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Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: July 26, 2006
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: Project Runway, “Designer’s Best Friend” (Season 3, Episode 3)
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: The American public relationship with Ivanka Trump. There is something about her (could it be that she’s a beautiful, modelesque blonde white woman? WHO CAN SAY?) that makes people constantly look to her to be a positive, calming, corrective influence on her more boorish, foul-mouthed, petty father. Who is the President of the United States. But we’ve always been pretty enamored with Ivanka; we were back when she was a teen model, when she was a young advisor to her dad on The Apprentice, and when she was putting forth the image of a well-adjusted daughter of privilege (and scandal) while her brothers still looked like the poster children for vitamin deficiency.
So it’s no surprise that Ivanka had made several appearances on Project Runway before becoming de facto First Lady of the United States. Her first, eleven years ago today, was on the third season of Project Runway. She was a guest judge — along with Vera Wang — for a challenge in which the designers had to create a look for a dog and its owner. …Look, not all challenges can be winners. At least they weren’t designing for Kermit and Miss Piggy on this one. Anyway, Ivanka was there in her capacity as VP of Real Estate Development at the Trump Organization. Though mostly she was there in her capacity as a former model and famous person.
Ivanka showed up again, eight years later, on Project Runway All-Stars, in the fourth season premiere “Made in Manhattan.” By this point, Ivanka wasn’t just the pretty daughter of a notorious, once-bankrupt, womanizing reality show host. She was now the pretty daughter of a notorious, once-bankrupt, womanizing reality show host who had hounded the first black president of the United States into producing his birth certificate.
It’s an interesting moment in time to remember Ivanka Trump being embraced by a reality show with such high LGBTQ representation, considering 11 years to the day after her first Project Runway appearance, her father tweeted his intention to bar transgender people from serving in the military, without so much as a peep from his once-LGBTQ-embraced daughter. You wonder whether Project Runway — or its designers — would be so eager to welcome her back another time.
