Fashion TV: When is enough enough?

When people find out I'm interested in fashion, one of the first things they ask is whether I watch Project Runway. (The answer? I only watched one season, and I wasn't too into it.)

Project Runway's been through nine seasons so far and has been wildly successful. It’s been so successful, in fact, that there have been numerous fashion TV spinoffs on various channels.

People expect the fashion circuit to be in the know about these programs, but when there are so many, who has time to watch all of them? How does one know which ones are really worth watching?

Perhaps most of us were introduced to the concept of fashion TV years before Project Runway, thanks to a little MTV reality show called The Hills. The lead characters’ lives as Teen Vogue fashion closet interns were glamorous -- they flew to New York on a whim, hung out with members of famous bands and never seemed to do homework, even though they were both technically college students.

Following The Hills was the lesser-known The City, which chronicled Whitney Port’s job with -- and resignation from -- Diane von Furstenberg’s label and Olivia Palermo’s work at Elle magazine. Elle fashion editor Joe Zee has his own TV show, All on the Line, on the Sundance channel, and Elle was involved with Project Runway before fashion editor Nina Garcia moved to Marie Claire.

Aside from designer competitions, celebrity stylists have found their niche in the fashion TV world, too -- Rachel Zoe, stylist to big-name stars like Anne Hathaway, just finished her fourth season on Bravo TV show The Rachel Zoe Project, in addition to having her first child this year. Zoe’s assistant, Brad Goreski, now has his own Bravo show, It’s a Brad, Brad World, to chronicle his life as a stylist, too.

Brad Goreski, photo courtesy of People StyleWatch magazine.

 If these programs weren’t enough, three more fashion TV shows have cropped up in the past year. British It Girl Alexa Chung hosted a reality show called 24-Hour Catwalk, which was loosely based on the Project Runway premise of a design competition. The catch, however, was that designers only had 24 hours to produce their collections.

Even NBC hopped on the fashion TV wagon and is currently mid-season with its new show Fashion Star. Hosted by Elle MacPherson, the show is quite similar to Project Runway in that designers compete on a themed topic each week to produce a winning collection in the season finale. Like Project Runway, Fashion Star also boasts celebrity and designer judges, though John Varvatos is less of a household name than Michael Kors.

With all of these fashion-based shows on major cable networks, even fashion editors can’t possibly have time to watch all of them. My advice? If you’re going to watch one fashion TV show, make it the one that’s produced by Vogue.

The Council of Fashion Designers of America teams up with Vogue each year to give their Fashion Fund award to one budding designer whom they feel deserves recognition in the fashion industry. In the new show, available on Hulu, finalists compete for the endorsement of the CFDA and Vogue itself. Now that’s fashion TV!