Gunn's Golden Rules

Take Risks! Playing It Safe

Is Never Really Safe

HOW I BECAME INVOLVED in Project Runwayis a funny thing. The producers were looking for a consultant because they knew little about the fashion industry. They had produced Project Greenlight,about the film business, so this was a new world for them. A few people had given them my name, so they called me at Parsons.

I will tell you that I had my snob hat on as I was talking to them on the phone. Fashion reality?I thought. That sounds disgusting. Who’s telling them to call me—my enemies?

I was reluctant to meet with them, but I agreed to go. Truth be told, I was a little curious. The meeting went very well. I was instantly more interested when they said they wanted to work with real fashion designers. I thought, At least there’s some integrity operating here.

Then they asked me the question that, upon reflection, I realized they were using to vet people. “How would you feel if we told you we wanted the designers to design and create a wedding dress in two days?”

“Well,” I said, very matter-of-factly, “they’d have to design and create a wedding dress in two days.”

They looked at each other meaningfully.

“Did I give you the wrong answer?” I asked.

“No,” they said. “You’re just the first person who said it could be done.”

“Why?” I asked. “What have you been hearing?”

“Everyone says it would take days, a minimum of a week, that they’d need help, that the process is so complicated …”

“Look,” I said, “in two days you’re not going to get an Oscar de la Renta wedding gown. You’ll probably get a basic column without sleeves, but it will be a wedding dress.”

They looked at each other again, and I thought I saw them smile.

I left the meeting feeling really excited about the project and hoping they’d pick me.

Then I waited and waited. I was feeling disappointed when they hadn’t called a week later. But then a couple of days after that they did call, and they said they wanted to work with me. I was thrilled.

We worked together for six months, and there were just two major points of disagreement. During their fashion-industry interviews, they had become convinced that the designers shouldn’t make their own clothes. In this scenario, there would be a sample room full of seamstresses and pattern drafters who would do the actual fabrication.

“Unless the audience sees the designers getting real and metaphorical blood on their hands, why would it care about them?” I asked. “Also, whom does Heidi send home? If there’s any problem with the garment, the designer can just blame it on the seamstress.”

We know I won that. The other point of disagreement had to do with the workroom. Originally, it was going to be in the Atlas apartments, where the designers would live. The belief was that they should have twenty-four-hour access to it. I said that would make the show a stamina test beyond the stamina test it already is. I insisted they be forced to go home at a specific time and then return the next morning.

Not only was it marginally better for them mentally and physically, it would give them some fresh perspective on their work, a break from what I call the monkey house.

I won that, too. (Essentially, the Bravo show Launch My Lineis all the things I didn’t want for Project Runway.)

In the end, they didn’t have the budget to outfit Atlas with a loftlike workroom, so they were scrambling for an alternate space.

“Do you want to look at Parsons?” I asked.

Once the show was a success, people started speculating about how Parsons scored such a huge coup. Well, now it can be told!

I called downtown to Parsons headquarters and said we wanted the uptown design building for filming over the summer. I asked what the feeling would be and how, if it was indeed okay, we would facilitate it. The auditorium space where the judging happens had been used by outside people conducting seminars, and, ahem, sample sales. A staff person, Margo, was in charge of it. We talked to her about it, and Project Runwaymade a deal to pay the fee plus the cost of extra security and all the other expenses associated with keeping the building open after hours. Everyone was happy, or so I thought.

Two days before wrapping, one of the university’s executive VPs called and yelled at me. “I’ve just heard about this show!” she ranted. “You’re putting this entire institution at risk!”

I didn’t see the danger, but she kept insisting I had single-handedly destroyed the college.

“We’re coming up and stopping this right now,” she said.

I went to see Margo, who had received the same call I had.

“What do we do?” she asked, starting to panic.

I thought about it for a second and then said, “I’ve been in academia long enough to know that when they say, ‘We’re on our way up there,’ it will be a couple of days.”

Sure enough, wrapping was long finished by the time the VPs arrived with their torches and pitchforks to shut it all down.

But I was still kicking around, so they took their anger out on me. I was royally raked across the coals by the Legal Department and by the president’s office. They scolded and shamed and told me what a disgrace I was and how much jeopardy I’d put the college in. Finally, I asked, “What did I do wrong? I called and asked you about it. You said to work it out with Margo. We worked it out. You got a hefty chunk of change. What’s the problem?”

Naturally, when the show was a big success, they were congratulating themselves on how bright they’d been to get in on the ground floor. I didn’t remind them how they’d almost fired me over it. I just said, “You’re right! Good job!” Take the high road.

The Runwayproducers were very hesitant to have me go on the auditions, because it was a lot of time and they weren’t paying me, but I really wanted to go anyway. I was curious and wanted the show to succeed, and I said, “I’ve invested this much time and energy into this project. I’d like to stay involved through each phase and help get the right people for this.”

So I followed them around to see the applicants. It was really interesting, and very hard work. We were doing twelve-hour days, looking through hundreds of portfolios and garments. In New York City, I did prescreenings out in the courtyard of the Soho Grand Hotel, where the interviews were being conducted, and I saw a procession of odd people who just wanted to be on a television show. They had brought clothing, but in some cases they were items from their closets, or pieces they had designed but not made. In some cases there were no clothes at all, just some drawings or photographs. It was a big potpourri.

I would say three-quarters were design students, and while I don’t object to that in theory, they’re still in an incubator. They almost never have their own point of view yet.

Some of the future stars of the show were in that line, and I had no early indication that they would make it on the show. Jay McCarroll, who went on to win Season 1, arrived pulling a wagon containing what I recall were dolls. Austin Scarlett was in the line looking incredibly androgynous and strange. Looking at the two of them, I thought: Is this going to be a freak show?But of course we wound up discovering some amazing talent, including Austin and Jay.

In Miami, on the last day of auditions, the producers came to my hotel room and said, “We think we need a mentor to be with the designers in the workroom. Would you be interested?”

I thought about it for a second and then asked, “Do I have to live with them?”

They laughed and said no, I wouldn’t have to live with them.

“In that case, sure!” I said.

When I called my mother to tell her I was being considered for a TV show, she responded, “But you’re so old.”

“I think I’m meant to be a counterpoint to the young designers,” I said. What I was thinking was, Gee, thanks, Mom.

But even then I still had to prove myself. Bravo needed what’s called B-roll of me talking on TV. Luckily, I had done a couple of little fashion-related interviews that they could look at, including one on CBS Sunday Morning.Based on that, they gave me a chance. As you know by now, I’ve always been shy. Project Runwaywas either going to kill me or cure me. But I thought it was a great opportunity. I had to just do it and hope I didn’t die from fright. It made it easier that I didn’t think I was actually going to be on camera much, if at all.

No one has ever said this, but I am pretty sure that the producers speculated that if they just sent the designers alone into the workroom with a challenge, no one would talk. They would just work, heads down and eyes on their garments, and the tops of these designers’ heads wouldn’t make for must-see television. Sending me in to probe and ask questions would at least elicit some dialogue.

Accordingly, the entire time we were taping, I had every confidence no one would ever see me or hear my voice. I thought they were cutting me out and just leaving in the designers’ responses. So I was very relaxed, assuming I was just a ghost on the cutting-room floor.

As we now know, they wound up leaving me in as a character. I was pretty shocked when I saw the first season and realized I was not a disembodied voice or a mere prompter. But I was happy with how smart the show was and how much it revealed about the creative process. The rest is history.

I was an unpaid consultant for the first two seasons, and then I signed with an agent and began being paid for my work, which made the situation even better.

People are often shocked to hear that I was unpaid for so long, but I did it for the love of it, and (please don’t read this, anyone associated with the show) I would do it again for free in a heartbeat. And it all worked out. My West Village apartment was falling apart, so even though I couldn’t afford it at the time, I joined a waiting list for a more expensive place called London Terrace Gardens on West Twenty-third Street. I was nervous that my name was going to come up before I could afford it, but luckily, it wasn’t until I was given the appointment at Liz Claiborne Inc. that my name was called, and by then I had the means to move.

Yes, those early days of Project Runwaywere hard work, but they were also deeply fulfilling. What if I’d said no because I wasn’t being paid? I would have turned my back on an incredible opportunity. I wanted to help them because I was concerned with the quality of the show. I wanted it to show reverence for this industry I love and prevent anyone from making a joke out of it. Luckily, the producers were all about quality and integrity. It was a great marriage.

What do they say: Do what you love and the money will follow? It’s always been true for me. I had no expectation of personal success through this show. I never expected there would be a second season, much less a seventh. And I never expected to get famous in a million zillion years. While we were making Season 1, I just thought, If nothing else, this is going to be great cocktail-party-conversation fodder.

Lauren Zalaznick arrived during the taping of one of the Season 1 shows. I didn’t know she was the president of Bravo and so, technically, our boss. We were just two people standing there together in the back of the auditorium watching the judging together. She turned to me and asked rhetorically, “Who’s going to want to watch this?”

“You’re corroborating my worst fears,” I responded. It was hard back then to see the shape of the show. I didn’t know what was going on when I wasn’t around. I thought, Is it going to be about sexual escapades at the Atlas?

But now we know how it turned out: a smart, fun look inside the creative process of fashion designers. I was so happy about it. It proved the point I keep insisting on: You don’t need to dumb things down for the television audience. People are smart, and they want to see intelligent shows. People have come up to me and said Project Runwayis the thinking man’s reality show, an idea I love. The audience for the premiere of Season 1 was 354,000. For Season 6, it was almost three million.

It was very satisfying to come back to some of the snarkier people in the industry—the ones who said way back during the airing of Season 1 that I was wasting my time or that the show wouldn’t amount to anything—and to tell them, “Remember that show you were so dismissive of? It was just nominated for an Emmy.”

To date, the show’s been nominated for sixteen Emmys. There’s a bobble-head doll of me for sale. I am well known enough that there is a ton of misinformation floating around about me on the Internet. There was something about my going to the deli across the street from my office with Andy Roddick. They said we were dating and had a lover’s spat at the counter. Well, I’ve never even met Andy Roddick but he’s married to a woman, and I haven’t been on a date in decades, so no chance of that! But I’m flattered that people think of me enough to take the time to make up insane gossip.

Again, no one’s more shocked or pleased than I am at how the show took off and changed so many lives. I guess it really did seem like a dubious undertaking back then. We had scores of potential judges turn us down. I called Diane von Fürstenberg at least twice to ask her to judge, and she turned me down.

“I told you,” she said in that catlike voice of hers, “I’m not interested in doing this show. I’m going to my island.”

When the show premiered, she called and said, “Why didn’t you tell me about this? It’s wonderful!”

(Quick anecdote: Diane von Fürstenberg’s 2009 Christmas card featured a foldout poster of her as the mermaid figurehead of a ship. Well, it turns out that image was not a product of Photoshop. It was the actual bow of the yacht belonging to her husband, Barry Diller. I hadn’t seen anything like that since Michael Jackson’s Historyvideo.)

Heidi Klum is a key creative force behind Project Runway. I love her. She’s just utterly and totally fantastic and has believed in the idea from the start. But that’s not to say all the negative talk about the show couldn’t get to her, too. To add to the anxiety of Season 1, we were doing pickup lines as filler. We don’t do that anymore, but back then we had to do that occasionally when the plot was too confusing. So we’re sitting in a hotel suite, waiting to do our lines, and she looks genuinely devastated. I said to her, “Heidi, you look really upset. Is anything wrong?”

“Have you seen an advance cut of the show?” she asked me.

“No, why?” I said. “Have you?”

“Yes, I think it’s great. But a friend who saw it said it was bad, and now I’m worried.” She was especially upset because this was someone in the TV world.

“You can’t listen to anyone in TV!” I told her. “Everyone in this business has an agenda. We’re not going to know if it works until the public sees it.”

That seemed to calm her down, but I wasn’t surprised she was so upset. Heidi doesn’t respond well to criticism. Someone who’s that beautiful certainly doesn’t face a lot of it in the course of her life!

And yet, secretly, I was wondering, Is the show terrible?

As we all know now, Heidi never should have worried. And I was right to believe in her and the show and to risk getting on board. I also learned that working on something you believe in and that you enjoy is really no risk at all.

There are attendant risks to fame, though, like going to awards shows. The first time I walked the red carpet, I felt like a mongrel at the Westminster Dog Show. When we were nominated for our first Emmy for Season 1 of Runway, I was beside myself. The entrance had bleachers that were packed with photographers flanking the carpet.

People kept yelling at me things like, “You’re blocking my view of Jessica Walter!”

It was humiliating. At the end of the row were curtains, and when I reached them, I thought I was finally going to be inside and away from all the flashbulbs and shouting. But no: It was just beginning.

The NBC publicist wouldn’t let me hide. She kept saying to the press, “I have Tim Gunn here. Do you want to talk to him?”

Looking right at me, they would say, “Who?”

Then we lost on top of it!

I have such respect for people who do the red carpet, because it’s so hard. Everyone wants to criticize what you’re wearing. Every news channel wants to have the most captivating story to tell, so they’re dying to have someone trip or to see the top of a strapless dress fall off.

This is a circumstance where taking a fashion risk is an incredibly brave and hard thing to do, and I celebrate it.

Whenever I do red-carpet reportage, celebrities come up to me because they know I will ask real questions and won’t cheer if they fall down. Once on the red carpet, the goddess Helen Mirren reached over and gave me a big kiss and said, “That’s for saying such nice things about me at the Oscars.”

But I wasn’t just being nice. I can’t lie, so I am incapable of being a kiss-up. I really thought she was the most ravishing, sexy woman there. She is absolutely amazing because she is so comfortable in her skin. She exudes that. And she wasn’t afraid to show it off.

And yet, I’ve received plenty of flak for things I’ve said as a commentator.

Once was when I stood in support of the black lace Alexander McQueen dress Cate Blanchett wore to the 2007 Golden Globes. It was kind of a minidress with a big black lace skirt and train over it. I thought it was great. I asked her about it, and she said, “I only listen to my own voice. I’m surrounded by people who want to make me into their dress-up doll. But this was a collaboration between Alexander McQueen and me, and it’s exactly what I wanted.”

I loved it, and so did People,but we were about the only ones. The press went to town on me for approving of it and basically said I’d lost my mind. Well, I don’t think so. I stand by that dress.

Something similar happened at the 2008 Oscars when Tilda Swinton wore a washed silk satin black Lanvin gown. I thought she was magnificent. I had a debate with Stacy London on Todayabout it. She said it was a big garbage bag. But I insisted the dress said exactly what Tilda wanted it to. That Lanvin creation said, “I am not a classicist. I am a bohemian. I stand apart. My clothes say that about me.”

Would I put that dress on Sally Field? Of course not. You can’t separate the dress from the woman who’s wearing it. That’s the point I try to make when I talk about “the semiotics of fashion”—that is, what our clothes say about us.

There’s only one judgment I regret. After the 2009 Oscars, I was on Good Morning Americaand debating someone with whom I’ve never particularly gotten along. She made me so crazy that I became a contrarian. I am usually very polite and measured, but when someone gets my hackles up, I tend to blurt out ridiculous things just to disagree. And, alas, this occasionally happens on national television.

This morning-show nemesis of mine said something about Sophia Loren’s organza Armani gown. You may remember the dress. It was low-cut, full of pleats and ruffles, and wouldn’t have been out of place on a Wild West madam. Suddenly, I became the dress’s sole, and impassioned, defender. “She didn’t look inappropriate,” I said righteously. “She didn’t look like a tart!”

But you know what? She totally did.

I met her and Valentino on the same red carpet, and I thought, They would make a great match, just in terms of their completely unnatural coloring, a similar otherworldly shade of orange-bronze.

RISK TAKING IN FASHION is fun, but risk taking in our careers and in our education is essential. Ambitious people are more attractive and more fun to be with than people who maintain the status quo.

I love it when at least one designer on Runwayis eager to step up and out. Typically, the whole cast is ambitious, but sometimes only one or two of them have that intense drive to take it to the next level. They want to make a positive mark on the world. They want to leave a legacy.

I lived in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, for four months when we were establishing a Parsons program there in partnership with the Malaysian government. The prime minister’s daughter had gone to Parsons in New York. He loved the education she received so much that he asked us to set something up there. There are few design schools in Malaysia, and I found out why.

In a group of potential faculty, I was talking about a competitive environment in the classroom and how this is a good thing. I said the faculty has to have a high bar of expectation, and the students themselves need to push one another. They stared at me like I was crazy. I was clearly speaking a foreign language. What was revealed was that in that part of the world, it’s not good to be better.

I hear this is also a Midwest sensibility, and that in certain states bragging is forbidden. I’m stunned by it. No one can be better than the lowest common denominator?

I remember from my admissions days the demise of class ranks on high school transcripts. They stopped probably twenty years ago. For me, sitting in an admissions seat, ranks were a way of assessing the 3.6 from a high school. Is that in the top 10 percent, or does everyone else at that school have a 4.0? When I asked high school officials why they’d gotten rid of ranks, I was told, “Ranks made students feel bad.”

Well, if they’re in the bottom 5 percent of their graduating class, maybe they should feel bad!

I thought it was a woeful day when they took ranks away. Everyone needs a push to reach what he’s capable of.

This was my point in Malaysia: You need to differentiate between good, mediocre, and poor. In my Western experience, we want to achieve our best. We want the gold star. The golden apple! To think that all I have to do is show up and I’ll be patted on the head? That’s no way to live an exciting artistic life.

I SEE THIS AS a trend not just in academia but also in parenting. I think it may be the celebration of imagination and self-confidence over good citizenship. Creativity should be fostered, but so should conceptual development and execution. Parents should want their children’s self-confidence to be earned.

I love to see children building discipline, whether it’s by learning an instrument or doing a sport. It’s good to expose them to lots of different things. A broad range of exposure is really important, because you don’t know what’s going to resonate. But when you find something that does it for them—whether it’s the ballet or baseball or sewing or karate—you can feel good that you helped them find something they can get involved in and about which they feel motivated to excel.

We adults need to do this, too. It takes a certain level of humility to push ourselves to try new things. Once we have a realm of expertise, we may think, Why expand our horizons? We’ve found our niche.But it’s very important to keep your hand in as broad a range of areas as possible. I’ve seen so many people around me losing their jobs in recent years, and some have had a very tough time readjusting.

My advice to them: Try to take your ego out of it. You don’t make it about you and how hard your life is. You have to focus on what needs to get done and find a way to do it, independent of what your ego may be saying about what you deserve or what’s beneath you.

I ran into a neighbor at the supermarket who had lost his job on Wall Street. He was there at the store applying for a job. He showed me the application and said he’d just had an interview and they’d told him he was overqualified. “But I’ll do anything,” he pleaded. He was having a hard time, but he had the right attitude, and I predicted he would come out of the recession just fine.

Breadth of exposure is really important in education, even if you’re studying something specific like fashion. At Parsons we made our students experience every phase of every design. They would bitterly complain: “I don’t want to do menswear,” or “I can’t do children’s clothes.” But they would have epiphanies. “Wow, I’m really good at suits.” Or “I have a natural gift for children’s pajamas.”

They would be amazed, and I would say, “That’s why we do this.” They never would have discovered it otherwise. They would have cut themselves off from a rich field of experience if they’d had their choice.

The buffet style of education, where you take what you want when you want it, is so unfortunate, in my opinion. I know young people. They gravitate toward what comes naturally to them and what they think they want. But what they’re comfortable with isn’t necessarily their destiny.

I also think it’s good to keep as wide a circle as possible of professional acquaintances. My predecessor at Parsons never interviewed anyone for positions unless there was one available that very second. I took a lot of promising people out for lunch just so we’d know each other and be able to cut to the chase when a job did open up. I thought we should vet people and stay in touch with them so we had a stable and could get someone into open jobs immediately rather than having everything be a 911 call.

You can be inspired by anything, and you never know what information is going to serve you well later. That’s why I think core curriculums are good. You need to have a grounding in everything. Fashion does not exist in a cultural vacuum. Lady Gaga’s famous gyroscope dress on Saturday Night Livemade me think that her designer at some point took a physics class.

So it’s good to push yourself and others to study as many different fields as you can, even if you think you know exactly what you want to do.

If you aren’t convinced that it’s good for you and for your career, then maybe you will be convinced by David Sedaris’s argument for broad-based education in his story “21 Down”: “When asked ‘What do we need to learn this for?’ any high school teacher can answer that, regardless of the subject, the knowledge will come in handy once the student hits middle age and starts working crossword puzzles in order to stave off the terrible loneliness.”

As a crossword puzzle junkie myself, I love that argument for education. But I also believe culture can genuinely improve your life. You can be too rich and too thin, but you can never be too well read or too curious about the world.