Ink

Kansas City designer Ari Fish is majorly in right now.

The quirky Kansas City artist with a penchant for post-apocalyptic style appears as one of 16 designer contestants vying for first place and $100,000 on the Aug. 20 Season 6 premiere of “Project Runway.” The reality show raked in 3 or 4 million viewers per episode last year, according to Nielsen ratings.

So what role will Ari (that’s AIR-ee) play on the show? Fish’s friends say she’s far from a diva — that she’s warm, funny and whip-smart — but that she’s fiercely dedicated to her work.

Last month, Fish, 26, said goodbye to her West Side neighborhood and guten tag to the autobahn. Translation: She moved to Berlin to help Peggy Noland, her friend and fashion co-conspirator, open a boutique.

Fish can’t discuss the show because of a contract with Lifetime, the new cable network home of “Project Runway.” But the network allowed the soon-to-be reality TV star to chat via e-mail about what inspires her, how she likes Berlin and — for good measure — how she’d outfit Lil Wayne.

Stay tuned.

‘In’ or ‘out’?

Fish’s designs are mystical, utilitarian and insanely detailed.

Her clothes more resemble performance-art pieces than grab-and-go garb. That makes sense, considering that Fish attended the Kansas City Art Institute hoping to study performance art. When she found out that no such program existed, she fell into painting and later, ceramics. Then she surprised everyone — including herself — by going into fashion.

“I never studied fashion,” Fish wrote in an e-mail. “It just came up and people said I should do it, and I did it, and I played and had fun and still do have fun with it.”

Nomadic tribes and the “utilitarianism of their garments” inspire her, she wrote in her e-mail. Fish’s bio at mylifetime.com also reveals a few other muses: geometry, athletic apparel, ergonomics and Lil Wayne.

So will “Project Runway” judges appreciate Fish’s far-out take on fashion?

If they’re like Peregrine Honig, artist and owner of Birdies, a Crossroads Arts District lingerie boutique, then yes.

Honig has been collecting Fish’s work for about three years. She said she likes that Fish’s garments “have a false sense of necessity,” and that when you wear them, you feel protected — even royal.

Fish’s designs “are not based on looking super-sexy or skinny or appealing,” Honig said.

It takes massive confidence to pull off an original Ari Fish, Honig said. If you’re not self-assured, heavy-handed clothes like these will wear you.

Speaking of which, what of the time when Fish and Noland described clothes they co-designed as “unwearable”?

Said Fish: Some people don’t get the art.

“Why not just nod to that, say, ‘I know what you are thinking,’ and move on, you know?” Fish wrote. “We don’t like to waste time.”

The bottom line: “Runway” judges will love or hate Fish’s risk-taking designs.

Is she a drama queen?

No way, Fish’s friends say.

“She’s funny and sweet and fair,” Honig said. “She’s got a really good heart, and no bad temper.”

Fish doesn’t lose her cool, Noland said.

“Ari works better under pressure than anyone I know,” she said.

Access Hollywood recently reported that Fish doesn’t drape, doesn’t sketch. She’s “deeply conceptual,” Tim Gunn, the fashion guru who corrals contestants, told Access Hollywood.

Fish’s methods may be unconventional, but is she a diva?

Well, Fish once gave herself a stick-and-poke tattoo that read “avid diva,” Noland said. That’s the only diva behavior friends noted.

Fish has a goofy side, but she takes her art seriously.

“I work all of the time,” Fish wrote. “Work is fun or maybe fun is work. I don’t hang out, go out, party, blah, blah, blah. That’s not my scene. I find it’s easier to get things done when you don’t.”

Honig said Fish is “ritualistic in her art making.” Fish has been known to dedicate days, even weeks, to projects with little rest.

“If I’m really into something,” Fish’s e-mail said, “I will work on it from start to finish, even if takes me 30 hours.”

“Project Runway” contestants often have to collaborate. And friends say Fish is easy to work with. But what if she has to pair up with someone with whom she has nothing in common?

“I really don’t think many people collaborate well with just anyone,” Fish wrote. “And whoever disagrees is fibbing themselves.”

Will reality bite her?

Commercials for the upcoming season of “Project Runway” play up the drama with harsh sound bites from judges.

“It’s looking a lot like roadkill,” Gunn hisses in one clip.

You have to look super close to glimpse Fish in these ads. Could this mean she was booted from the show early on? Or just that she didn’t provide snarky sound bites or camera-ready tantrums?

Kansas City sculptor and musician Mark Southerland said the Fish he knows is no wallflower.

“She’s a really strong, strangely vibrant person,” Southerland said.

Southerland commissioned Fish to create elaborate ceremonial robes for his 2008 performance art piece, “Urban Noise Camp.” She’s also making him a costume for an October art show.

When Southerland found out eight months ago that Fish had landed the show, he said he felt like a “concerned Midwesterner.”

“When you watch your friend, who has this amazing mind, this amazing hand, you worry that (the show) is somehow going to twist her in the wrong direction,” he said.

Similar suspicions of reality TV come up with Ssion frontman Cody Critcheloe, for whom Fish has designed clothes.

“Editing is the most powerful tool in the modern media,” Critcheloe said. Producers “can do whatever they want. I just really hope this show showcases how awesome I know she is.”

What’s her ‘Project Runway’ persona?

The real Ari Fish might not match her TV persona.

Reality show producers take weeks of footage and cram the juiciest bits into tidy, one-hour packages. The stars sometimes become one-dimensional versions of themselves.

So how will Fish come across? Will she be the sweetheart? The rebel? The crier? The bore? The bully? The bitch? The kook?

Perhaps the quirky one?

That’d be fine by Southerland.

“If that’s all they did to her — if she’s just the joyous, quirky soul — then that’d be OK,” he said.

Southerland said one of Fish’s best assets is her lack of inhibitions. During rehearsals for “Urban Noise Camp” at the Lyric Opera practice space, Fish started reading tarot cards and burning copal incense.

Opera brass extinguished the incense to save their muslin curtains from smelling like smoke, Southerland said.

“I love the fact that she’s not anchored down,” he said. “I would’ve thought, ‘Oh, maybe I shouldn’t do this.’ ”

This from a man who dresses in floor-length neon robes and plays experimental jazz on a miniature saxophone.

Will she make it work?

“Project Runway” contestants have to live and work together under extreme conditions. Cameras follow every move. They’re sleep deprived. They work around the clock to make garments using limited materials and time.

Then fashion pros pick apart their work on national TV.

None of that should faze Fish, who knows about working under duress.

She and Noland once sewed 1,000 body suits in a week with two sewing machines and an unhealthy amount of coffee.

“We locked ourselves up and pulled an all-weeker,” Fish wrote. “I’m not talking about an all-nighter here.”

Fish wrote in her e-mail that stress is “a bad involuntary response” she’s trying to wean herself off of.

“You have to understand that there are wars. There is famine. People are sick without health insurance,” Fish wrote. “If I don’t get a garment done in four hours or three weeks, it is not the end of the world. I can’t take that garment with me when I die.”

Fish’s mantra: Whatever happens, happens.

She hasn’t decided, for instance, how long she’ll stay in Germany or which career path to follow.

“I don’t belong in fashion, and I don’t quite know what that means,” Fish wrote.

If she does pursue fashion, she said she’d start a store or a magazine.

“It’s like meeting the person that you will marry,” Fish wrote. “You just know it’s them, and if it’s not them, you know that, too.”

Playing dress-up

What do Lil Wayne, Roseanne Barr, Lady Gaga, Samantha Ronson and Barack Obama have in common? Nothing, really, except that we asked Kansas City designer and "Project Runway" contestant Ari Fish how she'd dress them. Click here.