Gunn's Golden Rules (28 page)

There’s only one judgment I regret. After the 2009 Oscars, I was on
Good Morning America
and debating someone with whom I’ve never particularly gotten along. She made me so crazy that I became a contrarian. I am usually very polite and measured, but when someone gets my hackles up, I tend to blurt out ridiculous things just to disagree. And, alas, this occasionally happens on national television.

This morning-show nemesis of mine said something about Sophia Loren’s organza Armani gown. You may remember the dress. It was low-cut, full of pleats and ruffles, and wouldn’t have been out of place on a Wild West madam. Suddenly, I became the dress’s sole, and impassioned, defender. “She didn’t look inappropriate,” I said righteously. “She didn’t look like a tart!”

But you know what? She totally did.

I met her and Valentino on the same red carpet, and I thought,
They would make a great match, just in terms of their completely unnatural coloring, a similar otherworldly shade of orange-bronze.

R
ISK TAKING IN FASHION
is fun, but risk taking in our careers
and in our education is essential. Ambitious people are more attractive and more fun to be with than people who maintain the status quo.

I love it when at least one designer on
Runway
is eager to step up and out. Typically, the whole cast is ambitious, but sometimes only one or two of them have that intense drive to take it to the next level. They want to make a positive mark on the world. They want to leave a legacy.

I lived in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, for four months when we were establishing a Parsons program there in partnership with the Malaysian government. The prime minister’s daughter had gone to Parsons in New York. He loved the education she received so much that he asked us to set something up there. There are few design schools in Malaysia, and I found out why.

In a group of potential faculty, I was talking about a competitive environment in the classroom and how this is a good thing. I said the faculty has to have a high bar of expectation, and the students themselves need to push one another. They stared at me like I was crazy. I was clearly speaking a foreign language. What was revealed was that in that part of the world, it’s not good to be better.

I hear this is also a Midwest sensibility, and that in certain states bragging is forbidden. I’m stunned by it. No one can be better than the lowest common denominator?

I remember from my admissions days the demise of class ranks on high school transcripts. They stopped probably twenty years ago. For me, sitting in an admissions seat, ranks were a way of assessing the 3.6 from a high school. Is that in the top 10 percent, or does everyone else at that school have a 4.0? When I asked high school officials why they’d gotten rid of
ranks, I was told, “Ranks made students feel bad.”

Well, if they’re in the bottom 5 percent of their graduating class, maybe they should feel bad!

I thought it was a woeful day when they took ranks away. Everyone needs a push to reach what he’s capable of.

This was my point in Malaysia: You need to differentiate between good, mediocre, and poor. In my Western experience, we want to achieve our best. We want the gold star. The golden apple! To think that all I have to do is show up and I’ll be patted on the head? That’s no way to live an exciting artistic life.

I
SEE THIS AS
a trend not just in academia but also in parenting. I think it may be the celebration of imagination and self-confidence over good citizenship. Creativity should be fostered, but so should conceptual development and execution. Parents should want their children’s self-confidence to be earned.

I love to see children building discipline, whether it’s by learning an instrument or doing a sport. It’s good to expose them to lots of different things. A broad range of exposure is really important, because you don’t know what’s going to resonate. But when you find something that does it for them—whether it’s the ballet or baseball or sewing or karate—you can feel good that you helped them find something they can get involved in and about which they feel motivated to excel.

We adults need to do this, too. It takes a certain level of humility to push ourselves to try new things. Once we have a realm of expertise, we may think,
Why expand our horizons? We’ve found our niche.
But it’s very important to keep your hand in as broad a range of areas as possible. I’ve seen so many
people around me losing their jobs in recent years, and some have had a very tough time readjusting.

My advice to them: Try to take your ego out of it. You don’t make it about you and how hard your life is. You have to focus on what needs to get done and find a way to do it, independent of what your ego may be saying about what you deserve or what’s beneath you.

I ran into a neighbor at the supermarket who had lost his job on Wall Street. He was there at the store applying for a job. He showed me the application and said he’d just had an interview and they’d told him he was overqualified. “But I’ll do anything,” he pleaded. He was having a hard time, but he had the right attitude, and I predicted he would come out of the recession just fine.

Breadth of exposure is really important in education, even if you’re studying something specific like fashion. At Parsons we made our students experience every phase of every design. They would bitterly complain: “I don’t want to do menswear,” or “I can’t do children’s clothes.” But they would have epiphanies. “Wow, I’m really good at suits.” Or “I have a natural gift for children’s pajamas.”

They would be amazed, and I would say, “That’s why we do this.” They never would have discovered it otherwise. They would have cut themselves off from a rich field of experience if they’d had their choice.

The buffet style of education, where you take what you want when you want it, is so unfortunate, in my opinion. I know young people. They gravitate toward what comes naturally to them and what they think they want. But what they’re comfortable with isn’t necessarily their destiny.

I also think it’s good to keep as wide a circle as possible of professional acquaintances. My predecessor at Parsons never interviewed anyone for positions unless there was one available that very second. I took a lot of promising people out for lunch just so we’d know each other and be able to cut to the chase when a job did open up. I thought we should vet people and stay in touch with them so we had a stable and could get someone into open jobs immediately rather than having everything be a 911 call.

You can be inspired by anything, and you never know what information is going to serve you well later. That’s why I think core curriculums are good. You need to have a grounding in everything. Fashion does not exist in a cultural vacuum. Lady Gaga’s famous gyroscope dress on
Saturday Night Live
made me think that her designer at some point took a physics class.

So it’s good to push yourself and others to study as many different fields as you can, even if you think you know exactly what you want to do.

If you aren’t convinced that it’s good for you and for your career, then maybe you will be convinced by David Sedaris’s argument for broad-based education in his story “21 Down”: “When asked ‘What do we need to learn this for?’ any high school teacher can answer that, regardless of the subject, the knowledge will come in handy once the student hits middle
age and starts working crossword puzzles in order to stave off the terrible loneliness.”

As a crossword puzzle junkie myself, I love that argument for education. But I also believe culture can genuinely improve your life. You can be too rich and too thin, but you can never be too well read or too curious about the world.

M
Y MOTHER PARTICIPATES IN
one of those sponsor-a-child programs and has a boy in Guatemala to whom she sends money each month. She’s been doing it for a long time.

“He sent me a Christmas card,” she said that first holiday season.

“That’s so sweet,” my sister said. “What’s his name?”

“Felix.”

“Felix?” we said. “That doesn’t sound very Guatemalan. What’s his last name?”

“Wait,” my mother said. “Let me get the card … It’s Navidad.”

She thought the name of her sponsored child was “Merry Christmas.”

We still joke about Mr. Felix Navidad.

I am a firm believer in giving back, and I encourage you to do as much charity work as you possibly can—especially if your work allows me finally to take a break. In fact, in writing this book, I’ve been surprised by how often I’ve said things that could fall under the theme It’s Hard to Be Nice.

That’s not saying you shouldn’t be nice for society’s sake,
nor that it doesn’t ultimately pay off for you personally, but let’s be honest: Niceness can at times feel a little bit thankless.

My wonderful associate, Marsha, and I have lunch together in my office every day when we’re both free. At one recent lunch she was teasing me about how many charity lunches I go to. We took a bet on how many it actually was, and then we got out the calendar. A little math later, we realized I had attended more than sixty such lunches in the past year. That’s more than one a week, far more than I see my family or my closest friends.

It’s a hard thing to complain about. And no one knows this more than I do, having spent most of my life far from the in crowd. But please indulge me. There is this expectation that once you’re in a certain social world, you have endless obligations to it.

I was at a reception for Bill Clinton at someone’s apartment on Park Avenue, and as thrilled as I was to be there on one level, on another, I was just so drained from a long day of work that my idea of a good time involved getting under the covers with a book. While I was there, I was thinking how ironic it was that at one time I would have killed to be at this party. Now I would kill to be home watching game shows.

But maybe part of the problem is that I am just too clueless to move in high society. I’m often struck by how unworldly I am. A lot of invitations I get are receptions or dinners where you’re expected to write a check, especially if it’s for a political figure or a cause. And there I am showing up, ready just to have a drink and gossip, when in fact I’m supposed to be calculating how many thousands of dollars I have to hand over. I’ve realized I need to read the fine print.

The worst part is that the hosts are always surprised when
I’m surprised. “Why did you think we were having this party?” they say when I stumble at the check-writing portion of the evening.

“Um, for fun?” I am so naïve.

I
T FEELS RIDICULOUS TO
complain about a call from Bette Midler, but I feel like I can, because it’s not like she ever calls just to chat. It’s always about an event. Not long ago, she called to invite me to a fund-raiser for the New York Restoration Project, her tree-planting initiative here in New York City. Well, it wasn’t really an invite as much as an order. “You are coming to this event I’ve having, aren’t you?” she said. “And you are buying a tree, aren’t you?”

I did go, and I bought two trees, and it was all perfectly charming—but also, like all these things, a little painful. I was sitting next to Martha Stewart at the dinner, and the second Bette stood up to speak, Martha vanished. I turned around and she was just gone, without a trace.

“Where did she go?” I whispered to someone at the table.

“When she knows she’s about to get hit up for money, she does a disappearing act,” the person replied.

I should have her teach me that trick,
I thought.

It’s harder on people who, unlike me, have really serious money. My friend Dr. Sheila C. Johnson, who founded and ran Black Entertainment Television with her now ex-husband, received 1.5 billion dollars in a divorce settlement. We go to events together occasionally, and I’m always struck by how shameless people are in asking her for money wherever she goes. Her mother’s friends are forever calling her, asking for $7 million for the church or some such thing, and she’s always telling
her mom, “Please stop telling your friends I will give them money. It’s my money, and I will choose what to do with it!”

For the last event we went to together, I suggested we make a train of gold foil coins to attach to her gown. It would trail behind her to announce, “The horn of plenty has arrived!”

I
N CASE YOU HAVEN’T
guessed by now, I’m at these kinds of events all the time. I can’t get more than a sip of a glass of wine at a party because I’m getting pulled this way and that for press or for work or for the show. There’s no air in my schedule.

I know it’s a high-class problem, and I’m the luckiest guy in the world. After being a poverty-stricken academic for so long, I am glad I can now afford to write checks occasionally to benefit worthy causes. But now that I’m not broke I have problems a lot more complicated than deciding which flavor of ramen noodles to cook up. Specifically: When do all the pleas for money stop? When I run out of cash and am back to the ramen?

This is one of the pitfalls of being nice: You wind up overextending yourself. That’s why one of the most important things to learn after you master good behavior is how to say no gracefully. It’s ultimately better for everyone, because you don’t burn out and wind up in a mental institution, making you no good to anyone at all.