My mother had so many moats around her, so many huge chasms and reservoirs of denial. I mean, I never came out to her. Part of it was there’s nothing to be gained, and part of it was that I knew we were going to get into some awful debate about sexual preference.

When I was living in the Village, I took her to a restaurant, and we’re having a perfectly fine time. She looks at me and says, “Why did you take me to a restaurant that’s filled with nothing but men?” I said, “What do you mean?” She said, “Well, I’m making the assumption that these men are gay.” And I said, “Well, Mother, it’s New York, and more specifically, it’s the Village. And yes, I don’t know that all of them are, but certainly some of them are.” Then she said, “Why would you take me to a gay restaurant?” And wasn’t that the perfect opening for me to say, “Well, because . . .” I didn’t leap in, and she quickly said, “Never mind. Two women just walked in.”

I wouldn’t change anything. Before my mother died, and my father had passed, someone said to me once, “You wouldn’t bring your father back?” I said, “No, because the passing of my father brought a new dimension of closeness to my mother and my sister and me that I wouldn’t want to give up.” And basically the person who asked the question looked at me like I was some horrible human specimen.

I don’t think anyone does it better than Mrs. Obama. I’ve been on the nominating committee for the Design Awards, and in that capacity, I’ve been one of many people associated with the Cooper Hewitt who’s been invited to the White House. The First Lady is the patron of the National Design Awards, and during the Bush administration, I didn’t give a rat’s ass — I wasn’t going into that White House. But once President Obama was elected: Yes, I’ll go! I’d love to! And the first lunch I was at Mrs. Obama’s table seated across from her and next to the wife of the secretary of the Smithsonian, Mrs. Clough. And she had this lovely southern accent, but the first course was before us, and she turns to me and she says, “I can barely see this, it’s so small.” So Mrs. Obama heard it and she rose and she said to the entire room, “I want all of you to know that when we moved in, we inherited the kitchen protocols that preceded us. I quickly became so concerned about so much waste. We were just throwing away or giving away tons of food, and it bothered me tremendously. So some of you may think that these portions are small. I’d rather have you leave here and get an ice cream cone than have food left.” When the meal was over, did anyone have to go out and get an ice cream cone? No.

When I was hospitalized following a suicide attempt as a teenager, basically all I really wanted to do was get out of that place. So I thought if I didn’t cooperate, they were going to say, “He’s not a good patient; we need to get rid of him.” And when Dr. Goldblatt finally succeeded in getting me to open up and speak, I thought, Okay, now I’m just gonna have diarrhea of the mouth. He’ll “cure” me, and I’ll be out of here. And I met him three months into being there and spent two years with him, five days a week. I began to think of him as being a family member, and exhilarated as I was to get out of there, it was painful to leave him.

I just realized my whole mentoring approach and so much of my teaching approach comes from that experience with him. That’s certainly my method with the Project Runway designers. It’s “What do you think?” And “What would you do with this skirt?” I think it’s empowering, because it means the answer is within you. Nothing makes me happier with the Project Runway designers than knowing they are aware of the same issues that I’m aware of. Because if I see it and they don’t, well, I can’t want you to succeed more than you do.

I took two of our season-thirteen designers out to lunch, and Alexander Knox was struggling with this collection. I looked at him and said, “What’s the matter with you? Just reach into the best work from the season and use those designs as a point of departure to move forward.” And he looked at me and said, “I can’t do that.” What do you mean you can’t do that? “The Weinstein Company owns our work.” I said, “Wait a minute. The Weinstein Company owns the work you created on the show, but they don’t own your ideas.” And Alexander and Sean Kelly looked at me and they’re nodding, saying, “Yes, they own our ideas. In the contract it says they own the rights to everything that we design and that we don’t.” I burst into a rage and then thought, Tim, calm down. I wrote an e-mail to my liaison at the Weinstein Company and said, “This is what I heard. Is this true, or is it a misunderstanding?” And my liaison wrote back quickly and said, “Oh no, it’s very true.” So I said to the legal team, “This is unacceptable.” And they said, “Well, it’s the way it has to be.” And I said, “In that case, carry on, but you’re gonna carry on without me, and I will tell any designer who wants to be on this show not to be.” The last sentence in the e-mail was, “I’m certain you will understand why it is I can no longer be associated with this show. Sincerely, Tim Gunn.” I sent it to the Weinstein Company, to Lifetime, to our producers, and I’m happy to say all hell broke loose. It was such a whole pu pu platter of emotions, because on the one hand I was fraught with guilt, like, What am I doing? I’m turning my back on the show. The whole prospect of telling Heidi Klum I wasn’t returning was excruciating, but then you mix that in with absolute fury about being so betrayed and my concern about the designers. And a week later they came back to me and they said, “We got rid of the clause. It’s not there anymore, and the designers will retain the rights to their work.”

I had a very close relationship with the former chair of the fashion design department at Parsons, Frank Rizzo. We had a whole succession of falling-outs and I was always taking the high road afterward: “I’m so sorry. Forgive me. (Even though you’re the ass who did all this stuff.)” We had a final falling-out over an illness of my mother because I said, “I can’t go to your house for Thanksgiving. She’s in the hospital, and I have to go see her.” “Oh, so you’re putting me in my place.” It was a matter of, Listen, sister, I’m not going back to kiss the ring. I’m just not. Well, I never dreamed I was gonna be chair of the fashion design department at Parsons. And had we still been close, I could never in a million years have done what I did in that department and made the changes that I made, because he would have been over my shoulder, saying, “No, you cannot do that. No, you can’t get rid of this person. No, you have to promote so-and-so.” It would have been awful.

The Parsons faculty did not want the Proenza Schouler boys, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, to collaborate [on their thesis]. I said, “We’ll see what happens. It’s a big experiment, but this industry is about collaboration. Let’s let it incubate within the safe haven that’s academia.” After September 11th, Jack and Laz weren’t coming to class. And on the one hand, I appreciate being traumatized. On the other hand, let’s welcome some distractions. Get in here, get to work, and there’s a lot of work to be done. So I contacted them at the end of the month of September, and I’d already filled out leave-of-absence forms for each of them. “Gentlemen, all you have to do is sign it.” Well, it was tough love. From that point forward, they were running as fast as they could, and by the end of that fall semester, I said to the faculty, “You were so concerned that 1 plus 1 would equal .5; well, 1 plus 1 equals 10 in this case.” And the rest, of course, is history. I mean, look at them; they’re fashion establishment.

I never even had a drink until I moved to New York when I was thirty. I grew up around so much liquor and a family where someone, at every family gathering, would put their foot through a coffee table or step through a plate-glass window or something. But I found, living here, that just a glass of wine helps take the edge off. In fact, when Hurricane Sandy hit, I thought, There’s nothing I can do about it except drink. And it really helped.

I had an uncharacteristic little hissy fit at the Food Emporium on the Friday after Sandy. The place had been devastated. The shelves were bare. But by Friday things were really restored; I was impressed. I heard this woman berating the manager about the fact that there was no mascarpone cheese. I went over and said, “Don’t you think you should just chalk this up as being a minor inconvenience, because people like you are downtown with nothing?” I was still at Liz Claiborne then, and I knew people lost their homes and cars. Can you imagine having the audacity and no presence of mind to think, You know, maybe this recipe can use ricotta?

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