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Laura Bennett is easily my favorite "Project Runway" contestant ever, both for her clean, classic designs and for her willingness to speak up when it mattered (Bennett issued an eleventh-hour challenge of Season 3 winner Jeffrey Sebelia's final collection, assserting that he hadn't done his finishing work himself). She managed all this while pregnant with her sixth child -- and she looked great the entire time.
These days, Bennett, 46, has stepped away from the fashion world and is directing her creative energies into a variety of written projects; she is a regular columnist at The Daily Beast, and has a book coming out in April, titled "Didn't I Feed You Yesterday? A Mother's Guide to Sanity in Stilettos" (Ballantine). She took time this week to talk with BlogHer about her personal style, her hair, and her pick to win Season 7.
What have you been up to since "Project Runway" wrapped?
I did sort of make a foray into the fashion industry -- you know, obviously, with all the opportunity that I had. I wasn't in the fashion industry before "Project Runway." I was just a fan of the show, I was actually in architecture, and I did a line of clothing for QVC, and I kind of discovered that the fashion industry ... I don't like it very much. It's a tough, tough business. It takes a lot of cash, and you never know what it is that you're going to get back. So I've sort of ... I don't know if I've squandered the opportunity, but I've sort of backed away from fashion design a little bit.
Another thing I discovered is that when you're in the fashion industry, you don't really get to sew. You design and things get sent to China and it's sort of like the part that I love best, sitting there and beading a dress or you know, making a dress for myself to wear to an event, I found that I was doing the least of that, and I was doing the most of having to haggle with factories over dyes being wrong. So I just didn't really enjoy it that much.
So are you designing at all now, or just sewing for your own pleasure?
I'm sewing for my own pleasure...I'm still a huge fan of fashion, and I still go to the shows in the tents and I follow everyone, and I still sew a lot for myself and for private clients, but at the moment I'm not doing a huge line available to the public.
Who's your favorite designer? If you're not wearing something you've made, who are you wearing?
Who I would wear, probably, if I could afford it, is a sort of a lesser-known -- to the masses, anyway -- designer by the name of Ralph Rucci, who is just ... to me it's just luxury is the only way I can describe it. It's sort of a private luxury -- you don't see it from across the street and go Oh my gosh, look at that dress! because it's not necessarily flashy, it's just the way his things are put together, it's all done by hand and I just appreciate the way every seam is finished and every detail is just so well thought-out. And so if I were spending, you know, $4,000 on a jacket or you know, six, eight thousand dollars on a dress, I would spend it on Ralph Rucci. And it's really just about the craftmanship, for me.
I do have a few of his things that I got off of eBay.
Oh, eBay is the best place.
I love eBay! Love eBay. This year I bought a bunch of old mink stoles off of eBay, and got them home and cut them apart the minute they arrved and made them into these little, much more modern, almost like mink t-shirts, I guess is the best way to describe it. So I've had a lot of fun with that.
Let's talk about your personal style; you always look fabulous. Do you really look that great every day, or do you ever have a day where you just think, eh, I'll throw on some sweatpants? Actually, do you own sweatpants?
I do not own
