Fashion TV: So last season?

Maybe we waited too long for Project Runway to get out of legal limbo. Maybe the genre is simply oversaturated. Maybe fashion just seems too frivolous in these terribly serious times. For whatever reason, news that MTV is starting its own sartorial series, The Stylist, gets us none too excited. Could it be that clothes just don’t do it for us anymore?

First came the Runway doldrums, as we watched our once-favorite reality series sit in the amber of a legal morass like a fossilized bug. It’s Bravo’s! No, it’s Lifetime’s! No, there’s a lawsuit! We all know how it ended: Lifetime won and is bringing the show back in August (relive some of Runway‘s glory with the clip embedded below). Then Bravo announced that it would start its own competing series: The Fashion Show with Isaac Mizrahi, Kelly Rowland, and Fern Malis, premiering May 7. (And at first blush, it looks about as close to Runway as Hayley Mills does to Hayley Mills in The Parent Trap.) Now MTV wants in, and frankly, it seems like a stitch too many.

Plus, doesn’t it all seem a little…silly? Especially now? Either we can’t afford new clothes, or it seems imprudent to give our credit cards that kind of workout. Or is that the point? Should we embrace these shows because they’re empty calories, fun little distractions from layoffs, swine flu, and pirates? What do you think, Pop Watchers? Is fashion in, or is it out?

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