Gunn's Golden Rules

What does the phrase mean? I’m assuming that most readers have been to a monkey house at a zoo. The stench of it is like nothing I’ve ever experienced. Every time I visit, I can’t help but declare, “This place stinks!” Well, after about ten or fifteen minutes, it no longer smells as bad. And after half an hour, it doesn’t smell at all.

The trouble with that is the following: It still stinks. We’re merely used to it, so the smell disappears to us. However, anyone walking into the monkey house anew is going to scream, “This place stinks!”

Once I bought a lamp, and the wrong color was delivered. It was pretty garish. But I was so desperate for light that I set it up. I thought: That is horrible looking.But as time went by, I grew used to it, and after a couple of weeks I even started to like it. I began to refer to its garish color as being “unexpected.” Then a dear friend, an interior designer, came over to my apartment for a visit. She gasped when she saw the lamp and said, “What possessed you to get that?”

I’d been living in the monkey house.

You can tell when what you’re doing is what you’re meant to be doing. If it’s fun, and satisfying, and comes together in a great way, then you know that’s something you’re in some way destined to do. If it feels dishonest, it probably is. While I think that it’s good to step out of one’s comfort zone and try new things, if in doing so, the particulars don’t feel right, then they’re not. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try new things, just that you should listen to yourself and learn from mistakes and not get so comfortable in a gross situation that you forget it smells.

So many people these days are switching jobs, or looking at new industries, and I think that, as tragic as the circumstances are, potential exists to try new things and find something truly fulfilling. But you really have to be flexible.

I see this all around me. We have been through meteoric adjustments at Liz Claiborne Inc., where I’ve been chief creative officer since 2007. Since the recession began, we’ve received completely new messages from the executive team. They are clear messages, but they require big changes. And yet I see so many associates failing to acknowledge that things have changed. The whole world has changed. And we need to adjust constantly.

We’re going to need to rethink completely what we’re doing in my own department at LCI. I actually really enjoy this kind of upheaval. I like the opportunity to evaluate what we do, and how we do it, and how we could do it better, or do it just as well with less. It’s great to have the opportunity presented to us, because ordinarily we’d just keep slogging on in the same way. So many people I see complain when they’re faced with changes, “But that’s not the way we do things.”

We knowthat. That’s why we’re having this discussion. Put it behind you.

It was like the curriculum development at Parsons. Whenever I would declare that we had to make changes, someone would say, “But this is the way we’ve always done it.” I banned that phrase from my office. You just mustn’t think that way. There is always room for improvement.

LCI’s fabulous and inspirational CEO, Bill McComb, is always saying, “Don’t look back.” He’s right. You can’t bring all that baggage with you.

On my former Bravo show Guide to Style,I found people in a fashion rut with no clue how to get out of it. My job was to unwedge them from their rut, their own personal monkey house, and then to say, “You’re out of the rut now. Where do you want to go? Who are you?”

The worst-case scenario is that it doesn’t work and you go back to where you were before.

On Season 7 of Runway,I found with too much frequency that some of the designers would say, as early as ten p.m., that they were done and were going to surrender the remaining time.

“You’re done?” I would ask them with a tone of shock. “If Leonardo had had more time with the Mona Lisa,it would be even more beautiful. Use the time and make it better.”

There have always been designers on the show who wouldn’t use the full time for whatever reason.

But never before Season 7 had I seen a whole group of people with such a languid approach to time. I call Season 7 the season of the sashay. No matter how close to the deadline they were, no matter how quickly they needed to get their models ready for the runway, there was no physical demonstration of urgency. Everyone just sashayed around the workroom and the sewing room.

Althea Harper was a little bit like this in Season 6. She was very last minute and would get caught up with the lichen on the bark; forget about the forest for the trees. “There’s more to life than this ruched hem!” I would try to tell her.

In the same season, Johnny Sakalis and Mitchell Hall were social gadflies who just wanted to chat all the time. I said, “You two have work to do,” and they would just keep gossiping. “We are late!” I’d be yelling at the workroom. “You need to move it!”

There they were, saying, “I’m coming … I just need to move thisover here…” Slow as can be. All of them! A talented bunch of people, but wow, were they lackadaisical.

JUDGING ON Project Runwayis sometimes about informing people that they are living in the monkey house. Often a designer has worked on something so long that he or she thinks it is the most beautiful garment on the face of the earth, when in fact it is an abomination.

Michael Kors is a great judge, and I think it’s partly because he does such clean, elegant work that he has a great ability to let the designers be themselves and not project his own taste onto them. (Friends of mine who love to wear lavish jewelry are big fans of Michael Kors dresses, because his clothes have such simplicity that they make a fantastic frame for baubles.)

He and Nina Garcia play so well off each other, because they both have a great eye, and they aren’t afraid to say what they think. There’s a great exchange in Season 7 when Nina throws her arms up about a neckline treatment.

Michael says, “Nina! How many necklines do you ever really see? I can count them on one hand!” The two of them have a big debate about how much innovation is possible when it comes to necklines. The Fairchild Dictionary of Fashion(my bible!) devotes ten pages to necklines and collars, but the truth is that clothes today typically feature only a few different ones.

I love these kinds of specific conversations about fashion. It really gets at the heart of these choices the designers have to make, and it’s so satisfying to listen in on these two important fashion people talking about it. Their squabbles are very instructive when it comes to how the design world approaches a burning issue like the boat neck.

It’s a lot harder than it looks to be a judge. And when we have designers as guest judges, it’s often hard for them to keep their own aesthetics in check. Most designers are incapable of understanding any aesthetic other than their own, and they want to impose it on the designers. Unlike most designer judges, Michael is really terrific about seeing each designer on his or her own merits. It’s a rarity.

Nina has a great eye, but there was one time she championed a dress that everyone else hated, and that I would say belonged in the monkey house. Perhaps you’ll recall the green neoprene dress Ra’mon Lawrence Coleman made in Season 6. He was dyeing it in the toilet before I suggested he take pity on the model who had to wear it and switch to the sink. The dress, a hot green mess thrown together at the last minute, was a disaster.

Well, Nina had a forty-five-minute filibuster for the neoprene dress. Nina is so tough and cool that she has the capacity to intimidate Heidi (and all of us a bit, truth be told). Nina’s trump card was her crystal-clear assertion that she would wear the dress. With that said, Heidi went along with it, too. Well, the look I thought was going to send Ra’mon home ended up winning the challenge for him. I couldn’t believe it.