Shooting From the Hip, and Missing, Without a Gunn

As "The Fashion Show," Bravo's response to losing "Project Runway" to Lifetime, settles into its debut season, its most significant shortcoming has become clear. It does not have Tim Gunn.

He is key to "Project Runway's" success and one of the reasons it won a Peabody Award in 2007. A former instructor at Parsons, Gunn was instrumental in communicating that the show was actually interested in discovering new design talent and not merely in a Darwinian winnowing of the tribe.

Yesterday, Gunn was scheduled to receive an honorary degree from his alma mater, the Corcoran College of Art and Design, and to speak at the commencement ceremony. The experience, he said, would be "very personal and very emotional." After drifting from one school to another, he landed at the Corcoran and graduated in the class of 1976. The school, he says, "was a transformative force."

Gunn is often billed as a fashion expert, a television personality and a Liz Claiborne executive. All of those titles are accurate, but if there is any overriding reason for his popularity, it's that he is, above all, an educator. (He even manages to sound professorial in his Tide commercials.) He has taught TV viewers that the fashion industry is not exclusively a bastion for overindulged divas who spend their days at each other's throats while trying to cook up the most outlandish bit of whimsy with which to torture women.

"We need to look at each other respectfully and with thought and consideration. I have zero tolerance for those who think they're better than everyone else," he says. "In my world, the squeaky wheel does not get the grease."

Gunn believes in commercial fashion, not art projects. The best design lies somewhere between a banal T-shirt and the most outrageous Paris couture, he says. "It's a huge playing field." Still, as he's participating in "Project Runway" auditions now, he sees "clown clothes" and garments that look like "floats in a parade." While this does not make the teacher happy, it doesn't make him vicious.

Gunn brings a refreshing gust of wit and humanity to reality television. He defends the fashion industry from having its public perception shaped entirely by the catty and selfish -- no matter how insistently some of the contestants on "Project Runway" play those roles. A significant amount of nurturing happens on Seventh Avenue. Designers regularly support each other by working backstage at each other's fashion shows, offering up fabric when the finances of a colleague hit the skids and opening the doors to showroom spaces when struggling designers need a free place to present their collections.

Most recently, the Gap and the Council of Fashion Designers of America announced that the third Gap Design Editions will be available in stores June 16. The collaboration has emerging designers Lisa Mayock and Sophie Buhai of Vena Cava, Albertus Swanepoel and Alexander Wang interpreting classic Gap khakis. The big corporation gets a few fresh ideas, and new designers get their names and work in stores across the country.

That sense of nurturing goes missing on "The Fashion Show." The judges for the design competition include Liz Claiborne's Isaac Mizrahi, Kelly Rowland of Destiny's Child and Fern Mallis, who led the way in transforming New York fashion week from a ragtag presentation of frocks in disparate showrooms into a commercial behemoth concentrated under the big tops in Bryant Park.

Mizrahi has a biting humor and delivers his lines like a cocktail party guest whose eyes keep flickering off into the middle distance in search of someone more important to engage. Rowland boasts little in the way of fashion credentials other than her ability to wear clothes, which should not be confused with what models do, which is sell them.

Mallis has an impressive résumé in the fashion industry, having borne witness to the rise and fall of many a brand. But her greatest accomplishment is not in design or sales or in coming up with zingy one-liners, but in organizing fashion designers, which is a bit like herding cats. That suggests that Mallis is both patient and diplomatic, but she lacks Gunn's quick wit.

As for the contestants, they have so far not proven themselves to be especially skilled in the workroom or in image-crafting. One of them does not know how to sew. Another snottily mumbled something about "male domination" while he was dressed as Tinker Bell. Which is not to say that a man can't dress up like a sprite, but he shouldn't choose that moment to also channel a misogynist.

And yet, one could find a way to forgive all these flaws if only "The Fashion Show" had a single character who came across as wise and unflinchingly honest, whose comments were witty rather than barbed and who did not constantly thrust his best side toward the camera for the sheer pleasure of blocking someone else's close-up.

For all of the outlandish challenges facing the designers on "Project Runway," Gunn is the unfailing voice of reason acknowledging the absurdities, encouraging the contestants to be innovative and peering worriedly over his spectacles when they appear to be plummeting off the deep end. And at the end of each episode, Gunn is right there telling the sad sacks sent packing that he's still so very, very proud of them.

Viewers don't want to see a reality show in which the competitors have an extended group hug before going head-to-head or a judges' panel that does nothing but sputter incomprehensible words of encouragement. Shows need tension.

But Gunn never lets the tensions -- or the good television -- overwhelm the teaching.