The workroom outlasted the network, the host, and the city.
Bravo to Lifetime to Bravo to Freeform, Heidi Klum out and back in, New York traded for Los Angeles and back again — the sewing machines and the workroom format never budged. Nothing about Project Runway's address stayed fixed except the address that mattered.
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The 10, in order.
- #01The debut season sets the baseline every later shakeup has to answer to.Heidi Klum hosts, Bravo airs it, sixteen designers work a Manhattan workroom. Nothing about that lineup looks like a choice yet — it's simply what the show is before any network move or host change turns it into one.
- #02The follow-up proves the format repeats without losing anything.A bigger cast and a settled judges' table show the show can run itself back at scale. Before any later reset, this is what steady looks like — Bravo, Manhattan, Klum, no asterisks attached.
- #03The only season that ever left Manhattan, and changed networks to do it.Production jumps from Bravo to Lifetime and the workroom relocates to Los Angeles in the same move, the biggest structural swing the format ever tried at once. No season before or since touches both the network and the city.
- #04The city comes home before the network does.Manhattan returns as home base, but Lifetime keeps the show for several more years yet. The two variables that moved together the season before start drifting apart on separate timelines.
- #05The last quiet season before the show resets almost everything about itself.Heidi Klum's final year in the host chair before a long absence closes out the Lifetime era without any fanfare. Nothing here signals how much bigger the next shakeup is about to be.
- #06Network, host, mentor, and judges' table turn over in the same season.The show returns to Bravo with a new host, a former winner installed as workroom mentor, and a refreshed panel — the biggest simultaneous reset in its history. The Manhattan workroom is the one variable the reboot leaves alone.
- #07Production absorbs a disruption no earlier season had to plan around.A season reshaped by conditions nobody designed for tests whether the workroom format can hold up under real disruption. It's the first shakeup the show didn't choose for itself.
- #08The format runs back at full scale after a season that couldn't.With production conditions normalized, the show returns to its standard rhythm and shows the disruption didn't leave a lasting mark. A recovery season, not a reset — the quietest entry on this list.
- #09For one season, no single host runs the room at all.Fourteen returning designers compete under a mentor-and-judges structure instead of a traditional host, the closest the format comes to testing whether it needs one. The workroom itself never changes shape.
- #10The show leaves Bravo entirely for the first time in its modern run.Freeform picks up the show and streams it next-day on Hulu and Disney+, while the cast still works out of the same kind of Manhattan workroom the format opened with. The letterhead changes; the workroom doesn't.
More lists in this vein
↩ cross-canon listA change of addressA show's whole identity can rest on one fixed set — a share house, a restaurant floor, a brokerage office, a boat's home waters. These are the seasons where that address changed, sometimes on purpose, sometimes because the old one fell through.cross-canon list ↪The mic changed handsSeasons that mark a lead-host handoff — the first run under a new voice, or occasionally the last under a departing one — and the format's real test of whether it can hold its shape once the person holding the microphone changes.