Santino Rice

Santino Q. Rice (born August 20, 1974), a St. Charles, Missouri native, is a fashion designer living and working in Hollywood. Rice participated as a contestant on the second season of the Bravo reality show Project Runway and was one of the three designers selected to show at Olympus Fashion Week, along with Chloe Dao and Daniel Vosovic and finished third behind them. Santino was commonly viewed as a very talented designer who elicited criticism from the judges for going over-the-top on many designs, adding unnecessary items such as feathers, beads, sequins, and trims. Although many felt that most of his basic designs were nicely thought out, the extra embellishments were criticized as being "cheesy." The judges criticized these tendencies repeatedly, telling him that he over-embellished, but the criticism seemed to have little effect. Rice talked back to many of the judges, particularly Nina Garcia, when they critiqued his over-the-top style, regularly defending his over-decorated designs. Ironically, when Santino presented a less extravagant version of his designs on the season finale, the judges were confused by his lack of usual style and embellishments. Contestants on the show were often irritated by Santino's arrogant behavior, but also were highly amused when he did his frequent impressions of the fashion director at Parsons, Tim Gunn. When we first saw the impressions, it was the "Flower Power" episode, and Andrae Gonzalo was outside. Rice was mocking Tim Gunn when he said, "What happened to Andrae?" He also mocked Tim's catchphrase, "Make it work!", quite often, and did an impression of Tim with Andrae at a Red Lobster that elicited many laughs. On the "Reunion" episode, other contestants were given the opportunity to hear many of the hurtful things Rice said of them. In a typical example, Rice said of fellow contestant Diana Eng, "I can't stand the sound of her voice!" and "the three of them are so cheesy." referring to two other contestants, including Diana Eng. Santino also appeared in the Miss Universe 2006 pageant as a judge. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.