Project Rehab

Gunn remembers the first time he saw himself on TV back in 2004. "It was horrifying," he says, sitting cross-legged in Claiborne pin-striped trousers and a matching vest. "It was the night of the Project Runway premier party, and I refused to go. I watched the show at home, alone, peeking out of the sheets of my bed the way I used to watch The Wizard of Oz as a kid."

Gunn is a long way from home. Now a regular on the entertainment circuit with cameos everywhere from Ugly Betty to The Biggest Loser, his corporate beige office is stuffed with souvenirs of his newfound celebrity: a framed photo of him and Oprah, a cover of Entertainment Weekly featuring him and Heidi Klum, a talking Bobblehead -- of himself.

Surprisingly, Gunn, who received a degree from Yale in English lit, has never been a fashion designer. His organizational chops and passion for education landed him at Parsons the New School for Design in 1983. In 2000, the longtime chair of the fashion-design school -- an untouchable fiefdom due to its success -- resigned; Gunn, then an associate dean, was charged with finding a replacement. When he pulled back the curtain, he discovered that the program hadn't evolved during the last half of its 100-year history. "The feeling of the department was, 'It's such a success -- the graduates are so famous -- don't do anything to it,' " Gunn recalls. "This great department, in my view, was little more than a dressmaking school."

The biggest problem was the Designer Critic program, a yearlong senior-thesis project in which groups of students were paired with famous designers, such as Donna Karan and Marc Jacobs, to create a single line. At year's end, students debuted their work at an industry fashion show attended by everyone from Vogue editor Anna Wintour to buyers from Bloomingdale's. It was the pinnacle of the Parsons fashion experience, and to Gunn, it represented everything that was broken. Instead of challenging students to cultivate an original design point of view, their big-name mentors were directing all the creative decisions. For the most part, the school was training its future designers to become drones.

In the winter of 2000, Gunn told Randy Swearer, then dean of Parsons, that they had a crisis on their hands, and Gunn refused to allow another graduating class to endure the Designer Critic program. He advised that the fashion department needed a leader dedicated to overhauling the entire program at its guts. Then he suggested that he was the person to do it. Swearer agreed, and the next year, Gunn was named chair.

Gunn scaled back the Designer Critic program to one semester during junior year and announced a new senior thesis in which every student would design an entire collection -- and only the best work would make the end-of-year show. Parsons's entrenched faculty bristled, and it wasn't long before Gunn got a call from Swearer, summoning him to his office. When he arrived, three of the Designer Critics along with Stan Herman, president for more than a decade of the powerful Council of Fashion Designers of America, were waiting. "They were there to tell the dean he had to get rid of me," Gunn says. "That this was a disaster for both Parsons and the industry."

To the entire room's surprise, Swearer told the group he backed Gunn 100%. "It was very clear that Tim understood what needed to be done and, most important, was willing to do it," says Swearer. "He had the opportunity to completely succeed or fail."

At first, it looked like the latter. On the day of the first show under Gunn's revamped program, he remembers the CFDA's Herman issuing an ominous warning: "I hope you have a new gig lined up because I'm afraid this is over for you." Not quite. For the first time in Gunn's experience at Parsons, the students received a standing ovation. And the press actually wrote about the students' designs rather than who showed up at the after-party.

The wisdom of Gunn's transformation was evident in the work of students Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez. Earlier that year, the two had asked their academic advisers if they could pair up together on a line and were told no -- that wasn't how things were done. The students appealed to Gunn, who unilaterally instituted a new policy: Double the number of pieces in a collection and collaboration is fine. After all, that's how a number of successful designers work. "The moment those boys presented the collection for the show," says Herman, "that changed my perception of the school. It was far from schoolwork." Julie Gilhart, the fashion director at Barneys New York, immediately bought the collection. After several months of successful sales, McCollough and Hernandez found a backer, and today, Proenza Schouler -- the team's nom de couture -- has become arguably the most celebrated label to emerge from New York in recent years.