He Makes It Work

I adore Tim Gunn. He's blunt yet concerned; withering in his candor and still unabashedly sentimental. He's the best friend we all want; the kind of friend who could say to you, "I like that color on you, but the material is so outrageously tacky that it looks like a hooker sale at K-Mart." It sounds bitchy coming from another woman (because we tend to question the motives of other women--do they really think it looks like shit or are they attempting to undermine confidence with a barbed comment?). But coming from Tim, you'd know it was born of a genuine concern. He doesn't want you to don't end up on the back page of "Glamour" with a black bar across your eyes. Tim cares.

Tim first came to our attention as the mother hen and mentor of the competing designers on Bravo TV's "Project Runway" series. As the former head of Parsons in New York, Tim had been mentoring students for years; his eye for detail and ability to separate the wheat from the chaff was honed as sharply as a fresh Ginzu knife. On the show, his evaluations of the designs were often dead on; his assessments were uttered in exasperation yet in a tone that conveyed, "I know you can do better than this crap!" Soon, that was summed up in his all purpose catch phrase: Make It Work.

On Thursday night Bravo is launching a new program, "Tim Gunn's Guide to Style." It's the next generation of "What Not To Wear" helmed by the master himself. There are untold fashion disasters walking on the streets of Manhattan everyday so one can only imagine the breadth of work Tim will have to undertake. It should be delicious.

The late great Diana Vreeland, legendary fashion editor and arbiter of style once said. "The only real elegance is in the mind; if you've got that, the rest really comes from it." And a little help from Tim Gunn couldn't hurt.