What Not To Wear And Who Not To Listen To



I daresay by now, if you're a Brit resident, you've seen it. That show where those most affable of people, Trinny Woodall and Susannah Gordon, take unsuspecting women and tell them that their wardrobes are shite, their hips are fat and they should stop buying round-neck sweaters. They crusade through the programme, throwing out people's most beloved clothes, storming into fitting rooms and confiscating "offending" items. By the end of the show, the victim has been poked, prodded, shown their reflection from all angles, scolded and cowed. Result: a new haircut, a new wardrobe and vacant peals of "I love it!"

The show's pretty successful. Yet there's a number of fatal flaws - not least the very concept of the show. These two women march singlemindedly into people's wardrobes, dessicating them and promising to replace the binned clothes with £2000 worth of "fantastic" new clothes that will "transform" the wearer and give them a "brand new" image. Lovely. We'll ignore the fact that most women's wardrobes, if you tot up the cumulating spending over the years, are worth a fair bit more than £2000.

We'll concentrate instead on the fact that they're not promising a complete £2000 wardrobe that will see the wearer through life for the next few years - the clothes are all bought in one short space of time - in one season. Do we want brand-new images that make us look like paper dolls? Inevitably next year, when our lucky recipient is sick of the colours, bored of looking like a two-dimensional mannequin dolled up in Next's A/W 2002 collection, she's left wishing she hadn't let those two harridans throw away that crocheted scarf that she's had for years - it'd be just the ticket this spring to bring last season's £2000 wardrobe up to speed.

You cannot replace several years or even decades of personal sartorial acquisition in a matter of weeks - you just can't do it. The result will be sterile, lifeless, and devoid of your personality. What Trinny and Susannah forget is that most people's clothes tell a story - they got that dress on holiday in Venice a few years ago, it's a bit worn now but it'll always remind them of those amazing two weeks... etc. By throwing out someone's collection of stories, you're erasing a part of their history. Little wonder that the women on this show resemble blank-faced car crash dummies post-T+S-treatment. One woman was told that "this colourful belt will preserve your indivuality". Trinny blithely ignored the fact that the belt was the same belt that every high street store is selling at the moment in one manifestation or another. Yes. Very good. Very individual. You can't compact someone's personality into a stringy belt with cheap plastic turquoise stones pasted onto it, you offensively idiotic woman.

Hasn't anyone else figured out the gist of this programme yet? This isn't about Trinny & Susannah's selfless mission to make the nation better-dressed. It's about their shameless ego trip, their determination to make the nation look like THEM. They are setting themselves up, week in and week out, as fashion experts, and saying: You Should Look Like Us. Such are the results of each show; the women singled out for fitterhappiermoreproductive wardrobes all look like pale, uncomfortable Trinny/Susannah clones.

Did these two vile women ever consider that we might not all want to look like them? Some of us might wish to resemble more than a cheaply assembled high-street shop dummy. The pair of them look polite, safe, mid-30s, that-looks-professional-and-acceptable-doesn't-it? and utterly nondescript - no risks, no experimentation, no fun. It's hard to tell whether their own fashion sense is the result of a determined concealment and dilution of their own personalities, or in fact a reflection of how little they have to say about themselves, in spite of their eager self-aggrandisation. I would dearly like to see another show's fashion experts [wherever did 'Want It Need It Gotta Have It' go? Marvellous show...] bully T+S into discarding and replacing their entire wardrobe - perhaps they could make it a special feature show, and get as much humour from humiliating the pair of them as they did with Jeremy Clarkson and Lesley Joseph not too long ago.