Gunn's Golden Rules (7 page)

Well, I thought I’d seen everything, but then walking through the freight exit on my way to the subway, I pass André’s
Maybach parked
in the freight room
. Apparently, he couldn’t even walk from the sidewalk.

Don’t get me wrong:
Vogue
is an essential read for all fashion lovers. Anna and her team are very talented, and they are on the cutting edge of trends. But when I see what a bubble they’re all living in, how detached from reality they are, how much money and time is wasted in the course of their work, I worry about the example it sets for people coming up in the fashion world, a world that—let’s face it—is now a lot more crowded and a lot less moneyed than it has been in years past.

I hope that
Project Runway,
which encourages hard work, thrift, and skill, is part of the solution to that unsustainable excess and hauteur. I am heartened that, by and large, the thousands of young designers I come into contact with are simply trying to make beautiful things to the best of their ability, rather than attain a lifestyle that allows them to be bibbed and hand-fed grapes.

And yet, maybe not. I thought the recession would have more of an impact on the industry, but there’s still a fleet of limousines over there in front of 4 Times Square.

I look forward to seeing what the next generations of fashion designers and magazines look like. Between the demise of so many publications and the decline in fashion company
fortunes, I wonder whether we’re heading for a new age of decency and diligence. I would certainly rather the industry not go broke, but if that’s what it takes for everyone to acquire some values and lose that sense of entitlement, maybe a little belt-tightening wouldn’t be so tragic.

I
DON’T KNOW IF PEOPLE
have gotten ruder or if my tolerance level has declined. I recently spoke to a group of high school juniors and seniors at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum’s Teen Design Fair. Those young people are our future, and I believe in them. I love being part of the annual event.

We had a Q&A afterward, and one of the teens stood up and asked what advice I had for them.

“I’ll give you some life advice,” I said. “The first piece is: Listen and listen
intently
when you’re being spoken to about something. The second: Take the high road. When presented with frustration or anger or discontentment with a situation or a person, don’t reduce yourself to that level. Don’t get into a conflict in that moment. You’ll feel better about yourself for it.”

Well, to my surprise, this created a near frenzy in the room. The students were aghast. I was surprised by the reaction, so I said: “Tell me more about why that seems like bad advice to you.”

“I believe I should stand up for myself!” said one student.

“I’m not saying you shouldn’t stand up for yourself,” I said. “I’m just saying, in the heat of the moment, walk away from it.”

One episode of
Project Runway
’s Season 6 speaks to this. The challenge was for each designer to do a look that complemented his or her best look on the show to date.

Althea Harper thinks Logan Neitzel is copying her zipper-collar design and complains about it to her own model and to Irina, whom she mistakenly thinks is her friend. She starts to get worked up, but then she thinks:
You know what? I need to concentrate on getting my own work done and let this go.
She takes the high road and doesn’t say anything.

In the end, Logan gets voted off because his garment just wasn’t very good. On the runway, Irina borrows Althea’s words about Logan and turns them against Althea. Irina suggests that Althea has copied
her
by doing a sweater. Heidi disagrees, and Irina is embarrassed. In the end, Althea wins the challenge.

One moral might be not to trust Irina—and not because she’s a bad person at all, because she’s not. She’s just incredibly tenacious. But the true lesson, one that I hope I eventually convinced those design students of, is that taking the high road is always the best way to go. You feel better about yourself, and the world feels better about you.

That doesn’t mean it’s always easy. After a recent plane trip, I was standing at the baggage carousel. I’d been waiting a rather long time for my luggage. In fact, no one had gotten any suitcases at all. A rumor started that our bags were lost. This is, of course, very stressful, but I figured getting all worked up would make it only more stressful. But one of the women who’d been on my flight did not agree. She started pacing and trying to recruit an army to storm the airport administration: “Let’s all go together to the office and scream that we’re not
going to take it anymore!”

I turned to a passenger standing next to me who seemed tempted to follow and told her, “Don’t even think about it. Take the high road.”

Sure enough, a short time later our bags showed up and no one had to handcuff herself to the ticket counter. There are times for protest, for civil disobedience, but on a day-to-day basis, it’s best to avoid bringing out the big guns.

And yet, I know for a fact how hard it can be to keep your frustration to yourself. Sometimes keeping in feelings can be painful. One time, for me, it proved almost fatal. I was in my twenties and was having an excruciatingly horrible lunch with my mother, during which I honestly saw my life pass before my eyes.

Fortunately, I arrived at the restaurant, Clyde’s of Georgetown, first, because waiting just fuels my mother’s innate sense of martyrdom (unfortunately, this trait is genetic). Also, if she gets there first, my mother will often hand the hostess her credit card as she walks in to avoid a discussion at the end of the meal about who will pay the bill.

“You just love taking the battle out of this thing, don’t you?” I ask when I learn she’s done this. (Twice, I’ve actually gone to the hostess and substituted my credit card for hers, but then it turns into a real fight.)

When she arrived, I greeted her with a hug and a kiss, which was like hugging and kissing a mannequin, because she was as stiff as an ironing board. I love my mother dearly. I’ll miss her when she’s gone. She is filled with emotion and cries during commercials, but she’s never been very affectionate with her children. She doesn’t kiss me. I hug her, but she doesn’t hug back. I don’t doubt how much she loves me, but she’s kind of
like a rock. Make that an elegant rock: Nancy Gunn has always been the spitting image of Queen Elizabeth II.

I always wonder if her lack of demonstrable affection is connected to an incident from her youth. My grandmother liked to tell the story of coming home to find the goldfish were dead. When asked what happened, my mother answered, “I don’t know. I just took them out of the bowl to kiss them.”

Was it then she learned that a kiss can kill?

In any case, we were shown to a table. I think we both ordered a glass of wine (and if we didn’t, we should have), and I chose the restaurant’s famous hamburger.

When the food arrived, Mother was carrying on about something about me that was annoying and irritating to her. It could have been anything from not calling her in a month to “I told you that I hate that tie, so why do you persist in wearing it?”

I nodded, eating, attempting to take the high road and pretending to agree with her, but unfortunately, I was internalizing my frustration. Suddenly, I inhaled a too-large bite of burger. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t eject it from my lungs. I literally thought I was going to die. I started to gesture wildly.

My mother thought I was simply behaving badly, so she carried on talking and looking at me disapprovingly. Thanks to the ringing in my ears as I started to suffocate, her voice grew silent, as did the ambient voices and clatter in the large room. Panic set in. I was going to die—right there, upright in a chair, with my elegant mother carrying on and on throughout the speedy evolution of my death.

For some unknown reason, my panic abated, and resignation set in. It was at that moment that my constricted throat muscles relaxed and the potentially fatal chunk of chuck catapulted from my mouth—and landed in my mother’s lap.

She was horrified and said so. “What the hell is the matter with you?” she hissed. “If you’re angry at me, just tell me so. You don’t have to spit your food onto me!”

“Spit my food onto you? I almost died! Right here! In front of you! I thought I was going to die, and you’re embarrassed?” I yelled back. “Wouldn’t you have been more embarrassed by a corpse?”

By now I was in tears, and Mother looked contrite. She responded, “Don’t be ridiculous; you didn’t die. You’re here.”

I asked for the check.

Mother said, “I’ll take it.”

“No, I will,” I retorted. “Because if I had died, then you would have
had
to take it.”

We never did resolve whatever conflict we’d been having, but at least my near-death experience changed the subject. And I learned a couple of valuable lessons. One: When you’re on death’s door, rules of etiquette should most definitely be suspended. And two: Never try to resolve an emotional conflict over food. I recommend ordering drinks instead—with neither ice nor olives.

In the absence of choking hazards, taking the high road is a good strategy. You never know where the people you’re dealing with today are going to be in twenty years—or next month! Even if you’re a really selfish person and are only looking out for your own self-interest, you should treat people well. Why bitch-slap someone unless you’re leaving the planet for good? Don’t burn bridges; you might need those bridges later.

But there are limits. You don’t let yourself be abused. Even as you take the high road in a perilous situation, you should try to figure out how to keep from being in a difficult position like that again.

For years, my refrain was: I bend and I bend and I bend until I snap. No matter what was dished out I would think:
Keep taking the high road … hmm, it’s getting awfully high … the altitude’s really something … I’m having a little trouble breathing
… Then I would basically have a nervous breakdown.

Now I’ve learned to set limits and to take cues from people’s behavior.

For example, if someone is always late to meetings with you, you need to ask yourself why you continue to let yourself make appointments with this person. If you hate doing something for someone, you need to ask yourself why you keep doing it.

I used to host a wonderful fashion scholarship dinner. I did it for five years in a row. But the last time I did, it was horribly managed. Every decision made around the event was terrible, and the people organizing it were completely dismissive of every concern I had. I just hated the whole thing.

So I said to myself, “Why am I doing this?” I thought,
This is something I was doing to be nice, and it’s no longer fun to do, so I’m going to bow out for next year and let someone else host.

I gave the organization a lot of notice and felt very liberated.

But I wasn’t free yet. The group’s president took me to lunch, and he was horribly abusive, telling me how angry he was that I’d stopped doing the event and piling on other complaints about me for good measure! Then he followed up with threatening e-mails. He was just furious that I wasn’t going to host his event anymore and figured he would try to intimidate me into reconsidering my resignation.

I thought,
Well, I’m definitely not going back after being talked to like this!

When someone else from the organization contacted me, I
explained how badly I felt I’d been treated. He must have said something to my tormentor, because then I received this syrupy e-mail from the yelling president about how much I mean to the event. He asked me if we could get together again.

I thought about it for a second and then said, “No.”

This was an abusive relationship.
If I return to the event,
I thought,
I am condoning this bad behavior.
It sends the message that it’s okay to talk to people cruelly. And it just isn’t.

You don’t want to behave badly back at people like that, though God knows it’s tempting. But you also don’t want to put up with mistreatment. It does no one any favors.

The abuser could be your boss, and in a case like that you just need to try to keep your integrity, even as you’re being mistreated, and try to get out of the situation as soon as you possibly can. Now that I’ve been on television, though, it’s like the whole world is my boss. Everyone has an opinion they want to share about my demeanor on my shows, or who the
Runway
finalists were, or all manner of things over which I have little control. And truth be told, a lot of these people don’t even seem to know who I am. They just know they’ve seen my face before. I’ve found it’s always good just to smile and walk away. Or, in the case of nutcases, run away.

Usually people think of me as a surprisingly nice person as fashion people go, but occasionally someone will corner me on the street and say: “You’re so mean!”

Often this is because people mistake me for Clinton Kelly from
What Not to Wear
—which I’m sure would disturb him to no end, because I could be his grandfather. When I determine that’s the case, I say, “I think you have me mistaken for—”