When Project Runway Season 20 premieres on Bravo tonight, it will be a victory lap for the long-running reality series. The entire field of contestants will be made up of “All-Stars” from seasons past, including fan favorites like Rami Kashou (Season 4), Jonathan Kayne Gillespie (Season 3), and Hester Sunshine (Season 17). But there be only three people on tonight’s all-new episode of Project Runway who were there when it started all the way back in 2004: long-time judge Nina Garcia and O.G. Project Runway stars Kara Saun and Nora Pagel.

It’s impossible to understate just how revolutionary the original season of Project Runway was when it premiered. Bravo, a network that was hitherto known for art house cinema and Inside the Actor’s Studio, was leaning into the recent success of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy with a new fashion-forward reality series. As supermodel and host Heidi Klum explains in the first minutes of Project Runway, New York Fashion Week was only open to super-rich and super-connected fashion designers. This new reality show would comb the country for the best undiscovered talent, offering them a break into the fashion industry they otherwise couldn’t attain on merit alone.

Project Runway didn’t just launch the careers of struggling designers. It introduced everyday Americans to the world of high fashion and garment construction. Project Runway democratized an art form that was once only reserved for the elite, inspiring the rise of fast fashion for the masses and, more importantly, future designers to get off the couch and sew.

Original Project Runway Season 1 finalist Kara Saun told Decider that she was blown away by how many of her fellow All-Stars she had touched when she met them in the Season 20 workroom.

“They were just saying to me how much Project Runway Season 1 meant to them. Korto [Momolu] was like, ‘I was breastfeeding my child and watching you on this show and literally was like, if Kara Saun can do it, I can be on that show,'” Kara Saun said. “You don’t realize that it meant so much to people and who you were on this show also meant so much to people.”

For the first season of Project Runway, producers set up open casting calls for contestants in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Miami. Nora Pagel remembered being a recent college graduate feeling the pressure from her parents to get a job. When a friend told her about “tryouts for this TV show,” Pagel showed up for the New York audition with her senior collection and was immediately overwhelmed by the 1200 people in line.

“But then it just went down to, you know, you’re the top 100 and then the top 30 and then I just kept getting these notifications,” Pagel said. “When I was finally in the top running, I talked to my dad, and he was like, ‘Is this real?’ And I’m like, ‘Dad, I’m telling you, I’m going to be on this TV show. Please bear with me.'”

Kara Saun was at an equally tense crossroads. She was considering leaving Los Angeles after years of trying to make it as a fashion designer. “I promise you, I was on the floor of a girlfriend’s apartment who had just left to go back to the east coast and I was like, ‘God, I need a sign. Should I stay or not?” That night she got the call she had made it onto Project Runway.

Nora Pagel and Kara Saun soon joined ten other designers — including eventual Season 1 winner Jay Carroll — at Parsons School of Design to compete on camera for $100,000, a Banana Republic mentorship, and the chance to show at New York Fashion Week. The first challenge lobbed at the contestants was to create a sexy, glam look using only what they could purchase at a grocery store. Pagel wound up in the top three thanks to her sleek blue cocktail dress made from a lawn chair, but Austin Scarlett won the challenge with a garment literally constructed out of corn husks.

It was runway meets reality TV in the best possible way. And strangely not as bonkers a challenge as the first-time contestants might have been expecting.

“So here’s the funny thing. When I went on the show, Season 1, no one knew what to expect,” Kara Saun said. “I was like, ‘Am I gonna be eating worms and then sewing?’ Back then that was the thing. Like eating worms and doing all these things. So you really didn’t know what to expect. I just knew I was gonna do this show and it was gonna be great.”

The first season of Project Runway was indeed great, but it was also very much of its time. While most reality competitions in 2023 give contestants some privacy after hours, early seasons of Project Runway jammed the designers into tiny hotel rooms in pursuit of more on-camera drama.

“Oh my God, like I had a roommate. There was another person in the bed next to me,” Kara Saun said. “I mean, we walked literally from the hotel to bars. Like how many blocks was that? I don’t even know.”

It was also an era where reality producers leaned hard into creating over-the-top characters out of the real people onscreen.

“It was the early 2000s and I was young and I think they called me — but I don’t remember knowing that — the punk,” Pagel said. “It’s funny because I don’t really know if I am a punk or not. I did have the haircut.”

(On the day that Decider interviewed Pagel, she appeared extremely polished and had just attended her son’s kindergarten graduation ceremony. Definitely not punk.)

“I think back then you didn’t really also realize that things stay with you and things stick with you,” Kara Saun said. “I mean, the one thing that people have said to me throughout was just really like, ‘Oh my God, I loved who you were on the show.’ I don’t think that a lot of times in the reality world that the people see you.”

“I was definitely the youngest on the cast and that was a story, you know?” Pagel said. “Comes right fresh out of college, least amount of experience.”

The most notorious “character” on Project Runway Season 1 was Wendy Pepper, a 39-year-old wife, mother, and fashion designer from Middleburg, Virginia. She candidly revealed in her early confessionals that she was willing to leverage any tool possible to win the competition, including manipulating her fellow designers. Dogged by insecurities, she let the then 37-year-old Kara Saun give her a more youthful makeover and openly told the then 21-year-old Nora that she envied her youth and opportunities. Pepper would later return to the spin-off series Project Runway: All-Stars and attempt to reclaim her image. Tragically, she passed away in 2017.

“God bless Wendy, since she’s not with us anymore,” Kara Saun said, before emphatically praising Pepper and her family. She argued back then “people kind of picked characters” before they went on reality TV in order to stand out.

“Wendy came with the eye shadow and the hair, but you can think about it now… She was a great character, right?” Kara Saun said. “Wendy’s character was awesome. If you think about it in those terms? Like, my God, she was ahead of her time!”

Project Runway Season 1 wasn’t a massive hit out of the gate, but saw a drastic jump in viewership between the premiere and finale. So much so, production had to ask Austin Scarlett to produce a dummy collection for New York Fashion Week so the final three wouldn’t be spoiled for fans. By the time Season 4 rolled around, the show was a cultural phenomenon, complete with Amy Poehler impersonating breakout star Christian Siriano on Saturday Night Live. Behind the scenes, a tense bidding war erupted when the show’s producers, The Weinstein Company, wanted to move the popular show from Bravo to rival network Lifetime. In 2018, Project Runway finally returned to Bravo, but original host/judge Heidi Klum and beloved behind-the-scenes mentor Tim Gunn left to start a rival series, Making the Cut, on Prime Video.

Off-screen both Kara Saun and Nora Pagel also saw their fortunes rise. “I tell people that not winning Project Runway was the best thing that ever happened to me,” Kara Saun said. Because she hadn’t won, she was able to become a costume designer for What I Like About You, design a line for P. Diddy, work alongside Tim Gunn on charity endeavors, and provide Heidi Klum with custom maternity wear. “So many amazing things came from [Project Runway],” she said. “And everybody said the same thing: had you won, we may not have [called you].”

Today Kara Saun is best known for her professional work as the costume designer for Disney’s The Descendants and for being the “Fashion FairyGodmother,” working to give foster children and houseless children dream makeovers.

While Pagel admits to feeling “crushed” when she was kicked off the show initially, she is now extremely proud of the life she built off-screen. Today she is a creative director at Authentic Lifestyle Products, where she oversees designers and meets with brands to create mass market collections.

“Nora is a boss, okay?” Kara Saun said. “She’s freaking, you know, over this multimillion dollar company doing her thing. A wife, a mother, just doing her thing. And it’s so awesome to see that.”

When Kara Saun and Nora Pagel return to Project Runway tonight, Christian Siriano will now hold court as host and mentor. The aforementioned Nina Garcia is still a judge, but Heidi Klum and regular panelist Michael Kors have been replaced with Elaine Welteroth and Brandon Maxwell. There are other fundamental changes to the show’s format, too, from the diversity of models to the fact that models aren’t in competition with each other. The biggest difference that Kara Saun and Pagel noticed, however, was the sheer scope of the production.

Kara Saun laughed, “Can I tell you? Me and Nora were just like, ‘They get a lot of perks on this show!'”

“It was the biggest shock to me,” Pagel said. “Back in the day in the first season, we didn’t know what to expect. I feel like there was probably a much smaller crew, you know? It was the first season. It was a pilot.”

“Me and Nora were laughing because it was like, ‘Is there like 200 people there?’ Like not cast, crew. I’m like, ‘Who are all these people?'” Kara Saun said, before joking about additional perks designers now have when choosing fabrics. “‘Oh, you get to order what you want to?‘”

The first challenge for Project Runway Season 20’s designers won’t ask them to scour a supermarket for inspiration, but the looks that made them lose. Pagel said she had a “funny feeling” she’d have to revisit the wedding dress that got her kicked off in Season 1 Episode 5.

“I definitely have thought about that dress over the years. It in no way, shape or form affected my thoughts about the work that I do. I didn’t even design my own wedding dress. I knew that I was not a bridal designer,” Pagel said. “But to go back and to be able to hack at it again, I think it was really a way for me to show how I look at stuff differently now, you know? And I do look at things differently after all the experience that I have.”

Kara Saun was also influenced by her life experience when it came to the first challenge. When Project Runway‘s producers called her to see if she’d return to the show, she was in South Carolina caring for her ailing mother. While Kara Saun initially told producers she couldn’t leave her mother to join the show, it was actually her mother — a massive Project Runway fan — who convinced the designer to come back.

“I was just trying to, you know, get my mom really excited. I’m like, ‘Look mom, you know this is something that I’m not going to do. I don’t want to do. But if you want me to go back on Project Runway, I’ll do it. But just for you,” Kara Saun said. “And she was just like, ‘Yeah.’ She shook her head yes.”

“And several days later she passed. She transcended.”

Instead of tackling her lowest scoring dress, the Nancy O’Dell red carpet gown, in a straight-forward manner, Kara Saun used the challenge to pay tribute to her mother. “If I’m going to have one episode, I’m gonna make sure it’s about my mom,” she said.

While Kara Saun was able to use fabric she brought from home, there was a slight hiccup in her plan. She had not been able to get a Black model. Spoiler for tonight’s premiere, but in one of the most heartwarming scenes ever to occur on a Bravo reality show, Nora Pagel happily trades models with Kara Saun so she could bring her vision of a mermaid gown for her mom to life.

“No one at the time knew about my situation. They really didn’t know. So [Nora] just knew something was up,” Kara Saun said. “She just was like, ‘You can have my model.’ Like no hesitation. And that honestly is the person that Nora is. I love Nora. For her to do that, I literally just had tears in my eyes.”

Pagel shrugged off her act of generosity, explaining that she’s used to switching up models last minute in her professional life. “I knew how important it was for her. I just thought, you know, it would be wonderful for her to have that and I was happy to do it,” she said.

While returning to Project Runway after 20 years presented some unique challenges for both Kara Saun and Pagel — namely that neither had used a sewing machine lately — it was an overwhelmingly positive experience for both women.

“I think the second time around was definitely more enjoyable. I’m so at peace with my life in the past 20 years,” Pagel said. “I think back then I was so young and I felt like there was a lot more on the line, you know?”

“I was so happy,” Kara Saun said. “People have to understand, I had not, except for my mom’s homecoming dress that I made her own homecoming, I had not sewn for 15 years. So the fact that I made that gown, I won. The fact that I could honor my mom, I won.”

Both women have won in another, more sentimental way. Because the first season happened in the early days of social media, the two didn’t keep in touch. They were both thrilled to reconnect in the workroom and speak regularly with each other since wrapping Project Runway Season 20. 

“To see Nora and to see that smile? Nora was like 19 when she was on the show the first time,” Kara Saun said. “I literally was just talking to Nora yesterday. It’s been so good to reconnect with her.”

“I think it was really cool just being able to reconnect with [Kara Saun], you know? On that level of okay, we’ve been here, we’ve done this, here we are 20 years later,” Pagel said. “What an opportunity.” 

Returning to a legendary reality show after 20 years would be daunting for anyone, but it’s clear that original Project Runway stars Kara Saun and Nora Pagel made it work.

Project Runway Season 20 premieres at 8 PM tonight on Bravo. You can stream the premeire tomorrow on Peacock. Project Runway Season 1 is also now streaming on Peacock.