Tim Gunn Fires Back in Lifetime’s “Under the Gunn”

Designer Nick Verreos is only half joking when he calls Tim Gunn “the Zeus of mentoring.” “He is a god,” said Verreos who admits to a flair for the dramatic.

But when it comes to Gunn, it isn’t hyperbole. The former head of Parsons the New School of Design has become a fashion celebrity in his own right as the mentor to designer contestants on the popular reality show Project Runway.

“He has a way of giving critiques that are unconditional, nurturing and honest. He’s a wonderful truth-teller and he can just lay down the law,” said Verreos, a fan favorite from the second season of Project Runway who now has two fashion lines of his own. “What Tim does is an art really. He has a great eye and he has a way of giving designers his knowledge in such a way that is natural and not condescending and always helpful. It’s always about the growth of the designer.

That’s why when the producers of Project Runway determined they needed to put its next season on hold because of a scheduling conflict with Project Runway producer and host Heidi Klum, they opted instead to build a new show around Gunn with an emphasis on mentoring.

The result, a weekly series called Under the Gunn, premieres at 9 p.m. Jan. 16 on Lifetime.

While the competition format of Under the Gunn is similar to that of Project Runway the new show shows more of an emphasis on mentoring the designer contestants in the workroom. Gunn said the new show reflects one of the keys to his success— knowing the difference between mentoring and teaching.

“A good mentor is a coach, a cheerleader, a truth-teller. And my own particular approach is to pummel people with questions.  I need as much of a context as possible to understand what their point of departure is and what they are trying to achieve,” Gunn said. “I would never just walk up to someone and start speaking, and offering critical analysis of their work without fully understanding, or understanding as well as I can, what that designer is really trying to achieve.”

“When you are teaching, you can tell people what to do.  And when you are mentoring, that is not a good idea.  You really want the designer to be fully responsible for their decision-making.”

In Under the Gunn the key mentoring of the designer contestants is done by three Project Runway alums: Verreos, whom Gunn said he specifically selected because of his extensive teaching experience at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising in Los Angeles; fan (and Klum) favorite Mondo Guerra, who was the runner-up during his season in 2010 and won the 2012 Project Runway: All-Stars; and Anya Ayoung-Chee, the former beauty pageant contestant who won her season of Project Runway in 2011.

“Tim was very vested in sort of guiding us through this whole mentorship process. He wanted all of us to grow and become better mentors and, in that way, become better designers in our professional world,” Verreos said. “He was still mentoring us, in a way, but as mentors. That was great to have Tim to either pull us back or to push us even further in our communications with the designers”

Gunn agreed there are some similarities format-wise to the popular singing competition show The Voice, but pointed out that in Under the Gunn, the mentors really aren’t competing with each other. Instead, Gunn said, the format of Under the Gunn was a chance to put the spotlight on the important role of mentoring; something he said he wished there was more of an opportunity to do on Project Runway.

But you don’t just magically become a good mentor, Gunn noted. Coaching (and occasionally chastising) the mentors even pushed the usually unflappable (at least in public) Gunn to lose his cool on camera, he admitted. “There were many times I had to step in, including at one point, laying down some rules. And one of the first rules I needed to lay down was that … mentors had to leave the workroom an hour before (designers were to head to the runway showing) because (mentors) were becoming these irrepressible nags,” Gunn said. “They would be hanging over their designers saying, ‘No, don’t work on that, work on the collar’.”

“I had to pull Nick off of a designer once to say, ‘Let her go. This is now beyond the pale and unless you are resigned to make her work, which I will not allow you to do, there’s nothing else you can do’.”

While he hadn’t seen the series beyond the first episode, Gunn said he hopes the finished product reflects concerns he relayed to the show’s editors about not trying to force the mentor-designer relationship to be something it’s not. “[I told the editors] the mentors are not jockeys and the designers are not horses.  It’s not a matter of getting on a horse and say ‘giddy up’ and ‘go faster’ and patting their rear ends and saying ‘you know, let’s get to the finish line right now’.”

“The designer and the mentor are two completely separate entities. And the editing team was trying to make this correlation between a designer’s success and a mentor’s good mentoring.  And correspondingly, a designer’s failure and therefore it’s the mentor’s failure.  I kept saying, ‘You can’t look at it that way’.”

Verreos, for one, heard Gunn’s messages loud and clear. The experience, he said, has changed him as a designer and as an educator. “I think one of the biggest things I took away from this was the importance of listening and letting the student or designer speak. Instead of answering the question, let them answer it first and see what happens from there,” Verreos said. “That’s something I didn’t do before meeting Tim Gunn. That was not in my vocabulary. So that’s something I’ve taken from the University of Tim Gunn as it were.”

—Karyn D. Collins