to create out of the box fashion pieces for some of the music industry’s biggest stars like JoJo Siwa, Ty Dolla $ign, Paula Abdul, and Coi Leray.
As a lover of fashion and music, I live for competition shows and for watching the process of creating an outfit from scratch. That is probably one of the reasons this show was at times still enjoyable to me. I loved watching the designers come up with ideas, pulling the right fabrics, and deal with the stress of a time constraint and errors in stitching. As time goes by and designers are eliminated, I enjoyed seeing the remaining designers really push themselves creatively, especially Vietnamese designer Veejay Floresca and Atlanta-based designer Traviance Dunn. It’s thrilling to watch them create for big music artists especially when a lot of the designers have never created fashion pieces for performance. It creates a nice challenge to see how much of a versatile designer they can be or become.
The rest of the show, however, is drama city that makes my head hurt. Some is entertaining to watch, but I think it became too much when unnecessary drama was stirred up by a few of the designers. The constant catty comments, insults, and unsubstantiated rumors just completely ruined the vibe at times and all you’re thinking is “can we get back to the outfits?” I think the most entertaining drama that occurred was when designer Rey Ortiz decided to get into the other designers heads by saying he has the power to eliminate someone. Of course, the plan failed when production and the judges cleared up that rumor. The show, in terms of the drama, reminds me of the tattoo competition show Ink Master. Both feel familiar in that aspect and are entertaining, until it’s not.
I also take issue with how we are introduced to the designers. Why are they waiting until the middle of the series to share information about one designer? The first episode introduces us to a few and the rest are sprinkled out across the next few episodes which was annoying to deal with. Though most shared emotional backstories in their introduction, which is probably why they decided to separate it, I didn’t like that I couldn’t learn about all the designers in the first episode in one swoop. On top of this, most of the episodes felt like an ad for Lexus with the finalist’s challenge of creating an outfit inspired by the Lexus car. The random product placement of the car just threw things off and I wish the last showdown wasn’t based on it.
Though Dress My Tour has plenty of creativity, valuable criticism, and glimpses of friendship, I could not get behind the incessant drama and its editing style. I enjoyed rooting for some of my favorite designers like Todd Fisher and Keiandra Daniels and I truly admired the craftsmanship. However, the series is best palpable in small doses with much needed pauses in between to really unpack what just happened.
Dress My Tour is streaming on Hulu.
