![]() Here's hoping she breaks that out again soon. Other highlight: When Sara started rapping, Tyra jumped right in Tyra on Rhianna’s weirdo outfit: “She lost her mind all the way into rightness” Good villain for the cycle, but she made that fatal mistake of “not ![]() ![]() The previews promise a host of haute guest judges and hijinks, but will the bigger fashion prize take the entertainment out of “ANTM”? Or is it a return to the glory of the first few cycles, before the competition had gotten so set in its ways? Only the next episodes-and Nigel Barker-can tell us. Other promising contestants included Chris and Terra, the warring sisters, and Jane, the Ivy Leaguer. Pretty fun, but a far cry from the opening volley of, say, cycle 9, where the ladies boarded a cruise ship and had Miss J serenade them in a sailor suit.Īt the end, I was rooting for the gangly 6-foot-plus Anna-but I always go for the awkward ones. The only thing the models really got to do outside of bickering and their one-on-one session was mingle at a garden party with Cynthia Rowley. But “ANTM” got more fun to watch as it got campier, and Tyra meted out punishment and reward to her adoring modelettes.Ĭycle 15 seems, already, more serious-Miss J was in beige and bandannas, and there were no bizarre themes. Every cycle, Tyra and her coterie have gotten progressively more ridiculous - Miss Jay’s outfits added more spangles and ruffles, Tyra’s weave got less and less believable, and the challenges started verging on absurdist performance art. The truth is that “ANTM” has always really been about watching Tyra. ![]() Is it a sign that Tyra is being less inclusive, or straying from the shock factor of bending industry standards while casting for the show? Will it mean that this season will be better or worse? We shall see. It’s a diverse enough bunch, but there’s no one as groundbreaking for the modeling industry as Isis, the transgendered model from cycle 11, or even cycle 9’s Heather Kuznich, who struggled with Asperger’s syndrome. (“I think she learned her lesson,” Tyra said after she broke down in tears.)īut frankly, this cycle lacked some of the more obvious issues-oriented contestants of previous seasons. And then there was Emily, the girl from West Virginia who supposedly wrote racist comments in her diary. There was Esther, the modern orthodox Jewish lady, unusually gifted in the chest department. The few models that stuck out from the crowd mostly did so by virtue of bizarre personality quirks-there was Kayla who, before a Tyra-ordered hair combing, looked like someone had glued a Dolly Parton wig to her head. “We were so poor.” Cut to the next model.) “A sleeping bag!” the model proclaimed, her face crumpling on cue. (“I understand you had something you had to sleep in until you were 9,” she asked one contestant. Tyra, by now a master of the leading question, seems to get the girls from star-struck to weepy in 60 seconds flat. One by one, they’re brought in front of Tyra and the Jays to flaunt their runway walk and dish about their life hardships. The contestants this cycle are the usual mixture of giggly country bumpkins and spoiled fashionistas, drama queens and bubbly freckled blondes. And so Tyra whisks a busload of the girls in from LAX to that nexus of the avant-garde fashion world: Palm Springs. But now, she explains, it’s time to introduce everyday people to the world of high fashion. “I created this show because I wanted to bring modeling to the masses,” Tyra announces when she first meets her crop of hopefuls. But this time, when Tyra describes cycle 15 as “Top Model elevated,” I almost believe her, thanks to a newly brokered deal that lands the winner a spot on the covers of "Vogue Italia" and "Beauty in Vogue," magazines with considerably more heft in the high fashion world than "Seventeen." Every season, the newest batch of would-be runway superstars gasp and croon at the prizes for those who can survive the gauntlet of “smies”-ing and posing in whatever bizarre situations the producers dream up as necessary tools for a professional model-taking a beautiful photograph while falling, freezing, being attacked by animals, or floating in a wind tunnel.Ī modeling contract and a gig as CoverGirl aren’t anything to sneeze at, but they almost seem paltry compensation for undergoing that sort of ongoing torture, nor do they have seem to have turned Jaslene and Saleisha into household names. Tyra Banks’s patented model-making machine-has always been an exercise in dubious superlatives, and the premiere of Cycle 15 was no exception.
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