Gunn's Golden Rules

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.

Give Back (but Know Your Limits)