Tim Gunn remains designers’ advocate
Fashion guru Tim Gunn’s encouraging, unfailingly honest guidance of up-and-coming design talent helped turn “Project Runway” into a sensation when it debuted in 2004, and also inspired his most recent book, “The Natty Professor: A Master Class on Mentoring, Motivating, and Making It Work!” Now, with supermodel co-host Heidi Klum and longtime “Project Runway” showrunner Sarah Rea at his side, Gunn’s trusty advice has a new outlet: Amazon’s globetrotting, ultra-luxe design competition “Making the Cut,” which is to its forerunner what a Michelinstar restaurant is to your favorite neighborhood haunt.
While “Making the Cut” features a number of twists on the “Project Runway” template, Gunn remains an irrepressible (if often tearful) advocate for his charges.
The interview has been edited for clarity and condensed.
Is there a trick to boiling down your advice to the designers that makes for compelling television?
Want to hear the truth? I’m with each designer for 10 to 15 minutes, easily. So, in the edit, they boil it down to a few sound bites. Because it looks as though I’m in and out of that room in an hour. And in fact, on “Project Runway,” when we would have 16 designers, that critique session would be four hours long.
It’s not that I’m longwinded — I have a very Socratic approach to this. I pummel people with questions, because I can’t begin to respond to their work until I know what’s going on . ...
I try to ask enough questions to get them to see what I see, whether that’s something good, bad or indifferent. Frankly, on “Making the Cut” we’re not talking about janky hems the way we did on “Runway.” It’s to get the designer to say, “Oh, this asymmetrical look is not what I’m going for.”
Do you think your approach to mentoring has changed with the more accomplished contestants on “Making the Cut” versus the average “Runway” contestant?
Yes. And there’s another factor that’s critically important to all of this. With “Making the Cut,” we’re looking for the next big fashion brand, so my conversations with the designers are largely about, “How do these designs fit into the larger vision of your brand?” As opposed to looking at the minutia of the stitching or how the sleeve is set into the bodice. It’s a much broader dialogue, and I find it much more interesting.
If you do another season of “Making the Cut,’ is there anything you would tweak to improve it?
Sarah (Rea) and I speak several times a week, and we’ve already said to each other — and Heidi — that we can’t get stuck in this format. That was the problem with “Runway’s” success. No one would let us budge from the format.
We need to establish now that if we do in fact do a Season 2, we need to change things up. And if there’s a (Season) 3, change it up again. It’s not so much that we’re thinking about tweaking as we’re thinking about big change. Whether there is a Season 2 remains to be seen ... but we’re intent on not getting stuck.