by Tim Gunn
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.”
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 s
ame 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.
“Drama,” she says.
Seriously, that is her response to this generous man.
The waiter takes the plate back and does something to it. When it comes back, she picks at it desultorily.
She had horrible table manners. Her hair was falling in her food. She loudly imitated a cough she heard across the dining room, causing everyone to stare at our table in horror.
Then I learned the purpose of the lunch: Julia wanted to be a judge on Project Runway. “Call them,” she instructed me. “Tell them I have to be a judge.”
“That’s going to be a tough sell,” I said. “Other than wearing clothes, I don’t see that you have much experience with fashion.”
“That’s why I’d make the perfect judge,” she insisted.
“Clearly, you are talented,” I said. “Which of your talents do you value most?”
“Meanness,” she said without hesitation. “I’m really good at it.”
“Our judges are not mean,” I replied, trying to keep from losing my patience. “They are honest and fair. They care about good work and innovation.”
She didn’t seem to be processing what I said, but I tried once more to get through to her. As they left to go shopping at Saks, I made a suggestion.
“You have so much and are so lucky,” I said. “Maybe you should take some of the money you’re planning to spend today on shoes and give it to refugees?”
“I would never do that,” she said, laughing.
“Do you know about all the displaced people and the suffering?” I asked. (The news at the time was full of reports of displacement, death, and starvation.) “What’s your reaction to that suffering?”
She tilted her head back and said—I kid you not—“Let them eat cake.”
Young Julia was the most distressing example I’ve seen to date of an overblown sense of entitlement, but the phenomenon is pretty far-reaching, especially in the fashion world.
And it’s not just rich girls who are displaying such a detachment from reality.
In my later years of teaching, I started to see a disturbing trend: students who couldn’t function without their parents’ help. They were so overpraised and so overprotected that they were incapable of handling any problem, whether it was dealing with a teacher they didn’t like, sharing space with a roommate, or struggling with a class for which they didn’t have an affinity.
We would actually get calls at the school from parents who wanted to negotiate their grown children’s grades for them. Luckily, we had a system in place whereby the student would need to specifically grant his parents permission to speak to the administration. Many students denied their parents’ requests. But some of the students actually thought their parents getting involved was a good idea!
One of my most talented students had a certain arrogance about her that rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. During her time at Parsons, we had a Designer of the Year competition, and this student assumed the winner would be she. I still remember her tearful fit in my office after the results were announced.
“It was supposed to be me,” she said, crying.
“By whose reckoning?” I asked.
“Mine, my family’s, and my teachers’!” she shouted.
“With all due respect to the faculty,” I said, “this is the decision that was made.”
“It should be reconsidered,” she said.
“No, it shouldn’t be, and it won’t be.”
Viewers got a glimpse of such a drive to win from Irina Shabayeva of Season 6. When I did the home visits, I learned a primary source of her ambition. Her mother scared me to death.
“My daughter will win this,” Irina’s mother told me, as if it were a statement of fact.
“Well …, ” I said, nervously. “There are three extremely talented people in this competition—”
“She. Will. Win,” she said, staring deep into my eyes.
Oh, to have that kind of confidence!
Maybe it’s because I became a public person late in life, but I have never lost the belief that all my success could vanish just like that. I count my blessings all the time, and I pick my battles. I’ve heard some people didn’t want to see Project Runway go back to Los Angeles for Season 8 and tried to get me to advocate for us to stay in New York, but these things are far bigger than I am. Heidi lives in L.A., so she loves the idea of staying close to her family. Where we film is totally not my call. I always say: “If I get hit by a bus tomorrow, believe me, the show is going to go on.”
This sense of humility does not appear to be universal. Whenever I’m out in public, there are certain people who make demands of me as if I owe them a huge debt—even though we’ve never met.
Not long ago while I was walking down Columbus Avenue a woman leaped out of a car.
“You have to meet my daughter!” she shrieked. “She’s thirteen! She has to be on Project Runway!”
I explained that the show has very strict rules and that the young lady couldn’t be considered until she was twenty-one. This made no impression on the girl’s mother.
“Rules are meant to be broken!” she insisted.
I’ve finally learned how to respond to these overeager parents. At an event for young fashion designers, a husband and wife accosted me. They appeared dragging a small float behind them. It held miniature dress forms with outfits on them, and at the back of the float their fifteen-year-old daughter sat in a chair. I was the honored guest, so I couldn’t flee, much as I wanted to. They gave me this entire sales spiel about the daughter. I listened politely and responded, “Clearly, she has talent and ambition, but she can’t be on Project Runway until she’s twenty-one.”
They weren’t buying it.
“You’re robbing her of her stardom!” they said. “She’s a prodigy!”
“Okay,” I finally said. “Let’s play this scenario out. Your daughter gets on Project Runway. She wins.”
They’re nodding excitedly.
“Then she returns to her junior year in high school. How do you think she’ll feel?”
That question stopped them dead in their tracks. They hadn’t thought that far ahead. I said, “If your daughter is this sensational now, think what a few more years will do for her. Think of how much stronger she will be. She’s only going to get one shot at it. Why not save it up?”
It’s like learning a musical instrument. If you’re thirteen and a classical pianist, think of how much better you will be at eighteen or twenty-one, providing you keep practicing.
The parents seemed disheartened, but those are words to propel you forward rather than to crush your dreams. Isn’t it nice to have things to work for and look forward to, especially if you’re so young?
Stage parents make me crazy. They’re dogged and determined, but it reaches a point where it’s cuckoo. I find it very unsettling.
IT’S EASY TO BLAME parents for bad behavior, but there’s plenty of culpability to go around. Teachers are not totally innocent,
either, when it comes to encouraging talented students’ sense of entitlement. Too many of us so overprotect our students that they don’t develop a sense of the logical consequences for their behavior.
A faculty member at Parsons who taught there for many years was in a state of apoplexy because she believed that she had to give a B minus to a student in her Studio Methods (garment construction) class. She asked me to counsel her on how to stomach giving such a low grade to someone she thought had so much promise.
“What are the conditions?” I asked.
“The student hasn’t turned in most of her assignments,” she said. “She hasn’t been to class. But what she has turned in is excellent. She’s extremely talented.”
“She hasn’t been to class? That doesn’t sound like a B minus,” I said. “That sounds like an F.”
“But she’s a good student,” the teacher said. “She communicates with me via e-mail.”
“You need to fail her,” I said. “But I’ll make a deal with you. If you give her an F and she appeals the grade and makes up the missing assignments, I’ll allow you to raise it to a D. But only if she appeals the grade and makes up the work.”
The teacher took my advice and gave the absentee student an F.
As I expected, we never heard from the student. Ever. So the F stood. And we all learned something: The teacher wanted the student to succeed more than the student did.
People send each other messages all the time through their behavior, and the message here was, Fail me. I don’t want to be in school anymore. Instead of admitting that she wanted to get out of fashion, she forced the faculty to make her decision for her. From a faculty member’s point of view, I have this refrain: Why should I want you to succeed more than you do?
PEOPLE WHO ARE USED to having everything done for them don’t often have a strong grasp on how the real world functions. Sometimes it’s infuriating. Other times it’s kind of adorable.
