Gunn's Golden Rules (2 page)

That’s not just a catchphrase. It’s a philosophy I’ve followed my whole life, and I credit it with all the wonderful and surprising success I’ve had as a TV personality, teacher, and writer. What “make it work” means is that you should use what you have on hand to transform your situation. It’s always possible to use whatever tools you have at your disposal to create something that you’re proud of and that gets the job done.

Far too often in classes I’ve taught I’ve seen students throw out a lot of hard work and start again from scratch. They may wind up with a good garment, but they aren’t learning the skills that are essential to excelling in a creative field: patience, innovation, and diligence.

I love to see students trying to learn as they go along. The designers and artists I admire spend their whole lives learning. Everything they make may not be a commercial success, but every bit of effort they make gets them closer to realizing their vision.

One of the things I admire about
Project Runway
is that it’s really about developing creative design work. I’ll never forget a
woman coming up to me at an airport and saying that she loved
Runway
because she felt it set such a good example for her nine-year-old daughter. “It demonstrates that good qualities of character—like hard work and persistence—pay off, and cheaters never prosper,” she said.

Well, that was one of the nicest things anyone’s ever said to me. I love to think that we’re setting a good example in that way.

Few people remember it now, but
Project Runway
was quite controversial in the beginning. It took the mystique out of the fashion world and said, “This is a demanding, gut-wrenching industry. You need a really strong drive and love for the work in order to be successful.”

I guess we shouldn’t have been shocked, but people in this industry did not react well. They thought we were taking the glamour out of fashion. The design world had been enshrouded in a kind of veil of mystery, and
Project Runway
pulled it back to let the world see it for what it was, warts and all. We got some very nasty reviews and some very harsh comments from our colleagues.

But we wanted to tell the truth. And the truth is that in this business, crazy crises happen, like when you’re waiting for the knits to get off the boat from China and the show is tomorrow and the boat doesn’t dock. What do you do? Remove fourteen looks from the show? You make it work, somehow. It’s a fashion 911, and you have to respond to it. You can’t pretend it doesn’t exist.

Now the industry has bought in to the show’s concept completely, and everyone pretends they loved
Project Runway
all along. Well, I’m happy that the show’s become so popular and that everyone is so full of praise for it, but I do remember those
early days, when we were treated as though we were magicians telling everyone how the rabbit got in the hat.

I like to think that my role in the fashion industry has been a bit like
Project Runway
’s position among reality shows, which is a voice of simple reason. Let others be shimmery and flashy and brilliant. (And no one loves daring geniuses more than I do.) I will always be there in the wings saying, “You need to be good to people. You need to take your work seriously. You need to have integrity. You need to work with what you’ve got.”

A woman behind me in line at Starbucks the other day introduced herself as an assistant at a popular women’s magazine.

“Are you taking a break?” I asked.

“No, I’m here getting coffee for everyone.” She laughed a bitter laugh and showed me a mile-long list.

“It’s all in the details,” I said. “Do everything one thousand percent. You could be editor in chief some day!”

I’m afraid she thought I was teasing her, but the fact is I am constitutionally incapable of being snarky. I’m not throwing out barbs and making fun of people. I believe in giving a dimension of seriousness to the whole enterprise of creating and talking about clothes, even to red-carpet reportage, and I’m very proud of that.

As anyone who’s been on the red carpet can tell you, the experience is
terrifying.
You’re always just a hair shy of enduring a humiliating moment or facing someone who’s just there to make fun of you. I thought:
I need to be an antidote to all this horrible stuff.

As many people who watch
Project Runway
know, I am a stickler for good manners, and I believe that treating other people well is a lost art. In the workplace, at the dinner table, and walking down the street—we are confronted with choices
on how to treat people nearly every waking moment. Over time these choices define who we are and whether we have a lot of friends and allies or none.

So how do we do this social thing well? And by “well,” I mean: How do we become more respectful and further our own goals at the same time? Dear reader, these two concepts are not mutually exclusive; they’re mutually beneficial—and that’s what this book is all about.

To maintain anything like a good working relationship with people, to get by in the world successfully, you need to have good manners. (And you need a sense of humor or you may as well slit your wrists.)

I reflect on manners, or the lack of them, each and every day. There are times when I want to stop the world for a moment and ask certain people some probing questions, such as: All of these people are trying to get off the subway train. Why do you six people think you should enter before we leave? Don’t you realize that if you just clear a path we can get off and you can get on?

In the Internet age, even the very word
manners
seems antiquated.

Life moves so rapidly these days that it’s easy to feel justified in being rude.

“I’m rushing home to the babysitter. That’s why I didn’t say ‘thank you’ to the cashier.”

“If I treat my assistant humanely, maybe it will be taken as a sign of weakness and I will lose my job.”

“I get so many e-mails, there’s no time to respond, much less to be eloquent.”

With the advent of certain omnipresent technological devices, with chivalry long gone, with message boards teaching
young people that anonymous rudeness is acceptable, we are looking at a great amount of change for the worse.

But let us not be swept up in this tide of rudeness. This book (in addition to being a fun excuse to tell some of my favorite fashion-world stories) is a call to arms, a manifesto for kindness, generosity, and integrity. I hope you will join me in trying to make society a friendlier, more polite, and less aggressive place.

Of course, it’s not like I am perfect. I’ve made many mistakes, and I continue to slip up now and then in my effort to behave well. And you’ll hear all about it!

And yet I always atone for my errors, and there are certain fundamental social protocols I’ve come to hold dear: I don’t believe in texting while dining, sending one-word e-mails in lieu of formal thank-you cards, wearing shorts to the theater, or settling for any of the modern trends that favor comfort over politeness, ease over style.

Being a good friend to other people, being glamorous and attractive, being a success are no accidents. Having a rich career and home life are the result of a great deal of hard work.

But that doesn’t mean the work isn’t fun.

In this book, I will share my thoughts on what constitutes a life well lived. These rules are what I’ve always tried to impart to my students and have tried to follow in my own career and social life. In writing these chapters, I’ve tried to think of you, the readers, as beloved students who have come to me during office hours to ask advice, talk over a dilemma, or just hang out.

Good manners lead to better relationships, more career success, and less personal stress. Manners are a relief, not a terrible obligation. It’s my belief that etiquette isn’t cold and formal;
it’s warm and flexible. I am very concerned with manners, but I am not a robot. Manners are simply about asking yourself, What’s the right thing to do?

I deeply believe that if we all have this simple question in our minds, we will do right by one another. We won’t always succeed … As you will learn from this book, in the course of trying to do the right thing, I have let a closet full of unopened gifts pile up in my apartment, overextended myself to the point where I almost had a nervous breakdown, and even put a dear old lady in the hospital!

But I’ve learned from every mistake, and I’m eager for you to learn from them, too. In that spirit, I will be offering my thoughts on manners, reminiscing about my own experiences adhering or failing to measure up to them, and telling what I hope are entertaining stories—not
too
many scandalous ones, but I do have a few doozies …

So please, pull up a chair and let’s start our chat!

A
S A LITTLE KID
, when confronted with a difficult situation, I would run and hide somewhere in our Washington, D.C., house. I wanted to escape from the world. School, sports, church, birthday parties—anything social terrified me. All I wanted to do was hole up until the event had passed and I could go back to reading alone in my room.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t stay hidden for very long, because the house wasn’t that big and eventually my mother figured out my favorite hiding places. But usually it would be long enough to scare the living daylights out of her, which for me was not an unhappy side effect.

As my mother caught on to each new scheme, I got more creative. I think it was maybe the third or fourth time I hid, I actually ran away outside and found a good secluded spot in the yard. I was thrilled when I heard her inside tearing the house apart. Finally, I had really succeeded in terrorizing her. I could have stayed out in that yard forever.

Well, unfortunately for my escapist fantasies, we had a basset
hound, Brandy. My mother sent Brandy out to find me, and she did so immediately.

This made me more determined. I thought:
I need to get smarter about this. I need to run away
with
Brandy.

That didn’t work, either, because my parents would yell for me and Brandy would bark back.

Then it became a challenge to run away with her
and
to keep my hand over her mouth.

The whole project got more and more complicated until, ultimately, I decided it was less trouble just to stay home and be miserable.

In that moment, the seeds of “make it work!” were born. Running away from my problems didn’t help. I had to face up to whatever it was that I didn’t want to deal with—my homework, an angry parent, a fight with a friend—rather than just trying to put it off until it went away. Until you address them, I have since learned, such problems never truly vanish.

I had to make the best of the bad situation. What I found was that if I did that, the situation would rapidly become less bad, whereas if I hid from it or tried to make it go away, I would get more and more anxious and the situation would get worse and worse. I learned very early the wisdom of making it—whatever
it
was—work.

The phrase “make it work!” came later, but it didn’t originate on
Project Runway
. I began using it in my classroom when I was a design teacher at Parsons, the celebrated design college in Manhattan where I worked for twenty-four years. I found it to be an extremely useful mantra when my students were in trouble.

One such example came during a later phase of my academic career. I was teaching Concept Development to seniors.
This was a six-hour class that met once a week for the entire academic year—two fifteen-week semesters. It was a long time to work on a single project, and students learned a lot by having to go deep into their own unique concepts.

The year began with the crystallization of each student’s thesis: five to seven head-to-toe looks that represented their point of view as a designer. (It was Joan Kaner, the celebrated style maven and former vice president of Neiman Marcus, who once said to me, “I can tell everything that I need to know about a designer from five looks.” I think about that all the time.)

Those looks were executed in muslin (an unbleached cotton fabric used for prototyping) in a corresponding course that was appropriately called Studio Methods. I would visit that class on a regular basis, especially during fittings, which happened every two weeks.

On the topic of fittings, I forbade my students from designing for themselves or using themselves as fit models for their collection. Why? Because when you wear your own designs, you lose objectivity. It’s important that each designer maintain a well-honed ability to critically analyze his or her own work. If you’re only ever designing for your own body, you’d better be prepared to have a clientele of one.

I like the
Project Runway
Season 7 designer Ping Wu, who famously used herself as a mannequin, as a person even though she’s exhausting to be around. She has so much personality. When I told her at the end of Episode 3, “The workroom won’t be the same without you,” I meant it! I had to talk Jesse LeNoir off a ledge during their team challenge. He’s a lovely guy and quite talented. He recognized many of the problems the judges saw, but he couldn’t convince Ping to fix them.