Gunn's Golden Rules

The World Owes You … Nothing

“YOU MUST BE JULIE!” I greet my companion, a twelve-year-old girl who, with her mother, is joining me for lunch at Saks Fifth Avenue’s café to benefit a great charity.

The pair has donated a great deal of money to the charity in order to dine with me. I am flattered and excited to meet my young fan and her mother.

“It’s Julia,” the young girl says, her voice dripping with disdain.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I say, taken aback by her haughty tone. “I was given the wrong name. In any case, it’s wonderful to meet you!”

I immediately have a bad feeling about this lunch. Julia is petite and very skinny. I hope her chinchilla shrug is fake, but she tells me it is real. She’s wearing platform heels and a miniskirt, and she’s sporting lots of makeup. And she’s wearing a real diamond pendant, as she feels she needs to tell me.

She says she goes to an elite private school chosen for the fact that there is no dress code. She never wears the same thing twice, she brags.

I express shock that she has that many clothing options.

“Well, she styles them differently,” her mother qualifies.

I confess that I rather enjoyed wearing a uniform myself, because there’s something very democratizing about everyone wearing the same thing at that age. No one feels the urge to compete.

“There is no competition!” Julia says, scoffing at the thought. “No one dresses better than I do.”

“I can see why you’re trumping all your classmates,” I say, pointing to her Prada handbag.

“Oh, this is a cheap thing,” she says, referring to what I assessed to be a $1,500 bag.

“I only believe in expensive clothes,” her mother says by way of explanation.

Julia is no longer a fan of mine, I’ll tell you, because I don’t wear bespoke suits. I don’t have a private plane. I don’t go hobnobbing with stars. I don’t have a car and driver. She registered her extreme disappointment with each of these revelations.

Well, our food arrives, none too soon. But as soon as the waiter sets down Julia’s food, she waves her hand and says, “Away.” When asked for an explanation, she just says, “No.”

The chef, sweet as can be, comes out and asks her what is wrong with what he’s prepared. He seems eager to fix any problems.

“Drama,” she says.

Seriously, that is her response to this generous man.

The waiter takes the plate back and does something to it. When it comes back, she picks at it desultorily.

She had horrible table manners. Her hair was falling in her food. She loudly imitated a cough she heard across the dining room, causing everyone to stare at our table in horror.

Then I learned the purpose of the lunch: Julia wanted to be a judge on Project Runway.“Call them,” she instructed me. “Tell them I have to be a judge.”

“That’s going to be a tough sell,” I said. “Other than wearing clothes, I don’t see that you have much experience with fashion.”

“That’s why I’d make the perfect judge,” she insisted.

“Clearly, you are talented,” I said. “Which of your talents do you value most?”

“Meanness,” she said without hesitation. “I’m really good at it.”

“Our judges are not mean,” I replied, trying to keep from losing my patience. “They are honest and fair. They care about good work and innovation.”

She didn’t seem to be processing what I said, but I tried once more to get through to her. As they left to go shopping at Saks, I made a suggestion.

“You have so much and are so lucky,” I said. “Maybe you should take some of the money you’re planning to spend today on shoes and give it to refugees?”

“I would never do that,” she said, laughing.

“Do you know about all the displaced people and the suffering?” I asked. (The news at the time was full of reports of displacement, death, and starvation.) “What’s your reaction to that suffering?”

She tilted her head back and said—I kid you not—“Let them eat cake.”

Young Julia was the most distressing example I’ve seen to date of an overblown sense of entitlement, but the phenomenon is pretty far-reaching, especially in the fashion world.

And it’s not just rich girls who are displaying such a detachment from reality.

In my later years of teaching, I started to see a disturbing trend: students who couldn’t function without their parents’ help. They were so overpraised and so overprotected that they were incapable of handling any problem, whether it was dealing with a teacher they didn’t like, sharing space with a roommate, or struggling with a class for which they didn’t have an affinity.

We would actually get calls at the school from parents who wanted to negotiate their grown children’s grades for them. Luckily, we had a system in place whereby the student would need to specifically grant his parents permission to speak to the administration. Many students denied their parents’ requests. But some of the students actually thought their parents getting involved was a good idea!

One of my most talented students had a certain arrogance about her that rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. During her time at Parsons, we had a Designer of the Year competition, and this student assumed the winner would be she. I still remember her tearful fit in my office after the results were announced.

“It was supposed to be me,” she said, crying.

“By whose reckoning?” I asked.

“Mine, my family’s, and my teachers’!” she shouted.

“With all due respect to the faculty,” I said, “this is the decision that was made.”

“It should be reconsidered,” she said.

“No, it shouldn’t be, and it won’t be.”

Viewers got a glimpse of such a drive to win from Irina Shabayeva of Season 6. When I did the home visits, I learned a primary source of her ambition. Her mother scared me to death.

“My daughter will win this,” Irina’s mother told me, as if it were a statement of fact.

“Well …, ” I said, nervously. “There are three extremely talented people in this competition—”

“She. Will. Win,” she said, staring deep into my eyes.

Oh, to have that kind of confidence!

Maybe it’s because I became a public person late in life, but I have never lost the belief that all my success could vanish just like that. I count my blessings all the time, and I pick my battles. I’ve heard some people didn’t want to see Project Runwaygo back to Los Angeles for Season 8 and tried to get me to advocate for us to stay in New York, but these things are far bigger than I am. Heidi lives in L.A., so she loves the idea of staying close to her family. Where we film is totally not my call. I always say: “If I get hit by a bus tomorrow, believe me, the show is going to go on.”

This sense of humility does not appear to be universal. Whenever I’m out in public, there are certain people who make demands of me as if I owe them a huge debt—even though we’ve never met.

Not long ago while I was walking down Columbus Avenue a woman leaped out of a car.

“You have to meet my daughter!” she shrieked. “She’s thirteen! She has to be on Project Runway!”

I explained that the show has very strict rules and that the young lady couldn’t be considered until she was twenty-one. This made no impression on the girl’s mother.

“Rules are meant to be broken!” she insisted.

I’ve finally learned how to respond to these overeager parents. At an event for young fashion designers, a husband and wife accosted me. They appeared dragging a small float behind them. It held miniature dress forms with outfits on them, and at the back of the float their fifteen-year-old daughter sat in a chair. I was the honored guest, so I couldn’t flee, much as I wanted to. They gave me this entire sales spiel about the daughter. I listened politely and responded, “Clearly, she has talent and ambition, but she can’t be on Project Runwayuntil she’s twenty-one.”

They weren’t buying it.

“You’re robbing her of her stardom!” they said. “She’s a prodigy!”

“Okay,” I finally said. “Let’s play this scenario out. Your daughter gets on Project Runway. She wins.”

They’re nodding excitedly.

“Then she returns to her junior year in high school. How do you think she’ll feel?”

That question stopped them dead in their tracks. They hadn’t thought that far ahead. I said, “If your daughter is this sensational now, think what a few more years will do for her. Think of how much stronger she will be. She’s only going to get one shot at it. Why not save it up?”

It’s like learning a musical instrument. If you’re thirteen and a classical pianist, think of how much better you will be at eighteen or twenty-one, providing you keep practicing.

The parents seemed disheartened, but those are words to propel you forward rather than to crush your dreams. Isn’t it nice to have things to work for and look forward to, especially if you’re so young?

Stage parents make me crazy. They’re dogged and determined, but it reaches a point where it’s cuckoo. I find it very unsettling.

IT’S EASY TO BLAME parents for bad behavior, but there’s plenty of culpability to go around. Teachers are not totally innocent, either, when it comes to encouraging talented students’ sense of entitlement. Too many of us so overprotect our students that they don’t develop a sense of the logical consequences for their behavior.

A faculty member at Parsons who taught there for many years was in a state of apoplexy because she believed that she had to give a B minus to a student in her Studio Methods (garment construction) class. She asked me to counsel her on how to stomach giving such a low grade to someone she thought had so much promise.

“What are the conditions?” I asked.

“The student hasn’t turned in most of her assignments,” she said. “She hasn’t been to class. But what she has turned in is excellent. She’s extremely talented.”

“She hasn’t been to class? That doesn’t sound like a B minus,” I said. “That sounds like an F.”

“But she’s a good student,” the teacher said. “She communicates with me via e-mail.”

“You need to fail her,” I said. “But I’ll make a deal with you. If you give her an F and she appeals the grade and makes up the missing assignments, I’ll allow you to raise it to a D. But only if she appeals the grade and makes up the work.”

The teacher took my advice and gave the absentee student an F.

As I expected, we never heard from the student. Ever. So the F stood. And we all learned something: The teacher wanted the student to succeed more than the student did.

People send each other messages all the time through their behavior, and the message here was, Fail me. I don’t want to be in school anymore. Instead of admitting that she wanted to get out of fashion, she forced the faculty to make her decision for her. From a faculty member’s point of view, I have this refrain: Why should I want you to succeed more than you do?

PEOPLE WHO ARE USED to having everything done for them don’t often have a strong grasp on how the real world functions. Sometimes it’s infuriating. Other times it’s kind of adorable.

Case in point: One night in 2007 I was at Gen Art’s Fresh Faces in Fashion event. Gen Art is an incredibly valuable organization that supports the work of rising artists and designers. In addition to running myriad events and competitions all over the nation, Gen Art features the work of selected rising fashion designers at an annual event in New York. I was asked to judge the Best in Show, along with Diane von Fürstenberg and others.

Diane and I were there early, though she thought that she was late (“Even when I’m late, I’m early,” she declared). To kill time, we toured the displays in the lobby of the Hammerstein Ballroom (a relic from a bygone era of New York nightlife), which featured the work of rising accessories designers. Cocktails were in abundance. While I declined, Diane gave me reason to believe that she had not.

“I need a hot dog,” she announced to me in her languid voice.

I wondered for a moment if that was a euphemism. Don’t look at me,I thought.

But no, she was speaking literally.

“Why is there no food at these things?” Diane asked me. “They fill you with booze but give you nothing to eat. Do you think there’s a hot-dog vendor on the street? Oh, and I haven’t any money.”

This struck me as a little odd. Remember, this is PrincessDiane von Fürstenberg, now divorced from the prince and married to a member of American royalty, the billionaire Barry Diller. She had a car and driver sitting out front. Surely there were a few dollars in there for tolls and such? But no.

“Don’t worry,” I assured her. “I can treat us each to a hot dog. Let’s see what we can find outside.”

We exited the dusty old ballroom. Diane lunged forward to inform the driver of her shining, bottle-green Bentley that we were going off on a hot-dog mission. I looked around and saw nothing that remotely looked like a vendor’s cart. However, I knew that there was a diner at the corner of Thirty-Fourth Street and Eighth Avenue, a nice little dive called the Tick Tock.

We sashayed down the sidewalk, Diane’s arm wrapped around mine. I held the diner door for Diane to enter, and she burst in as if she expected silver trays filled with every kind of hot dog and condiment to greet her. Something told me that she had never been in a place like this before. Sure enough, she didn’t seem to know how diners worked.

While I tried to catch the eye of a waitperson so we could sit down, the famished Diane grew impatient. After sighing heavily, she called out to the rather cavernous space, “I need a hot dog! Someone, anyone, please bring me a hot dog!”

Well, this captured everyone’s attention. Every waitperson and every diner was suddenly staring at us. Imagine how we must have appeared: me in my Tim Gunn outfit and the ever-recognizable Diane von Fürstenberg (no wallflower, she) in all of her stunning regalia.

An amused waitress approached and led us to a booth just to the right of the entrance while Diane kept repeating, “I don’t need to sit. I just need a hot dog.”

“Well, let’s sit for a minute,” I cajoled, winking at the waitress. “Maybe you’d like some french fries as well.”

“Oh, yes, that would be nice,” she said, and smiled with a look that suggested she could smell them, “and some onion rings, too!”

Onion rings? Maybe she had been in a place like this before.

“Oh, and some pickles!” she called after the waitress.

Pickles? I began to suspect DvF was a diner junkie.

Diane’s energy was low, I could tell. She has a languorous look that I find extremely sexy, but in this case it looked more like a low blood sugar haze. I asked the waitress if she could bring whatever food was ready first as soon as possible. She obliged by bringing the pickles right away. Diane began to perk up as soon as she took a bite.

We talked and laughed and when the hot dogs, french fries, and onion rings arrived (quite speedily!), Diane had two bites of the hot dog, a couple of French fries, and then didn’t even touch the onion rings.

When we got up to leave, the people in the next booth leaped to their feet and asked whether they could take a picture with us. I’m always game and was about to oblige, but Diane stepped in and held her hand up.

“I’m sorry, darlings,” she purred, “but we’re late for an event where we’re both needed very badly. We don’t have time for a picture, but here, have some onion rings!” And she handed her stunned fan the basket.

I’m not sure what the moral is here … I really just wanted to tell that story. But maybe it’s that declaring to a room full of strangers, “I need a hot dog!” won’t get you what you want no matter who you are, unless you follow protocol and sit down and order like a regular person.

Also: If you’re going to yell demands for food into a room full of strangers, you’d better be as fabulous as Diane von Fürstenberg if you expect to get away with it.

I SEE DETACHMENT FROM reality all the time on Project Runway.It’s often about three weeks in that the designers become daffy with exhaustion. We shoot each season in thirty or thirty-one days, and something weird always happens on Day 24, every single season. It’s the point of the cycle at which everyone gets annoyed with one another: designers, judges, crew, and producers. Everyone starts complaining about how they need more sleep. Fights break out. Also, everyone gets into magical thinking.

On Day 24 of Season 3, for example, Angela Keslar very somberly approached to ask me a question that was plaguing her. There was a lot of buildup to that meeting. The producers told me that Angela had come to them with questions, to which they responded, “You have to hold your questions for Tim and ask him on camera.”

Well, we went to Mood, and I’m reminding the designers of how much time they have, and she says, “Tim, I have a question. We’re all really tired and really stressed out. And I’m sure you’ll say no, but can we have an extra fifteen minutes?”

“You just answered your own question,” I said. “What do you think?”

“No?”

“No,” I said.

OUT-OF-TOUCH BEHAVIOR IS certainly nothing new to the fashion world. I have an infinite number of less-than-endearing stories where it morphs into outrageous divadom. I’ll share a couple of my favorites with you. Both are about people who work at that bastion of the industry, Vogue.

In the summer of 2006, a writer named Robert Rorke called to interview me for a New York Poststory about Project Runway.He asked me, “Of all the things you’ve seen since you’ve been in the fashion industry, what’s the one thing you will never forget?”

And I said, without hesitation, “That’s easy. Anna Wintour being carried down five flights of stairs from a fashion show.” He said, not surprisingly, “Tell me more,” and I told him what happened. He ran only one line about it, but I’ll tell you the extended version, including the ridiculous epilogue.

I was at Peter Som’s show at the Metropolitan Pavilion on West Eighteenth Street. It was held on the fifth floor, and there was one large freight elevator. Knowing Anna was a Peter Som fan and knowing she famously dislikes riding in elevators with other people, I thought, How will she ever get down?I didn’t have a seat so I was standing, coincidentally, in a place where I could see Anna sitting in the front row with a bodyguard on either side of her.

An announcement is made—“Ladies and gentlemen, please uncross your legs”—which they do so the people in the front row won’t accidentally trip the models walking by them and so the photographers’ shots aren’t obscured. Anna is the only one who doesn’t uncross. Her foot’s sticking out there ready to put some unsuspecting model into the hospital. But anyway, the show ends. The models survive. And as the lights come up, bam,Anna’s gone!

I was there with a colleague from Parsons, and we had been discussing the will-she-or-won’t-she-take-the-elevator question, so we ran over to the elevator bay to see if Anna would deign to get on. She wasn’t there. Then we looked over the stairway railing. And what did we see but Anna being carried down the stairs. The bodyguards had made a fireman’s lock and were racing her from landing to landing. She was sitting on their crossed arms.

I ran to the window to see if they would put her down on the sidewalk or carry her to the car like that. They carried her to the car. And I thought: I will never forget this.

So the Postprinted the following version of that story on July 9, 2006, a day that will live in infamy: “After leaving a fashion show held in a loft building with only one freight elevator, Gunn wondered how the Vogueeditor, who doesn’t ride with mere mortals, would get downstairs. ‘Her two massive bodyguards picked her up and carried her down five flights of stairs and then—I looked out the window—they carried her into her car.’ ”

I didn’t think anything of it, but then the next day, Monday morning, Patrick O’Connell, Vogue’s director of communications, called and left a message that I was to call Anna Wintour right away. I was too scared to call her back that day, but on Tuesday I called Patrick and was told, “Hold for Ms. Wintour.”

Forgive my language, but I’m thinking I’m about to have diarrhea, I’m such a wreck.

He comes back on the phone and says, “I’m terribly sorry. She’s unavailable at the moment.”

“I can’t handle the suspense,” I said. “Can you please tell me what this is in regards to?”

“Yes,” he said. “She wants you to have the Postprint a retraction of your statement.”

“That would imply it’s not true,” I said.

“It’s not true,” he said.

“It’s very true,” I said, “and I can tell you exactly when it happened.” Thankfully, I keep a diary. I looked it up and told him the exact date, time, and location.

“Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,” he says. “I’ll get back to you.”

There are then many more phone calls, each one insisting upon a retraction or at least an apology. I refused.

“I didn’t malign her character!” I insisted, and still do. “My statement was a matter of fact.”

“Ms. Wintour knows how to work a Manolo,” Patrick finally said, angrily.

“Is that what this is all about?” I asked. “If you want an apology from me, here it is: ‘I apologize if I implied that Ms. Wintour doesn’t know how to work a Manolo.’ The goal for her departure from the fashion show was clearly speed, and that’s what she received from these bodyguards. Furthermore, I wasn’t alone in seeing this. Dozens of people saw it.”

In his next call to me, he said, “We’re going to have to get the lawyers involved.”

By this time I am not only a ball of anxiety, I’m also spitting mad. I said, “Well then, you’ll please permit me to get some corroborating witnesses.”

As luck would have it, that afternoon a fashion executive was in my office. He asked me why I looked so distraught, and I said, “I’ve been through hell. That personover there at Vogueis threatening me over a quote in the Post.”

I told him the story.

There was a pause, and then he burst out laughing. “I was at that show!” he said. “I saw exactly what you saw!”

He grabbed the office phone and called Patrick right then. Just like that, my nightmare was over. He told Patrick that he, among many others, could attest to the by-now-infamous stairs story. After days of torment, I was off the hook.

But I knew Anna still must have been seething, so I decided I was going to take the high road. I called Richard, the florist I use, told him the basic situation, and asked for a fabulous and tasteful arrangement of all-white flowers to be sent to her office. I got on the subway and delivered a card of my stationery, on which I said something like, “I apologize if my comments in the Postcaused you any unrest or unease. It was never my intention. With respect and regards, Tim Gunn.”

There was never any acknowledgment, but I felt like I’d done everything I could to put the matter right. And thankfully, I never heard a peep about any of this again. When I met Patrick in person sometime later, I told him, “I am so happy to see you. I was afraid that Anna had hurled the floral arrangement at your head and you were in a coma somewhere. It’s good to see that you are alive and well.”

He laughed, and I felt like I had closure on the whole ordeal. But it made me think that perhaps the devil really does wear Prada. I couldn’t believe how sweet she seemed in that great movie The September Issue.Of course, she did know the cameras were on …

When Times Square was shut down the day before New Year’s Eve in 2009, I suspected it was something inside 4 Times Square, which houses Vogue. As in: She huffed and she puffed. Although it turned out to be a suspicious unmarked van, there exists on that corner a more constant source of fear.

UNFORTUNATELY, THE REST OF the Voguestaff follows in her Manolo footprints when it comes to haughtiness.

On September 12, 2006, I was on a panel at the New York Public Library with Vogue’s André Leon Talley, as well as the photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders and PeopleGroup’s Martha Nelson. I don’t know how much the audience learned about fashion, but I certainly learned a bit about how ridiculous people can get when they live in the fashion-world bubble.

André Leon Talley arrived with a sizable entourage. And this was not a large greenroom. The NYPL’s director of public programs, Paul Holdengräber, a lovely guy, comes in and says, “We’d like to have a sound check.”

We’re all filing out to go do the sound check and André says, “I don’t need a sound check!” and he stays with his crowd of hangers-on. Fine. The rest of us do the check. Everything sounds great.

When we return to the greenroom, we see that someone has spread a translucent barber’s bib over André and he’s reclining, his arms at his sides. He’s being fed grapes and cubes of cheese one by one, like a bird in a nest.

I can’t believe we’re witnessing this,I thought.

Well, the best was yet to come.

André is cleaned up. The bib is folded. It’s time to go do the panel.

“The room has been cleared,” André says. It’s not a question; it’s a statement.

“Cleared of what?” Paul says.

André clarifies that he means of people. Apparently he doesn’t like to walk down the aisle of a full auditorium; he prefers it be empty.

Paul is in shock. He says, with a bit of a tone, “Empty? It’s standing room only. We have no place to move these people to.”

The room starts to get tense.

“It doesn’t matter,” I interject. “We don’t have to walk down an aisle. There is a stage door.”

“Why didn’t anyone tell me?” André asks in annoyance.

“I’m telling you now,” I said, “and if you’d come to the sound check, you would have known that, too.”

At the panel, André made a lot of very bizarre pronouncements. Someone in the audience asked why larger-sized women weren’t represented on designers’ racks or in magazines. “Obviously, I’m a large woman,” she said, “and I feel like I’m not marginal, although I think that large women are marginalized.”

It’s a good question, and a common one, but André began praising Mo’nique. “I think there’s no woman more fashionable than Mo’nique,” he said. “I love Mo’nique. And I think that Mo’nique does for the full-figured woman what Rosalind Russell used to do in those wonderful 1950s Technicolor films, and I love Mo’nique, and I say that seriously. That show she had for the large woman, the contest, I thought that was really wonderful, and I always think she’s great on her own show. I think she’s wonderful.”

I couldn’t stay quiet any longer. I tried to tell the woman something useful about sizes in the industry and was glad when Martha Nelson agreed with me.

“Yeah,” she said, “let’s be real.”

At the end of the panel, I let André and his crew go first in the elevator so I wouldn’t have to ride up with them. I just couldn’t handle another moment with him.

Well, I thought I’d seen everything, but then walking through the freight exit on my way to the subway, I pass André’s Maybach parked in the freight room. Apparently, he couldn’t even walk from the sidewalk.

Don’t get me wrong: Vogueis an essential read for all fashion lovers. Anna and her team are very talented, and they are on the cutting edge of trends. But when I see what a bubble they’re all living in, how detached from reality they are, how much money and time is wasted in the course of their work, I worry about the example it sets for people coming up in the fashion world, a world that—let’s face it—is now a lot more crowded and a lot less moneyed than it has been in years past.

I hope that Project Runway,which encourages hard work, thrift, and skill, is part of the solution to that unsustainable excess and hauteur. I am heartened that, by and large, the thousands of young designers I come into contact with are simply trying to make beautiful things to the best of their ability, rather than attain a lifestyle that allows them to be bibbed and hand-fed grapes.

And yet, maybe not. I thought the recession would have more of an impact on the industry, but there’s still a fleet of limousines over there in front of 4 Times Square.

I look forward to seeing what the next generations of fashion designers and magazines look like. Between the demise of so many publications and the decline in fashion company fortunes, I wonder whether we’re heading for a new age of decency and diligence. I would certainly rather the industry not go broke, but if that’s what it takes for everyone to acquire some values and lose that sense of entitlement, maybe a little belt-tightening wouldn’t be so tragic.