Tim Gunn
Tim Gunn
Timothy MacKenzie "Tim" Gunnis an American fashion consultant, television personality, actor, and voice actor. He served on the faculty of Parsons The New School for Design from 1982 to 2007 and was chair of fashion design at the school from August 2000 to March 2007, after which he joined Liz Claiborne as its chief creative officer. He is well known as on-air mentor to designers on the reality television program Project Runway. Gunn's popularity on Project Runway led to 2...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionTV Show Host
Date of Birth29 July 1953
CountryUnited States of America
When it comes to my vocabulary, I felt a responsibility when I was teaching to raise the bar of conversation in my classroom. And with my own students, I refused to let them use the phrase "I like" or "I don't like" when we were engaged in a critique.
I've never mentioned this, but when I was at Parsons teaching, the other design disciplines, they don't like fashion design. They see it as very nineteenth-century.
On my first day teaching my own classroom, I threw up before I entered the building.
I found early on in teaching, if you're too blunt an instrument, the students discredit you and think you're just being mean. They're not interested in what you have to say.
I learned early on in teaching how easy it is to hurt a young person and that's never my intention.
If you want to, you can share my teaching refrain: I can't want you to succeed more than you do.
I learned from teaching. If you are perceived by the student to be belittling them or purely criticizing them without offering up words of encouragement and support, they shut down and discredit you.
I love HGTV. I love the Food Network.
But I will add, there's one thing I will not do, ever: I will never talk to you about things you cannot change. It plants a negativity in the head of a designer or the student, and it's a distraction.
Fashion was in a crisis up until the mid-'90s and, when it came out of the crisis, it was a very different place. It was a place that nurtured and cultivated young entrepreneurial designers.
But my manners also came from when I was in college and began participating in critiques. You have to speak with someone respectfully about their work and be honest and open, without hurting them.
But if I had to choose a single destination where I'd be held captive for the rest of my time in New York, I'd choose the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Part of what was in the ether all around me growing up, until I was between 19 and 20, was a terrible, debilitating stutter. It was part of what made me very reclusive as a kid.
We all had to search for more words to describe things.