Plane Jane Went Out in Project Runway's First Cut. Then She Came for Law Roach's Wigs.

Project Runway opened its 22nd season by stacking the room and then gutting it. Sports Illustrated’s premiere recap counts 22 designers this cycle, the most the show has ever run at once, and the opening challenge — “Your Best Look,” judged on a garment each designer brought from home as their calling card — was built to hand six of them immunity and send six home.

Plane Jane was one of the six. So was Q, real name Robby Crone, who competed alongside her on RuPaul’s Drag Race season 16; SI has the two of them reuniting in the workroom and judging some of the other looks. Both were gone by the top of the second episode.

The garment that drew her critique was one Drag Race viewers had seen before: her look from the season 16 premiere.

The critique

Law Roach did not cushion it. “We didn’t see fashion. We saw a spiky cooch,” he said during deliberations, per Out’s premiere recap. “I wish I was on another show because I would make you lip sync for your life.” Jane’s reply — “Oh my gosh! But, listen, I would kill that lip sync” — bought her nothing. “Well, I wish you had killed the look,” Roach told her. “But you didn’t.”

Her answer, three weeks later

In an exit interview with Entertainment Weekly, Jane said she had misread the brief — she was told roughly a week before leaving to pack a look from home, assumed it would be raw material for a challenge rather than the thing being judged, and was made to commit to one on arrival. She did have time to alter it before it walked. Viewers had also questioned how she got cast at all, which she waved off: “I got scouted,” she said. “There was no foul play. Nothing unusual or off-the-books.”

She takes no offense at the critique, and says being told her look read as drag rather than Project Runway confirmed the job she already does.

Then EW asked whether she would like to return the read, and she took it. “Law has a lot of interesting and questionable wig choices,” she said, itemizing a short black one, a short blonde one and “an Ellen DeGeneres, Jane Lynch do with visible lace.” She gives him his due on the client work — by her account nobody can argue with what he has been putting Zendaya in lately — and diagnoses him with the thing she says she does herself: a stylist who spends the effort on other people and skimps on his own head, slapping on what she calls a “shake-and-go bus driver wig with visible lace” so long as the client is happy.

She is not, though, in the camp that finds Roach cruel. “Behind those critiques is honesty and truth,” she told EW. “I don’t think he does it to be mean.”

The Discord Addams of it all

That last point was a reply to Drag Race season 18’s Discord Addams, who had suggested in her own EW exit interview that Roach’s comments were mean. Jane could not leave it there: “Unlike Discord, I could never perform poorly on Drag Race because I’m not horrible at f---ing drag like she is.”

EW went and got the other side, and Discord matched her serve — she hadn’t performed poorly either, her actual point was that “Law is mean to everyone, not me specifically,” and she doesn’t need rage bait for engagement: “unlike Plane, I’m not horrible at drag like she is. Just kidding.” Then the closer: if Plane really believed that, Discord said, she wouldn’t have been in Discord’s house begging her to audition for Drag Race.

What’s next

Jane has withdrawn her on-air line that the whole thing was a waste of time — “I rescind my statement,” she told EW — and says she was delusional enough to think she was safe even after watching the look go down the runway. Her ambition now is to be cast in anything at all: “I hope other networks and programs were watching, and hopefully you’ll see me on the Great British Bake-Off soon!”

New Project Runway episodes land Thursdays on Freeform, reaching Hulu and Disney+ the following day. Heidi Klum fronts it with Nina García and Roach judging, Tyra Banks recurring, and season four winner Christian Siriano working the room.