Navy Spouse Competing on Project Runway
George A. Smith
American Forces Network (AFN) Broadcast Center
Military families will soon get to cheer on one of their own as a Navy spouse competes for the $250,000 grand prize of Project Runway.
Katie “Happy Color” Kortman, one of the 16 contestants on the Emmy®-winning show, lives in Japan along with her husband and four kids.
She’s a self-taught fashion designer who crafts clothing with unique combinations of bright colors. Kortman went to school for art, but since her university didn’t teach fashion design, she painted pictures of fashion instead. She then started designing fabric, bought a sewing machine and taught herself to sew. She has been wearing her own handmade clothes exclusively for about four years.
Once Project Runway reached out to her via social media and invited her to compete for a slot on the show, she immersed herself in preparation, saying, “I didn’t know how to design from scratch, but I wasn’t going to let this opportunity pass. I ordered textbooks, watched YouTube videos and got some private lessons.”
Kortman wasn’t sure how it would work out with her being stationed in Japan with four young kids, but her husband, Lt. Cmdr. Francisco Kortman, the Department Head for Obstetrics and Gynecology in Yokosuka, Japan, was all in, telling her he didn’t want her to lose the opportunity, to say yes, and they’d figure out how to make it work.
“She has always had a sizeable following on Instagram and my shipmates would tease me as being a husband of Instagram,” says Lt. Cmdr. Kortman. “Now I’ll be a husband of Project Runway too! Hooyah Katie!”
It’s fair to say when it comes to who is her #1 family fan, it’s pretty much a tie between the “Happy Color” designer’s husband and her Mom.
“I think me going on the show fulfils my mom’s lifelong dream,” Katie laughs. “When we found out I was going to be on the show, she was jumping up and down screaming. We had watched the show together for years and for me to actually go on the show was amazing.”
Katie feels appearing in a nationally syndicated show like Project Runway sends a positive message to other military spouses.
“I hope that by me being on the show they’ll see you don’t have to put your dreams on hold just because you move around all the time. There are ways this can happen,” she says. “Part of the reason I got this experience is while moving all the time I adapted and learned new skills.”
Watch Katie in the premiere of Season 19 of Project Runway Oct. 14 at 9 p.m. on Bravo in the United States, or on the American Forces Network at 7 p.m. Oct. 16 on AFN|prime in Japan, Korea and Central Europe. For AFN viewing times in other parts of the world, go to www.myafn.net.
| Date Taken: | 10.12.2021 |
| Date Posted: | 10.12.2021 10:17 |
| Story ID: | 407096 |
| Location: | JP |
| Web Views: | 113 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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