Gunn's Golden Rules (21 page)

The worst was a few years ago when I sent an angry e-mail late at night to a TV executive. He’d called to yell at me about something I’d said to the press. I took the high road at the time and was contrite on the phone. But then I stewed about it all night. I thought:
How dare you?
And I started thinking counterproductive things like:
I could have said this much worse thing to the press!
I wrote it all down in an e-mail and rather than just saving it and cooling off, I hit send.

The next morning, I woke up with one thought:
I can’t believe I sent that.

I sent a new e-mail apologizing and called later and just said, “Sorry.”

It blew over, and I learned that many mistakes can be undone. But I thought,
Never again.
When you take into account the emotional wear and tear, you realize it’s better to let most sleeping dogs lie. I’ve learned at the age of fifty-seven that as much as I’d like to say X, Y, or Z, I must consider how I am going to feel afterward. And the answer, in the case of angry or snide remarks, is: not great.

I also learned about e-mail attachments the hard way. Someone sent me an e-mail when I was at Parsons with an attachment saying, “What kind of a jerk is this guy?” I wrote back, “He demonstrates every time he puts a word to paper that he’s a complete and total asshole.” I thought I was responding to her, but in fact I was responding to the guy. He had a good sense of humor about it, luckily, and wrote me back, saying, “I’ve been called worse.” I was mortified.

And yet, I will say a misdirected e-mail saved my fiftieth birthday. My dear friends the Banus and a colleague at Parsons
were planning a surprise party for me. Meanwhile, I was having a huge falling-out with the colleague at Parsons. There was a volley of e-mails about the details of the party, and someone cc’ed me by accident. Suddenly, I see the whole sequence of correspondence and learned that my mother was coming; my sister and her family were coming; I even think that the Queen of England was coming.

Furthermore, this was during the time when tumultuous curricular and pedagogical changes were taking place in the Fashion Design Department, and I was woefully unpopular with the faculty. They were invited, too. So I responded to this unintentional “cc” and called the whole thing off. Thank you, technology!

Things do happen for a reason. As terrible as I would have felt doing this to my friends, had I arrived at the Banus and been met with this surprise, I would have walked out. They were inviting people I was all but at war with, and I really doubt I could have played nice.

I am really against surprise parties, especially if they involve people from different spheres. Assumptions that are made by either group about who should be included are almost always wrong. There are a lot of people with whom I interact because I have to; that doesn’t mean I want to eat cake with them. And then if they brought me a present, I would have to write a note.

One little technology-taming tip, If you, too, are surprised by typos: I like to print out things I’m working on to read them
on paper before I send them off. You miss a lot of things on the screen that are apparent when you’re looking at them on the page. Yes, there is the environment to think of, but—to paraphrase a certain celebrity on the topic of her fur coat being dead when she got it (“I didn’t kill it!” she said)—the tree’s already been taken down.

W
HEN PRESENTED WITH BIZARRE
circumstances—such as radical (and radically unappealing) cosmetic surgery—I’ll mutter, “That person is living in the monkey house.”

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
know
that. 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
this
over
here
…” Slow as can be. All of them! A talented bunch of people, but wow, were they lackadaisical.

J
UDGING ON
Project Runway
is 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.

Project Runway
auctions the winning looks of each season, so I bought the dress for Nina. It went for $305. When it arrived in a little cardboard box, I couldn’t believe how tiny it was, just two pieces of neoprene sort of glommed together. Seeing it up close was very illuminating. There were yellow pins sticking out of it, rough edges, spattered dye—and I still haven’t figured out how to assemble the top. Thank goodness I won it rather than some fan, who would have gotten that package and declared, “This
won
?”

I’m planning to send it to Nina with the suggestion that she wear it for the next event we have to do together. I have a feeling she won’t.

In any case, what keeps the show from turning into one big monkey house is the seriousness with which our judges take the matter of construction and design. During the runway show there is a huge amount of deliberation, far more than most people realize. From the moment that the judges see the work on the runway to the moment Heidi says who’s in and out, five to six hours elapse, not the several minutes you see at home.

I’m frequently wrong not just about who will be chosen as the winner, but also about who’s in the top or bottom three. Sometimes it flips while they’re deliberating. The judges change their minds a lot before they reach a verdict, which I believe is positive and a great testament to the seriousness of their discussion.

Guest judges are real wild cards when it comes to what they like. Sometimes a guest judge will say, “This was my favorite look!” And all the others had it as something that justified
sending someone home. That’s why Heidi rarely asks the guest judge to speak first anymore. In the make-each-other-over challenge in Season 2, Santino Rice’s jumpsuit for Kara Janx might well have sent him home had Freddie Leiba not said right off the bat that he loved that look.