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Project Runway's third season premiered last night with yet another colorful assortment of fashion weirdos to delight and amaze us while torturing each other. (We particularly warmed to Malan, the performer/designer who, if the fashion thing doesn't pan out, has a long, illustrious career ahead of him playing really gay vampires and snooty maitre d's.) The models were assigned without much fanfare, however, and we can only hope future episodes will go back to subjecting them to the amusing, white-T-shirted-slave auctions of seasons past. According to the NY Daily News, one model lucky enough to make it to the final three (and thus revealing her identity is a SPOILER—you've been warned), found her good luck to be cut short when she found herself sporting the front end of a speeding bus:

Hungarian model Jia Santos (whose real name is Eliza Jakubek), 18, became one of the three finalists. But near the end of taping, she was struck by a bus while riding her bike to the show's location in the city.

"She was dragged underneath the bus," her agent, Avenue Models' Javier Hernandez, told us yesterday. "She fractured her skull and her eye socket and was in critical condition for three days. Now she has been in intensive care for a month."

Her first words upon waking up, Hernandez tells us, were: "Am I still on 'Project Runway'?"

It's this kind of shameless commitment to promoting one's own career that raises the truly ambitious model above her workaday peers. To paraphrase Runway's resident guru Tim Gunn, if you're serious about a life in fashion, you simply must take what you have and make it work: Tie a scarf around the femur shard poking out of your thigh, act like that tire tread across your face was put there intentionally, and hit that catwalk like your life depends upon it.

  • 'Runway' model's traffic tragedy [NY Daily News]