Tim Gunn: Gunn's Golden Rules

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.”

The World Owes You … Nothing

“YOU MUST BE JULIE!” 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!”

I immediately have a bad feeling about this lunch. Julia is petite and very skinny. I hope her chinchilla shrug is fake, but she tells me it is real. She’s wearing platform heels and a miniskirt, and she’s sporting lots of makeup. And she’s wearing a real diamond pendant, as she feels she needs to tell me.

She says she goes to an elite private school chosen for the fact that there is no dress code. She never wears the same thing twice, she brags.

I express shock that she has that many clothing options.

“Well, she styles them differently,” her mother qualifies.

I confess that I rather enjoyed wearing a uniform myself, because there’s something very democratizing about everyone wearing the same thing at that age. No one feels the urge to compete.

“There is no competition!” Julia says, scoffing at the thought. “No one dresses better than I do.”

“I can see why you’re trumping all your classmates,” I say, pointing to her Prada handbag.

“Oh, this is a cheap thing,” she says, referring to what I assessed to be a $1,500 bag.

“I only believe in expensive clothes,” her mother says by way of explanation.

Julia is no longer a fan of mine, I’ll tell you, because I don’t wear bespoke suits. I don’t have a private plane. I don’t go hobnobbing with stars. I don’t have a car and driver. She registered her extreme disappointment with each of these revelations.

Well, our food arrives, none too soon. But as soon as the waiter sets down Julia’s food, she waves her hand and says, “Away.” When asked for an explanation, she just says, “No.”

The chef, sweet as can be, comes out and asks her what is wrong with what he’s prepared. He seems eager to fix any problems.