The ever-stylish and suave Tim Gunn, chairman of the fashion design department at
Parsons the New School for Design and my favorite part of
Bravo TV's Project Runway, reports that architectural design professionals "All hate fashion".
While this may seem unlikely, given that clothing and architectural design are similar in so many ways, Gunn insists that it is so. "I had a colleague tell me that fashion is the lowest form of culture," says Gunn,
in an interview with the New York Times. Never one to be rattled by much, Gunn insists that he is not offended by the animosity. "They're [fashion and architecture] both an infrastructure on which to put a skin or surface," he explains, and goes on to tell the story of how he first fell in love with architecture.
The story centers around a calendar the 10-year old Gunn received from his grandmother at Christmas. Each month of the calendar featured a French chateau to cut out and assemble, and by New Year's Day, Gunn had finished the entire calendar. Gunn moved on to designing and assembling his sister's Barbie houses, and with those types of accomplishments under his belt, found his first adult job after art school designing models for an architecture firm.
With a distinguished career built upon fashion and clothing design rather than architecture, Gunn has turned his love for building model homes into a hobby. He collects pop-up books of buildings and carefully searches for furniture and cupboard pieces that emit the aura of the perfect architectural aesthetic.
