Your Sunday: a day of rest. Tim Gunn’s Sunday: getting slaughtered by teens with sharp objects.

“Slaughtered” is Gunn’s own word for what happens at weekly fencing bouts he’s recently taken up. Hyperbolic, sure, but you can’t argue it doesn’t paint a picture. The longtime “Project Runway” mentor, who knows a thing or a thousand about the power of image, says he took up fencing three years ago at age 62. He takes three lessons in parrying and thrusting a week, he says. It’s those bouts, though, where “your brain can’t be anywhere else” that Gunn has sewn into his Sunday self-care routine.

“It’s like chess,” Gunn says in a telephone interview. “I’m just completely rhapsodic about it.”

Rhapsodic! Of course the man who once described the “wretched excess” of a “Runway” design uses a word like “rhapsodic” in casual conversation. And who couldn’t use a little more rhapsody in these wretched days of increasing excess? Daily invective on social media, a bleak outlook for Earth’s climate, leggings worn as pants: America might need Gunn now more than ever to show us that art, style and a sense of sartorial proportion are a corrective to the particular ills of 2018.

?Read our full interview with Gunn ahead of his visit to Austin on MyStatesman.com.

