Gunn's Golden Rules (4 page)

In any case, who would say no to this request? Debate about how to get this done ensued. There was a lot of talk about making this a special project and inviting the participation of any interested students and faculty. Many people were against leaving this important task up to young people. But ultimately it was decided that my second-year Three-Dimensional Design students were up to the challenge. As an enhancement, a class of ceramics students would make “wrapped packages” for under the tree. Fantastic! We charged full steam ahead. And we made our deadline!

Our ornaments were stunning. We chose a folk art theme and, using balsa wood, created the most elaborately beautiful shapes and forms—musical instruments, animals, pieces of furniture, and buildings—including a miniature White House that allowed you to peer inside and see miniature rooms.

But, oh, we were so very, very delusional. None of us had
a grasp on the size of that tree. We carefully walked our boxes of meticulously wrapped ornaments and ceramic packages over to the White House, navigated the security and X-ray process (security opened each and every wrapped ornament, which took hours), and were eventually escorted to the Blue Room.

The tree was at least as big to my eyes as the one at Rockefeller Center. As I continued to stare at it, it became bigger still, like the magical tree in
The Nutcracker
—only more like a giant redwood than a ceiling-brushing pine. And its scale was exaggerated by a formidable scaffolding of many layers that encircled it and went up to the ceiling. We had enough ornaments, I figured, for a hedge out back.

Indeed, as we started hanging, the tree quickly consumed our works of art. We looked through the boxes hoping there would be some giant ornaments we’d forgotten, but no. We were toast.

So what were we to do? We had to make it work. Our reputation as an academic institution and our individual reputations as artists were on the line.

I left and drove to Sears Roebuck on Wisconsin Avenue, because I had recently been there and had seen a Christmas display that included life-size bright red lacquered Styrofoam apples. Sure enough, I found piles of boxes containing a dozen each. I took all of them to the register and asked if more were in stock.

No.

Could they be ordered from another store?

With this question, the sales associate began to look at me differently, as though I were operating a bootleg Christmas apple operation and would be selling them out of a truck in the parking lot at twice the price.

“They’re for the White House!” I finally blurted out, with both pride and panic.

This got her attention. The next day, we had fifteen hundred stunning red lacquered apples for the tree. In fact, we had too many. I enjoyed giving them as gifts with the message: “Almost made it onto the White House Christmas tree.”

Our folk art creations stood out brilliantly against the enormous cone of glistening red lacquer. It was a masterpiece. We’d made it work!

Let me add that the Iran hostage crisis was going on at the time, which generated a huge amount of Sturm und Drang and loads of extra security.

Let me also add that Mrs. Carter was kind enough to pose for an official White House photograph with each of the students and then with all of us as a group. After the holidays, we hadn’t received the photos, so I followed up with the press secretary and learned that there had been no film in the camera (imagine: the predigital era!). The photographer had not, alas, made it work.

N
OW FOR A MORE
modern example of making it work:
Project Runway
’s entire Season 6 was plagued with problems from the start. You may remember that as the year we saw a battle over who would get the show: Bravo or Lifetime. While taping the season, we were in a period of suspension, not knowing how the lawsuit would be resolved and, therefore, not knowing our network destination. Also, it was our first season in L.A., and we were all adjusting to being out there. Luckily, all the producers of the show have been fantastic, and everything worked out for the best.

I’ve heard that a lot of people were disappointed when Gordana Gehlhausen and Christopher Straub went home in the last challenge. I see their point, especially when it comes to Gordana. In fact, it’s the only time I’ve ever heard what the judges were planning and gone up to Heidi Klum and said, “Are you sure this is the way you want things to go?” Not because there was anything wrong with the three who went to Bryant Park: Carol Hannah Whitfield, Althea Harper, and Irina Shabayeva (the winner). They are all incredibly talented young women with great futures ahead of them.

But there was not a lot of diversity represented. I was sad about that from a design perspective and from a home-visit perspective. Remember, I had to go to each of these people’s homes and hang out with them and their families. It just seemed very one-dimensional to have them all be women in their mid-twenties and relatively well to do. I asked Heidi, “Are you really certain? The homogeneity bothers me.”

It didn’t bother her or anyone else, so what can you do?

Season 7, by contrast, was glorious all the way through, and I think the best year so far. We returned to New York, and Michael and Nina Garcia were able to be part of every episode.

The talent was amazing, and even the eccentric characters were appealing in their own way. Seth Aaron Henderson, the Season 7 winner, is a very caring, thoughtful guy. He has a wife and two children. If you took his wife and son and daughter and lined them up in their house in Washington State, you would say, “This is a classic American family.” Then you bring him in and you think, When did the circus come to town? And his mother-in-law lives in the basement, which seemed a little Freudian. His children even said he’s like a kid himself.

Mila Hermanovski, Emilio Sosa, Jay Nicolas Sario—all of
them, too, were very gifted.

But even that blissful season had its wrinkles.

Now that there are sixteen designers a season, it gets hard to follow. I never was able to tell the two twentysomething brunette designers, Janeane Marie Ceccanti and Anna Lynett, apart, lovely as they were. I kind of miss it being just twelve. At the reunions, you find yourself saying, “Who are all these people?”

Season 2 had a preliminary episode called “Road to the Runway,” which introduced everyone. I loved that, and I hope we do it again sometime.

More frustratingly, two of the best designers, Emilio and Jay, seemed to have disdain for me. They rolled their eyes at everything I said. The show is edited to look like I’m in the workroom just once or twice a challenge, but I’m there all the time. It was a lot of scorn to soak up.

Their attitude was something of a shock. I said to one of them, “I feel an obligation to each of you, and an aspect of that is to give you equal time in the workroom. But if you don’t want it, we can talk to the producers. We can say that you actively don’t want me engaged with your work, and you will never again see me at your workstation.”

But they kept having me there, and it began to hurt. I thought:
What did I do to offend you? It’s my job to talk to you about your work. I have a lot of experience. Why won’t you let me help?

One time Heidi made the workroom rounds with me. Jay acted like she was the Second Coming. He oohed and ahhed over everything she said while continuing to give me the cold shoulder.

I said to him, right in front of Heidi, “I wish I had that kind
of response from you. I guess maybe Heidi should do these workroom visits instead of me.” Heidi looked at me, clearly thinking,
Whoa, what’s been going on here?

But I couldn’t hold back. I was really pretty upset by the whole thing, and as much as my feelings were hurt, my sense of what’s appropriate was, too. My feeling is that people should want to be nice, but even if they don’t want to be, they should fake it, because being abusive to someone who’s deeply involved in the industry you hope to excel in just makes no sense. What do they get out of making me, or anyone, into an enemy?

I’m not saying this in any kind of threatening way. I just think the more friends, or at least friendly acquaintances, you have in a small world like fashion, the more opportunities are likely to waft your way. If you get a reputation for being a diva, you’d better be truly phenomenal to overcome the personal bias people are going to have toward working with you.

Sometimes there is direct payback. In Season 5, I was made a judge for one episode, and a lot of people saw that as a kind of revenge for Kenley Collins’s being so dismissive of my opinions throughout the season. Well, that wasn’t the thought behind it at all, and I was very much against judging. In fact, from the start I begged the producers to keep me out of the judging chair. And I’ll never, ever, ever do it again, but I did learn a lot from the experience.

Here’s how it happened: I was at Christian Siriano’s show and received a call from the producers asking me if I could fill in the next day as a judge because Jennifer Lopez had backed out at the last minute. I begged them to find someone else. I said if they made me be a judge, I’d have to go back to the workroom that night and say I couldn’t engage with the designers as they finished up their collections.

I am always with the designers for the five hours before the show at Bryant Park, and I thought that I couldn’t spend all that time backstage if I was then going to be judging them. It wouldn’t be fair, I said, for me to wear two hats like that, to potentially guide them toward choices that I would then judge them on. It would appear duplicitous and potentially corrupt.

Plus, there were the personal biases I’d built up from spending so much time with the designers. I said to the producers, “You know I have a terrible relationship with Kenley. I don’t like her work and have been very vocal about it. Her not winning could become a self-fulfilling prophecy on my part. It would look bad, and quite frankly, it would be bad.”

My arguments had no effect on them. So I said, “Please do your very best to find someone else. If at the very last minute you need me to sub in, I will do it, but I beg of you to find someone else.”

They promised they would move heaven and earth to find someone else and so spare me from having to judge.

The next morning Heidi comes up to me and says, “Okay, we need you.”

“No, you don’t,” I said. “It’s you and Nina and Michael. What’s wrong with three judges?” (Yes, I had thought about it all night.)

Well, Heidi was so wonderful. I just love her. She is such a strong, smart woman. She said, bluntly, “What’s your problem with this?”

“I have a relationship with these designers. In the case of Kenley I have a really bad relationship,” I said. “I don’t sit in judgment of them in this manner.”

“Are you telling me that in all your years of teaching you couldn’t separate your students’ work from their personalities?”
she asked me. “And you couldn’t evaluate their work independent of who they were as people?”

Well, that left me speechless. She had me there. How was this different from an academic environment in which I had to spend a year with these students and then grade their work? I looked at her and stiffened my back and said, “You’re right. I can do this!”

And things happen for a reason. I learned that I was in fact able to separate my personal feelings from my judgments. I also learned a great deal about the designers’ work that I never could have known just from seeing them in the workroom.

Most significantly, before that moment, I’d never had a chance to evaluate the work off a dress form, aside from the flurried moments during which I escort the designers and models from the workroom. In the workroom, it’s always static. When the models come in for the fittings, I’m not there. When I come in afterward to ask how it went, every one of the designers says, “She looks great in the clothes!”

(Which reminds me, I’m always perplexed when they switch models. You know your current model’s size and shape. Why would you switch? It only makes your challenge more difficult.)

So to be at the judging and to see the clothes move—or, in the case of Kenley’s work, not move—on models was really transformational for me. I learned to wait to pass judgment on things. I used to tell the producers what I thought of the garments as soon as the models left the workroom for the runway. But from Season 6 on, when the producers would ask me prerunway, “What do you think? Who are the top three?” I would respond, “I’m not saying a thing until I see it on the runway. You just can’t tell until you see it move—or not.”

“Y
OU MUST BE
J
ULIE
!” I greet my companion, a twelve-year-old girl who, with her mother, is joining me for lunch at Saks Fifth Avenue’s café to benefit a great charity.

The pair has donated a great deal of money to the charity in order to dine with me. I am flattered and excited to meet my young fan and her mother.

“It’s
Julia,
” the young girl says, her voice dripping with disdain.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I say, taken aback by her haughty tone. “I was given the wrong name. In any case, it’s wonderful to meet you!”