Gunn's Golden Rules

Don’t Abuse Your Power—

or Surrender It

ONE DAY WHEN I was working in academia, I had to get some things postmarked by five, and before they went out they needed to be signed by a senior administrator. At three, I knock on her door, but she’s in there with a young woman. I’m told to come back. Finally, it’s four and we’re about to miss a deadline, so I open the door and peek in.

The administrator is standing behind a girl, lifting her arms up and then pushing them down, and yelling, “Serve from the left! Take away from the right! Now you do it! Serve from the left! Take away from the right! More vigor! Serve from the left! Take away from the right!”

The girl was practically in tears.

I gathered she was preparing for a fancy dinner and the girl was going to be serving. It was a little terrifying. I gathered my signed papers and scurried off to the post office, rather traumatized after witnessing this borderline abusive enforcement of dining etiquette.

This was a rather horrible example of the Bad Boss, a type with which I am far too familiar. To wit: Once we were having a staff meeting, and the boss said, “I’ve decided we need a café au lait at the front desk.”

“That’s nice of you to consider the coffee needs of the visitors,” I said.

“What coffee needs? I’m talking about a light beige,” she corrected me. “A charming English major out of Howard University.”

My jaw dropped. These are the kind of outrageous racial remarks we were dealing with in the seventies. It happens even now, but back then it was particularly prevalent and grotesque.

Which reminds me: In circumstances like that, you have to say something. It isn’t bad manners to point out when someone is being gallingly racist. You have an obligation not to let it slide. Alas, why is it that childish, bigoted, or foolish people so often seem to wind up in charge?

One of the worst bosses I ever had was a producer on Guide to Style.He always wanted to make sure everyone knew he was in charge, so he would assert himself in very aggressive ways.

In Episode 2 of Season 2, the adorable Gretta Monahan and I were doing the reveal of our subject’s new look to her family and friends. Well, the soundstage was unbearable. It was 120 degrees, and there was no air circulation. The model fainted. I caught her and then heard, from the audience, the boss say, annoyed, “Well, we’ve got to do it again!”

I followed him into the production room and said, “This can’t continue. We have seven more hours. This is abusive. We can’t go on like this. You can do whatever you want to me, but not to them. The crew and the audience are suffering. They didn’t sign on for this.” The walls were paper thin, and everyone knew something was going on because I never walk off the set. When I got back, the crew gave me a round of applause.

But it wasn’t over. The producer ran onto the set and started yelling at me.

“ Theysigned on to this!” he yelled, pointing to the audience while poking me in the chest.

“Can we please not do this here?” I asked. I don’t like to fight in front of the crew with anyone, much less our boss. He ignored my request and kept poking.

“They signed on to be guests,” I said, “but not to a sensory-deprivation environment with no water and 120-degree temperatures.”

We fought until we had no fight left in us. The model revived. We got through it somehow. But I thought: I am never working for this man again.And I never have. One day my wonderful assistant told me, “I have your old boss on the line. He’s at Ralph Lauren and wants to buy you a suit?”

“Hang up on him,” I said.

At the same time that I see people wielding power badly, I’ve seen a backlash against holding power of any kind, and I just don’t get it. For example, I don’t understand that be-a-pal parenting style. Children don’t need more friends. They need parents. You’re the adult, and they need you to act like one. And if you think you want your child to be your friend, you need to be in therapy.

Dale Carnegie wrote an insanely popular guide for salesmen called How to Win Friends and Influence People.It has been in print for something like seventy years, and it contains stories about how to become a better conversationalist. It’s basically about how to trick people into liking you.

In one of the book’s illustrative stories, a man is told to run the refreshment booth at a fair. He arrives to find two elderly ladies disgruntled because they feel their power has been usurped. So he hands one of them the cash box to manage and asks the other to show the teenagers how to use the soda machine. This supposedly gives them a sense of power and control and ensures that “the evening was very enjoyable.”

This is supposed to be a happy story, but it doesn’t sound like a good idea to me. You were in charge. You were handed the cash box. You’re new. The person running the event was a veteran. There’s probably a reasonwhy those ladies weren’t in charge.

That kind of behavior guide is all about giving insecure people something to make them feel good about themselves. But it’s so patronizing.

In another story in the book, a student in a beginning crafts class asks to go into the higher class. The teacher agrees. Everyone’s happy, and a lesson has been learned about “our deep desire to feel important.”

Well, I don’t know about that.

During my time as chair of the Fashion Design Department at Parsons, too many of my students would say on the first day of school, “I’m more advanced than this class. I need to take a junior rather than a sophomore class.”

I always responded, “We have four weeks to add/drop. I’ll speak to your faculty, and they will know within a month if you are so adept that you can go to the next level.”

Did it ever happen? Never!

In Life’s Little Instruction Book,which has sold more than ten million copies, the writer advises us to: “Compliment three people every day.”

Well, maybe, but only if they’re worthy. And do you keep a checklist?

“Buy great books even if you never read them.”

“Own a great sound system.”

“Sing in the shower.”

Really, it’s like: “Act aggressively happy whether you are or not.”

A lot of that book is about busting out of social constrictions and getting all touchy-feely and feel-goody. Well, I think a lot of people feel entirely too good about themselves and bust out of social constrictions entirely too much.

My now twenty-three-year-old niece, Wallace, much matured from the “Uncle Nag” days, often picks me up here in New York City and then we take the train together to see the rest of our family. I adore my niece, and I am so impressed with her great manners. She is so respectful of people. She sends thank-you cards. It’s great fun to do things with her and to have her visit because she’s good company and seems genuinely to appreciate a dinner out or whatever we choose to do together.

Also, the visits are planned well in advance, so there are no surprises. (One of the cardinal rules of visits: Don’t drop in.People who drop in drive me to despair. It’s simply not acceptable.)

People need boundaries and rules. Society does, too. You don’t flourish if you’re left to do anything in any situation. I say this about art and design all the time, and it doesn’t always make me incredibly popular.

A few years ago, I was at a conference of fashion design educators in Copenhagen. I was the only American, and I was reviled because I was from that place.What they hated about American design was that we look at design through a lens of commerce. They thought it constrained creativity. I maintain that having constraints is very helpful for the creative process.

On Project Runway,the designers do better work when they have a very specific challenge. And for me, it’s easier to discuss their work when there’s a real point of departure, rather than the do-whatever-you-want challenges, when all I can say is, “Well, if this is the look you wanted to achieve, you did it!”

With a certain amount of maturity, we can set up our own constraints. That’s a lot of what education is about—letting people set those assignments for us so that when we graduate we can start to set them for ourselves. Even now that I’m in my fifties, I still face certain situations where I have to admit that I need some rules to help me figure out what I should do.

Bosses should think of themselves as fulfilling this kind of boundary-giving function that school and parents do. They need to be clear about expectations and rules so everyone knows when an employee is doing well or not doing well. And when expectations are not met, there should be logical consequences, whether that’s the loss of the job, a decrease in salary, or something less drastic. There is no reason, in any case, ever to yell. And yet we’ve all seen it: bosses who lose their tempers constantly.

What I want to know is: What makes people abusive to their underlings? I don’t think people are born that way. Is there some role model for people who tells them this is the way they get to the top? Did Donald Trump’s “You’re fired!” catchphrase corrupt them?

My suspicion is that cruelty to those you have power over is insecurity, pure and simple. These bad bosses are afraid if they’re too nice to people, they won’t be taken seriously.

As anyone who sticks around in an industry for a while knows, the people who have the best careers and the best lives (and often who do the best work) are not the demanding, screaming, flinging divas. They’re the people who take their ego out of it and put all that energy into their creative life.

I remember in Season 2, we went to see Fern Mallis, who runs Fashion Week here in New York and worldwide, too. I think it was Daniel Vosovic who asked her, “What’s the one piece of advice you’d give a young designer getting into this industry?”

“Be nice,” she said without hesitation.

I thought: God bless you, Fern Mallis.

I’m sure some people thought she was joking or being flip, but she was dead serious, and dead right.

There is absolutely never any reason to be a fire-breathing dragon.

I would say this to faculty who yelled at their students: “You hold all the power. Do you think there’s a single student who questions your authority? Even if they do, you’re assigning them a grade. There’s no reason ever to raise your voice, to threaten, to storm around. You’re not competing for power; you’re holding it, all of it.”

When people have a choice between two similarly talented people and one is a drama queen and the other is responsible and friendly, whom are they going to pick?

Everyone wants to work with people who are low maintenance. You have a huge advantage over the competition if, in addition to being a talent, you are easy to work with.

I’d never met a fashion prodigy until Christian Siriano. He’s probably the most talented person who’s been on the show so far. But that’s not why I agreed to do the foreword for his 2009 book, Fierce Style.I did it because I respect and like him, and I want to support the careers of people who are both talented and decent to others. Christian has all of the attention and success necessary to create an unbridled diva, but he’s not, and I don’t believe he ever will be. Wisely and correctly, he knows that divadom will not advance his career.

If you got rid of everyone in the fashion world who was high maintenance, there wouldn’t be that many people left. But even if you’re in a crazy world like that, it doesn’t mean you have an obligation to drop your standards of behavior just to fit in.

Again, that doesn’t mean being a doormat. In twenty-nine years of teaching, I often had times when I had to have sit-downs with my students, but I did so calmly. I would say, “Look, things are not going well,” and explain what needed to change. If the students took what I said seriously, we all had a great time and they learned a lot. If they didn’t, then they got bad grades and we all moved on with our lives. That’s all you need to do.

Parents can take a lesson from this, too. The ones I know who are rough with their children are always saying, “I want them to know who’s the boss!”

Guess what? They do know. You’re going to be the boss or the mom or the dad whether you’re good or bad at your job. The kids or workers may be pushing your buttons, but you can say, “You are pushing my buttons, and I want you to please stop it!” Or you can recognize that that’s what’s happening and take a break and try to get over it.

The same thing goes for pets. I’m a huge dog lover. I grew up with wirehair terriers, an English setter, and the aforementioned sad-sack basset hound, Brandy.

I love a mutt. I tend to look at purebreds these days a little differently than I used to. They seem to have so many health problems, and then the vet just says, “It’s in the breed.” It’s like royalty who used to inbreed and whose progeny ended up with three eyes.

Anyway, when babies cry on the plane, I never think it suggests bad parenting. But when dogs bark constantly, I tend to think it’s bad dog-raising.

I live next door to a loud West Highland terrier that barks all the time. Luckily, I can’t hear it through the wall, but I can from the hallway. That to me doesn’t seem like a happy animal.

I blamed my sister and her husband for the fact that their yellow Lab barked all the time and couldn’t even sit on command. I had sessions with the dog whenever I was there to try to teach her tricks, but I didn’t visit frequently enough for the training to stick. Ultimately, I realized the dog was in fact quite smart. Her attitude was, I’m not going to sit if I don’t have to!

When I was a child, we had an English setter that was a real handful. She ran away all the time and would occasionally bite my sister or me. One Thanksgiving Day, my grandmother was stirring gravy, my mother was basting the turkey, and my sister and I were ambling around the kitchen. The dog was missing yet again. Then, suddenly, the dog burst through the screen door with a rabbit carcass and proudly used it to knock over everything in the room.

“Aw,” I said. “Look, she’s brought food for Thanksgiving!” I was very little.

Does anyone remember Barbara Woodhouse’s 1982 book No Bad Dogs: The Woodhouse Way?We bought it to help us with our terrier Raffles. Within an hour of the book’s purchase it had been devoured—by the dog.

When I was a child, I took Brandy for obedience training. She was great through the entire thing, but on the day of the exam she sat down and would not budge. I yanked at her so hard I pulled her collar off. Still, she wouldn’t take the exam, and we failed. That meant we couldn’t get the certificate of completion, and I really wanted it, because both our names were on it and I wanted proof that I’d worked hard. So I took her back and did the whole thing again. Once more, she was brilliant all the way through, and then, at the exam, she sat down and wouldn’t show her stuff.

Well, I bawled my eyes out from disappointment, but eventually I came to realize that she just liked the social activity of it all. Dumb like a fox, she thought: If I keep failing it, he’ll keep bringing me back!Well, twice was enough for me. And the truth is, she was impeccably behaved when she wasn’t being tested, so obedience school wasn’t a waste, even if I didn’t get that piece of paper.

Some people tell me I would be a good parent because I am able to stay so calm even when designers are behaving like sugared-up toddlers all around me. I’m always flattered when people say that to me, especially because I love children, and I like to imagine I’d be good at raising them. But maybe it only seems that way because I’m not actually a parent. With my students, I could walk away and go home at the end of the night to my own cozy apartment. Everyone’s a great parent if they don’t have kids.

I do feel very protective of children, though, and frequently fear for young people I encounter with parents who tolerate—or, more often, model—insane behavior.

The scariest instance of this was one day when I saw a mother literally putting her children’s lives at risk.

I left my dentist’s office in New York’s Greenwich Village and walked west to Sixth Avenue. I waited at a red light as cars passed along. At the corner beside me was a woman with two small children, one of whom was in a stroller. To my shock and horror, the woman entered the path of moving traffic using the child’s stroller as a battering ram with the full intention of crossing the street no matter what.

The older child, her daughter of about four, was by her side, but the onslaught of traffic clearly frightened the little girl to a point of total paralysis. She stood in the middle of the street while a car screeched to a halt a mere foot from her. Her mother, now successfully across the street, returned to her, yanking the now sobbing child by the arm, yelling, “When the sign says ‘Don’t Walk,’ it means run!”

I was shaken by the incident and felt bad that I hadn’t done anything to stop it. Should I have run to the child’s rescue? Should I have scolded the mother?

As a nonparent myself, I never want to assume I know better than a child’s own mother or father, but sometimes even those of us without kids can identify dangerous behavior. The parents I have relayed this story to agree that it seems pretty psychotic. They also typically enjoy the following story, about the ultimate in permissive parenting.

I was walking home on Broadway from the Ninety-sixth Street subway station. It was one of those rare summer nights in the city when the temperature is bearable, the humidity low, and sweet air wafts in from Central and Riverside parks.

All the restaurants with sidewalk tables were full and boisterous. Everyone was happy to escape air-conditioning.

A few blocks from my apartment, I saw a young boy of three or four walk up to a table of al fresco diners. He greedily grabbed some pasta with red sauce off one stunned woman’s plate and proceeded to eat it with both hands.

The boy’s mother spoke to her son about the incident, but not with the admonition that I was expecting, which would have gone something like this: “Stop! What are you doing? That is not your food! Apologize to these diners at once. You are in trouble, young man!”

Instead, she took a napkin from an empty table, wiped his hands, and said, “Darling, if you like that, then we’ll go inside and get some to take home.” She never even acknowledged the diners!

Every time I walk by that restaurant, I wonder, Where are that mother and son right now? I would say this child was doomed to grow up to be a social outcast, but it’s altogether possible he will grow up to be a star. I see a lot of similarly terrible behavior on sets.

A celebrity who shall remain nameless announces to an underling, “I’d like a Diet Coke. I want a twelve-ounce glass and five ice cubes, each no bigger than three-quarters of an inch in length.” Once the Diet Coke arrives, the celebrity says, “These ice cubes are at least an inch, and I count six. This is unacceptable.” And fling!He throws the drink across the room.

In academia, too, you see this kind of outrageous behavior. I knew a dean who had soup delivered to his office. I once saw him bring a spoonful up to his mouth, scream, “This soup isn’t hot enough!” and hurl the container across his office onto a wall, which I noticed already had stains on it.

Is this really happening?I thought. But I was glad I saw it, because if someone had told me the story, I would say it couldn’t possibly be true.

What enables this kind of behavior? What allows people to think that they are permitted to behave that way?

Don’t even get me started on Isaac Mizrahi. In my view, he’s one of the world’s biggest divas.

One time, Isaac threw a fit about a security guard from the second-floor showroom at Liz Claiborne Inc.’s Times Square offices. Why, you may ask? Was he stealing? Harassing guests? Showing up late? No, he was wearing brown.

Can you imagine having your senses so offended by something that it provokes such an extreme reaction?

You just never know what’s going to set people off. One time when I was on Martha Stewart’s show, she visited me in the greenroom. I threw out my arms to embrace her, but in lieu of a greeting she asked with a tone of horror, “Who let you in here with that?” She pointed to the Diet Coke I was drinking.

“No one,” I said. “Someone brought it to me.”

“W-what?” she stammered. “I don’t allow Diet Coke in this studio. It’s not to be anywhere around me. I’m going to find out who’s done this.”

And she stormed off. Then later she made an off-camera announcement to her audience about how they shouldn’t drink Diet Coke, either. She gave me a lecture in front of the audience about how bad Diet Coke is. Something about the chemicals? I couldn’t even focus on what she was saying because of how vehemently she was saying it.

About a year later, I was at a table with colleagues from Liz Claiborne Inc. for an event at which Martha was the honoree, so I offered up my Diet Coke story. They didn’t seem to believe me, and no one laughed. Everyone acted as if I’d made it up.

Later in the evening, Martha, while at the podium, pointed to me, and said, “Tim, I see you’re here! I hope you’re not drinking Diet Coke!”

My table exploded in laughter because they had the bizarre backstory. I think the rest of the crowd was a little confused.

Now, while we’re on the subject of Martha, who incidentally appeared in my first book as a fashion icon: Martha’s daughter, Alexis Stewart, strikes me as one of the angriest people I have ever met. Alexis and I did a commercial together for Martha’s Macy’s line. Whoever was directing the commercial was wise enough to have Alexis and me do our lines together before bringing Martha in.

Alexis kept cursing under her breath in anticipation of her mother coming, saying things like, “goddamned bitch,” almost as if she had Tourette’s syndrome. I was shocked that she could be so disrespectful toward her mother in front of total strangers. I also found it deeply ironic that the domestic goddess seems to have such an odd relationship with her daughter.

Speaking of irony: The domestic goddess and her daughter were at the Four Seasons for Thanksgiving dinner in 2009. I read Martha Stewart Living,and I always love looking at her calendar and seeing all the things she’s doing for Thanksgiving preparation: “Get the turkey” … “Make cranberry sauce.” The truth in this case was “Make reservation” … “Put on fancy clothes.” Not that I begrudge her a meal out. Sometimes even if you’re as domestic as Martha you’d just as soon let someone else whip up the Riesling gravy.

But back to the commercial shoot. We were out on a sound set in Queens and they’d totally re-created Macy’s Herald Square at Christmastime, right down to the last detail. It was magnificent. But when Martha first arrived at the studio, she took a producer aside and said, “I thought this was going to be a closed set. What are all these people doing here?”

“We’re supposed to be at Macy’s during the holidays,” he said. “They’re extras acting as customers. They’re shopping.”

Meanwhile, Alexis seems to be tensing up. I’ve always thought that having famous parents must be hard on a person, but there are ways around it: go into a completely different field, make your own way, change your name … anything to carve out a little space for yourself. But Alexis’s world seems to revolve around Martha. And yet she has appeared genuinely furious at her mother every time I’ve seen her. There’s something Grey Gardens–y about the two of them.

During one of our little breaks on the Macy’s commercial set, Martha gestured to the piles of linens and towels from her new collection and said, “Alexis, any of this you want for your apartment, please take it. I want to give you a housewarming present.” It seemed like a touching and generous gesture.

“I wouldn’t touch a single solitary item of this crap!” Alexis said, glowering.

Well, it rolled right off Martha. I thought, Yikes! She must get this all the time.

Abuse of power really can go both ways. If you’re a boss, a parent, or a child, it’s best to wield whatever power you have over your employees, children, or parents wisely. If you can’t be gracious, don’t spend time together. There’s no gun being held to your head that says you have to associate with people who make you crazy. My family may be a little eccentric, but I would never talk cruelly to them—and certainly not in front of other people.