Gunn's Golden Rules

was resistant to dressing in drag for the role. He was a sex symbol and was embarrassed that he had to put on a dress. But then when he did, he had a new concern: He wasn’t pretty enough! He and his costar, Jack Lemmon, went back to the wardrobe people and demanded better makeup, higher heels, and bigger falsies. His logic: If he was going to be a girl, he was going to be a pretty girl, by God.

That’s how people should be about everything: whatever you’re doing, give it your all.

That’s one of the things I love about Project Runway. It’s about each designer being the best at whatever it is he or she wants to do.

Whenever I do makeovers, I like to bring out whatever it is in that person of which they are most proud. I hate almost all makeover shows, because they tend to make everyone look the same: still frumpy, but slightly more upscale and slightly more put together than before.

I like to learn about the person and to find out how she really wants to look, what energy she wants to put out into the world. You can see it in the eyes of the people at the end of the show: they feel like they had a hand in the process, and the look they end up with is really them. It’s not just a costume. It’s about who you are and how you want to be perceived.

When I did a photo shoot for Moremagazine, we had two female lawyers, very different body types. I asked one of them, Karen, “Do you think you’re Hillary Clinton?” All she had were these very masculine pantsuits. She looked so dowdy and off-putting. When I told her this, she said, “I’m fifty-four years old. Aren’t I supposedto be dowdy?”

“No! No! No!” I told her. I don’t believe anyone ever has to look dowdy, and it’s perplexing when they do.

But when it came down to what direction to take her in, I was confused. I took her sister aside and said, “Talk to me. Karen is working a very strong masculine look. In fact, is this who she is?” I didn’t want to put her in flowery prints if she was more of a truck-driver gal.

“I don’t think so,” she said, “but I’m confused by it, too.”

This was interesting, because I’d half expected the sister to say, “Yes, she’s a diesel dyke.” And then we’d have worked with that. But that wasn’t the case here.

So I took Karen aside and said, “What’s going on here? Are these really the clothes you like wearing? Is this pantsuit you?”

“No” she told me, “but I don’t know how to be professional as a woman and not dress this way.” She was in court all the time and felt she had to convey authority. “I’d love to look more feminine, but I just don’t know how.”

In my first book, Tim Gunn: A Guide to Quality, Taste & Style,I talked about style mentors. It’s great to look around and find people in movies or books or pop culture whose style you want to emulate. Is it Audrey Hepburn, Debbie Harry, or Law & Order’s Mariska Hargitay? It’s helpful to think of your icon when you are constructing your own personal style. But this lawyer was just looking to male lawyers to construct her look.

I told her, “You’re wearing menswear-tailored clothing. Matching jackets and pants. There are other ways to look professional, you know. Right now you don’t look professional. I wouldn’t be drawn to you—unless I saw you at a leather bar.”

Luckily, she was open to showing off her figure and trying new things. She instantly had a whole new world available to her. Well, the transformation was thrilling. She felt unshackled. She realized that it’s looking good that makes you comfortable and confident, not just wearing casual or shapeless clothing.

Now she has the courtroom in her pocket, because she looks so much more accessible and she’s so much surer of herself. And still she gets to wear her favorite leather pants on the weekend.

Talk to Me: There’s Always Another Side to the Story

WHEN I WAS BACKSTAGE waiting to present at the 2010 People’s Choice Awards, I encountered the stunning Kate Walsh from Private Practiceand Grey’s Anatomy.She was wearing an incredibly cute vintage Count Ferdinando Sarmi beaded dress, but the effect of the dress was compromised by her demeanor as she talked on the phone.

“That person is a seat filler!” she was yelling at the person on the other end.

Apparently, her boyfriend arrived at their seats and saw that there were people already sitting in them. Rather than identifying himself to an usher as having been assigned that seat, he got on the phone and yelled at Kate, who was waiting backstage until it was her turn to present.

“They’re not allowed to have an empty seat!” she was yelling at him. “Those are our seats!”

It seemed fairly simple, but she didn’t seem to be getting through to him. She got off the phone and said, “I have to leave and go talk to my boyfriend.”

“You can’t leave,” the backstage staff said. “You’re about to present.”

I turned to my agent, Jonathan Swaden, and said, “She’s too fabulous for this. She needs to start going out with some people who can take care of themselves.”

It was high drama.

But I really did think there was a lesson in there about taking care of yourself and making others take care of themselves. Suddenly, she was expected to help her boyfriend navigate the seating rules rather than do her job and introduce an award on national television.

The boyfriend needed to recognize that there was another side to the story he thought he had figured out. The old expression is totally true: “If you assume, you make an ass out of you and me.”

That applies in a professional context as well.

We have an amazing library at Liz Claiborne Inc. called the Design and Merchandising Resource Center, which falls under my authority as chief creative officer. Well, sometimes designers borrow textiles and then never return them, or return them in terrible condition. Expensive books vanish. And then when I ban them from borrowing things, they plead persecution!

Call me a schoolmarm, but few things make me angrier than people not taking good care of library materials. This was edited out on Project Runway,but at the Metropolitan Museum of Art challenge in Season 7, I lost my patience with the designers when they kept trying to put their paws all over some of the Costume Institute’s most delicate treasures.

Speaking of museums, there was one perfect moment in Project Runway’s Season 6: we went to the