With a certain amount of maturity, we can set up our own constraints. That’s a lot of what education is about—letting people set those assignments for us so that when we graduate we can start to set them for ourselves. Even now that I’m in my fifties, I still face certain situations where I have to admit that I need some rules to help me figure out what I should do.
Bosses should think of themselves as fulfilling this kind of boundary-giving function that school and parents do. They need to be clear about expectations and rules so everyone knows when an employee is doing well or not doing well. And when expectations are not met, there should be logical consequences, whether that’s the loss of the job, a decrease in salary, or something less drastic. There is no reason, in any case, ever to yell. And yet we’ve all seen it: bosses who lose their tempers constantly.
What I want to know is: What makes people abusive to their underlings? I don’t think people are born that way. Is there some role model for people who tells them this is the way they get to the top? Did Donald Trump’s “You’re fired!” catchphrase corrupt them?
My suspicion is that cruelty to those you have power over is insecurity, pure and simple. These bad bosses are afraid if they’re too nice to people, they won’t be taken seriously.
As anyone who sticks around in an industry for a while knows, the people who have the best careers and the best lives (and often who do the best work) are not the demanding, screaming, flinging divas. They’re the people who take their ego out of it and put all that energy into their creative life.
I remember in Season 2, we went to see Fern Mallis, who runs Fashion Week here in New York and worldwide, too. I think it was Daniel Vosovic who asked her, “What’s the one piece of advice you’d give a young designer getting into this industry?”
“Be nice,” she said without hesitation.
I thought: God bless you, Fern Mallis.
I’m sure some people thought she was joking or being flip, but she was dead serious, and dead right.
There is absolutely never any reason to be a fire-breathing dragon.
I would say this to faculty who yelled at their students: “You hold all the power. Do you think there’s a single student who questions your authority? Even if they do, you’re assigning them a grade. There’s no reason ever to raise your voice, to threaten, to storm around. You’re not competing for power; you’re holding it, all of it.”
When people have a choice between two similarly talented people and one is a drama queen and the other is responsible and friendly, whom are they going to pick?
Everyone wants to work with people who are low maintenance. You have a huge advantage over the competition if, in addition to being a talent, you are easy to work with.
I’d never met a fashion prodigy until Christian Siriano. He’s probably the most talented person who’s been on the show so far. But that’s not why I agreed to do the foreword for his 2009 book, Fierce Style.I did it because I respect and like him, and I want to support the careers of people who are both talented and decent to others. Christian has all of the attention and success necessary to create an unbridled diva, but he’s not, and I don’t believe he ever will be. Wisely and correctly, he knows that divadom will not advance his career.
If you got rid of everyone in the fashion world who was high maintenance, there wouldn’t be that many people left. But even if you’re in a crazy world like that, it doesn’t mean you have an obligation to drop your standards of behavior just to fit in.
Again, that doesn’t mean being a doormat. In twenty-nine years of teaching, I often had times when I had to have sit-downs with my students, but I did so calmly. I would say, “Look, things are not going well,” and explain what needed to change. If the students took what I said seriously, we all had a great time and they learned a lot. If they didn’t, then they got bad grades and we all moved on with our lives. That’s all you need to do.
Parents can take a lesson from this, too. The ones I know who are rough with their children are always saying, “I want them to know who’s the boss!”
Guess what? They do know. You’re going to be the boss or the mom or the dad whether you’re good or bad at your job. The kids or workers may be pushing your buttons, but you can say, “You are pushing my buttons, and I want you to please stop it!” Or you can recognize that that’s what’s happening and take a break and try to get over it.
The same thing goes for pets. I’m a huge dog lover. I grew up with wirehair terriers, an English setter, and the aforementioned sad-sack basset hound, Brandy.
I love a mutt. I tend to look at purebreds these days a little differently than I used to. They seem to have so many health problems, and then the vet just says, “It’s in the breed.” It’s like royalty who used to inbreed and whose progeny ended up with three eyes.
Anyway, when babies cry on the plane, I never think it suggests bad parenting. But when dogs bark constantly, I tend to think it’s bad dog-raising.
I live next door to a loud West Highland terrier that barks all the time. Luckily, I can’t hear it through the wall, but I can from the hallway. That to me doesn’t seem like a happy animal.
I blamed my sister and her husband for the fact that their yellow Lab barked all the time and couldn’t even sit on command. I had sessions with the dog whenever I was there to try to teach her tricks, but I didn’t visit frequently enough for the training to stick. Ultimately, I realized the dog was in fact quite smart. Her attitude was, I’m not going to sit if I don’t have to!
When I was a child, we had an English setter that was a real handful. She ran away all the time and would occasionally bite my sister or me. One Thanksgiving Day, my grandmother was stirring gravy, my mother was basting the turkey, and my sister and I were ambling around the kitchen. The dog was missing yet again. Then, suddenly, the dog burst through the screen door with a rabbit carcass and proudly used it to knock over everything in the room.
“Aw,” I said. “Look, she’s brought food for Thanksgiving!” I was very little.
Does anyone remember Barbara Woodhouse’s 1982 book No Bad Dogs: The Woodhouse Way?We bought it to help us with our terrier Raffles. Within an hour of the book’s purchase it had been devoured—by the dog.
When I was a child, I took Brandy for obedience training. She was great through the entire thing, but on the day of the exam she sat down and would not budge. I yanked at her so hard I pulled her collar off. Still, she wouldn’t take the exam, and we failed. That meant we couldn’t get the certificate of completion, and I really wanted it, because both our names were on it and I wanted proof that I’d worked hard. So I took her back and did the whole thing again. Once more, she was brilliant all the way through, and then, at the exam, she sat down and wouldn’t show her stuff.
Well, I bawled my eyes out from disappointment, but eventually I came to realize that she just liked the social activity of it all. Dumb like a fox, she thought: If I keep failing it, he’ll keep bringing me back!Well, twice was enough for me. And the truth is, she was impeccably behaved when she wasn’t being tested, so obedience school wasn’t a waste, even if I didn’t get that piece of paper.
Some people tell me I would be a good parent because I am able to stay so calm even when designers are behaving like sugared-up toddlers all around me. I’m always flattered when people say that to me, especially because I love children, and I like to imagine I’d be good at raising them. But maybe it only seems that way because I’m not actually a parent. With my students, I could walk away and go home at the end of the night to my own cozy apartment. Everyone’s a great parent if they don’t have kids.