Gunn's Golden Rules

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 Furstenberg 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 Furstenberg’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