"Project Runway" Originals Auctioned for Charity

Season 4 designs on the block for The HOPE Program

Just when we thought we couldn't come up with another bogus excuse to show a Victoria's Secret supermodel on our pages, we come up with (goody!) a real one. Instead of Adriana Lima, today we set our sites in Heidi Klum and her hit television series "Project Runway." It was announced today that the actual designs created by the contestants on the show are being put on the virtual auction block, with proceeds benefitting The HOPE Program.

Visitors to ProjectRunway.com right now can bid on garments designed by Chris March and Kathleen "Sweet P" Vaughn, though bidding for those items ends tomorrow. After the season finale tomorrow night, more than 35 original garments designed by the final three contestants, Rami Kashou, Jillian Lewis and Christian Siriano, will be up for bidding through March 12. (See the catalog.) The auction of this year's winning collection will extend an additional week, closing March 19. A portion of the proceeds from the final collections will go to benefit New York-based The HOPE Program, a career-development program helping homeless and welfare-dependent adults.

In the words of Heidi and co-host Timm Gunn, don't miss your chance to "Make it Work" by donating to HOPE or bidding on the wonderfully creative designs - it is "sew" time!

Being in L.A. as we are (and ALWAYS ready to "take a meeting" or "do lunch" at The Ivy), we had to make note of the big guns involved with this effort. ProjectRunway.com was built from the ground up by The Weinstein Company, which was created by Bob and Harvey Weinstein, the brothers who founded Miramax Films in 1979. TWC is a multi-media company that officially launched on October 1, 2005. Dimension Films, the genre label that was founded in 1993 by Bob Weinstein, is also included under the TWC banner. TWC partnered with Delivery Agent, who proclaim themselves "the leader in shopping-enabled programming for television shows, motion pictures, sports and music videos, and is the one-stop-shop for Project Runway fans."

(The exquisite Ms. Klum is pictured in a photo we found on www.makeherup.com.)