Tim Gunn Reveals the Story Behind His Iconic 'Make It Work' Tagline on “Project Runway” (Exclusive)

Tim Gunn may have stepped back from mentoring contestants on Project Runway, but people still approach him and repeat his iconic tagline, "Make it work," all the time.

"It happened just about two hours ago," the former reality TV host tells PEOPLE exclusively over Zoom in early February.

But it turns out, Gunn, who mentored for 16 seasons before leaving in 2018 to create a new fashion competition show on Amazon Prime Video called Making the Cut, began using this phrase long before his Project Runway days.

During the interview, he recalls to PEOPLE how he came up with the tagline while teaching at the Parsons School of Design, where he served on the faculty from 1982 to 2007.

"I'll tell you the catalyst for it," Gunn, 71, says. "I was teaching a two-semester-long class — 30 weeks — with the same students in their senior year. They were developing their portfolios, which had to correspond to the collection they were creating in a different class. And I had a student, extremely talented, who in April — this was in September, and now it's April — declared, 'I'm going to start all over.'"

Upon hearing this, Gunn recalls looking at her and saying, "No, you're not."

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Related: Tim Gunn 'Wasn't Asked Back' to Project Runway with Heidi Klum: 'I Was Initially Devastated' (Exclusive)

"I said, 'After all these months, you're going to abandon this?'" he adds. "And she said, 'Well, I think I can do it.' I replied, 'Well, I'm not going to let you do it. Whatever it is that's troubling you, I want you to sit with this portfolio and, if necessary, go get your muslin prototypes from your other classroom and really analyze them. Come up with a diagnosis of what’s troubling you, and then a prescription for how to make it work — how to move forward with this.'"

"I said to her and to the rest of the class, 'If I just let you abandon something and move on to something else, maybe it will work, but maybe it won’t," he continues. "But if you really sit down and critically analyze what’s happening — and as I said a moment ago, come up with a prescription for how to make it work — you have just enhanced your whole internal toolbox, your problem-solving abilities."

He adds, "Life is filled with problems you’re going to need to solve. If you can figure out how to deal with that and how to make things work, it just makes you so much more agile and capable of really conquering the world.'"

Gunn also notes how he believes that failures are much more important in people's lives than successes. "If you only have successes, what have you really learned?" he says. "But when you have failures, it really grounds you and it buoys you up for the next round of life."

During the interview, Gunn reveals he's also taken to heart his own words of wisdom.

He notes how he recently overcame his own obstacle when he learned he wasn't asked back to host Project Runway after his longtime co-host Heidi Klum, 51, revealed she would be returning to the show. Upon hearing the news, Gunn admits that he was "initially devastated, then kind of humiliated." But quickly, he changed his perspective on the situation.

"I thought, how lucky am I to have had the experiences that I've had over the last 20 years?" he says. "This is phenomenal. I stopped the boo-hooing. I thought, it's really throwing hubris in the face of an angry God to mourn not being on this new show. So I've come to terms with it. Am I disappointed? Sure. And most of all, it's about not working with Heidi, but we move on and things happen for a reason. I don't know what the reason is yet, but it will be revealed."

He adds how he plans to watch the show to cheer on his former cohost. "I have her back and I'm with her in spirit always," he says.

Project Runway, which originally launched on Bravo, before moving to Lifetime and then back to Bravo, will now see its home on Freeform, Disney+ and Hulu for season 21.

Read the original article on People