I thought they were pretty good at working with folks who had strong personas, but were scary looking - the witch, and the goth girl computer geek, and I remember them being really helpful with some athletic types - an Olympic swimmer and judoka as well as a firefighter - strong, muscular women with fit issues. I learned a lot about fit, and MOTG styling. I seem to remember them doing 3 outfit creation sessions, and espousing that ‘comfortable’ doesn’t have to be sloppy. The show provided motivation to do a little better at a time when I had been neglecting myself.

I only watched UK version, I am now intrigued to see US I wondered how much of it was real and how much just for the audience, and if the changes stuck or people got back to their ‘before’ versions.
Lovely clothes for your son, he will be the best dressed arround I can bet.
My son is not into dressing and fashion, but we have this yearly ritual of refreshing his wardrobe every fall and I enjoy those so much. He just graduated from university and is starting to look for a job, so we will wait little with this year refresh to see where he lands first.

Thanks for all your thoughts, everyone! Runcarla, I'm going to share the ZZTop lyric with my son -- he'll get a kick out of it!

In fairness I'm coming back to report I watched more episodes after I posted and the later seasons didn't seem quite so mean-spirited. And yes, Janet -- I followed the rules about "dress for the body you have," and "don't buy it if it doesn't fit," in particular. Still do!

Also, I was very into their thing about putting everybody into "a great little jacket." Heck, I was still wearing jackets every day until about six months ago. And now that seems like another world! Which I guess it was...

I liked Trinny and Susannah - I found their books very helpful although there weren’t many episodes of their version of the tv show. The US version I learned a lot from and think it was revolutionary for its time. I don’t think they did a stellar job with anyone who had a very niche look already, but for people who had just taken a break from style for some reason they were great.

I always wondered how many people noped out after the initial ‘confrontation’ - I certainly would have. And the throwing away (really donating I think) process was kind of unnecessary and too drawn out. By my lights they could have skipped right to the shopping and the outfit building, which is the whole point anyway.

Totally agree one of the major failings was that they had a standard style formula which didn't take much account of individual preferences.

I believe they had one episode where someone declined to participate - maybe this one? IIRC correctly one of the teachers walked away from competing for the makeover after appearing very uncomfortable in the introductory scenes. I imagine there were others who declined early on but that wouldn't make the show.

I actually loved WNTW - i learned about it when I visited a friend in Atlanta while on business and her young teenage daughters told me I looked like the "after" on WNTW in my business suit!

I do remember a few episodes where the client was very angry about getting rid of her things - and at least one where they actually gave the old clothes back.

The thing that moved me the most was the aspect of raising self-confidence and bringing out inner beauty. The make up artist was very kind and sweet on that score, as I recall.

It show-cased real people, and lots of shapes and sizes, and for that it was a little ahead of its time.

Maybe I liked kind of being told what to wear/do?

Mary, I love getting nice clothes with/for my sons who are in their 20's. They're always so relieved to have the help with dress clothes. Your son is lucky to have you as his personal shopper!!

That show had very blah makeovers but most of the people seemed pleased at the end because brought ‘being well-dressed’ within the realm of possible.

Good point, elpgal. I'm still binge-watching and the makeovers, which seemed so dramatic back in the day, do indeed look pretty ordinary. I remember thinking "wow! they look amazing!" and now I'm just "yeah, they look nice..."

I totally enjoyed it at the time and I have not seen it since. There was some shaming for sure but since the participants were asked if they wanted to proceed I imagined that they knew the show and were secretly thrilled by the adventure.

The thing I remember most was that it often seemed sad to me that the participants were estranged from the people that loved them by their clothing choices. The medium of the "rules' seemed to give them some common ground and bring them together and of course they could evolve those rules outside of the show.

The early days of WNTW were definitely more rigid than the later seasons. In the later seasons, she and Clinton were almost more like therapists what with all the baggage they helped women unpack. Stacy & Clinton also became less rules oriented over time, and became more about finding ways to "upgrade" a woman's style--like keeping it authentic, just more elevated.

I know those later seasons really helped me unpack some of my own baggage around why I dressed the way I did. I wore these perfectly snobby outfits to class at university, like totally office appropriate stuff while everyone around me was in jeans, tees, and flip flops or pajamas and uggs. A guy once asked me why I was always so "dressed up" and what came out of my mouth was a total freudian slip: "if my exterior is all perfectly put together, maybe you won't know what a screwed up mess I am inside". I had a LOT of baggage around self-image, and Stacy & Clinton's later seasons helped me unpack it so that, today, I am ok with my body even at the highest weight I've ever maintained because I am confident in the choices I make to clothe my body.

Yeah, WNTW had its flaws, yet it was invaluable in a lot of ways.

How fun to shop with our grown sons, I love that too with mine. That plaid jacket is gorgeous!

I loved watching WNTW back in the day too. Gosh, it was on from 2003 to 2013. That feels like a lifetime ago! I did learn things about fit etc. Shows are such a product of their time. It was perhaps more of a "rule oriented" phase of fashion...? Then we evolve out of whatever we thought was so true and real then. I too have definitely moved on.

It can be fun but also a bit cringeworthy to go back and see what we thought was so cool or in at the time. Recently I've watched episodes of the old Peyton Place on Youtube, which was on tv in the 60's. (It started the careers of Mia Farrow and Ryan O'Neal) So SO dated, but also interesting that this is what was informing me of life via the tv at my tender age back then.

I loved the show, but agree it could get rather nasty ... But I always felt in the end the person saw themself in a new light ... One person I absolutely loved though was Carmindy! She was unfailingly kind and celebrated people's natural beauty; I'm still very influenced by her less is more approach. I loved Stacy but do blame her for making me second guess my love of black ha! Plagued me for years (as many of you know!)

Apparently it’s supposed to come back this year!

https://www.cheatsheet.com/ent.....show.html/

I liked Trinny and Susannah too but agree it feels dated. And the makeovers themselves always left me ambivalent. I'm sure they helped a lot of people better express what they were clumsily failing to express through their clothes. Or dress for a less common body type. But it was always so drastic (that's tv of course) and left me wondering if the people transformed did not fall back into old patterns soon after. This was even worse with the shows that followed and got ever more spectacular. I remember a Dutch show with two hosts who only wore black (hardly creatively dressed) and always commented viciously on their subjects 'before' style. They even hung up billboards of these people's styles to get passers-by's unfiltered opinions. Harsh, spectacle-driven way to make a point. That's possibly when I was truly done with reality tv.

Nice quote from Clinton in the article Roxanna linked about a possible reboot:

But Kelly added that he wasn’t sure that What Not to Wear would even work today. “The world is a different place,” he said. “People dress differently now than they did 10 years ago. There are no rules. You should be wearing what makes you feel good.”

The suit with T-shirt is a great choice for that position, and I love those shoes. I’ve pretty much given up on getting my son to wear anything but black high tops (leather Converse for school, canvas ones for casual, expensive ones for basketball). His one pair of red canvas Chucks has been worn once. But he’s only 17. Maybe when he’s as old as yours he’ll be more interested in other things.

I never watched that show but descriptions of it here sound like what most people think of as fashion. Phoebe’s comment “ the participants were estranged from the people that loved them by their clothing choices” shows how very stark and awful people’s ideas about fashion can be, that they’d cut someone off for not being fashionable. OTOH, anyone who would put so much emphasis on what another person wears isn’t anyone I’d want to associate with, so they’d spare me some effort by just backing away.

I recall that when I started on YLF, several people took pains to tell me that fashion isn’t mean, and I know that some here have felt persecuted for being “too fashionable” particularly in a career I found freeing because the range of what’s acceptable to wear is so incredibly wide. But I was recently ambushed on here by someone who disagrees that fashion isn’t mean and was angry that my style hasn’t progressed to her liking. She was so mean that Angie chose to delete the thread. As Joy says, some people feel better by putting others down.

I don’t buy the “laugh at the clothing, not the person” line, because of course the person is choosing *those* clothes over something else. I can think of a couple things I’ve loved that they probably would’ve thrown straight in the trash. The idea that there is another show where one guy looks at a person’s closet to see what kinds of patterns, etc they like and is on the side of the person being made over—why would there be anything else?

ETA read the rest of the thread.

If the show had lessons beyond just being mean, and those were “if it doesn’t fit, don’t buy it” and “dress the body you have” then I’m really unimpressed.

Cindysmith, what an interesting comment about interior/exterior! Maybe that’s why I’ve never bought the whole concept that fashion somehow helps people’s self-esteem. A fresh coat of paint doesn’t matter if the boards are rotting!

Carla, I’ve never been anywhere near Olympic level, but I would love to get back into competitive swimmer shape. You can definitely tell a swimmer by the way they’re built—broad back, nice shoulders, tight round butt. And people who do breast stroke and butterfly have specific twists on that. You’ve probably run into the same problem I have being tall—sometimes larger sizes mean taller, sometimes they mean wider, sometimes they mean both. So I can see it being a challenge to find clothes that fit well when you’re that fit. But it sounds like their approach to awesome bodies was the same as their approach to goth: “this is a problem because it’s not standard; we’ve got to “fix” it to make it normal”. Ugh!!!!!! Fix the clothes to fit the swimmer, and get the goth something black, for goodness sake.

Coming back to say I've been binge-watching the first few seasons for a week now and the thing that really sets my teeth on edge is the whole idea that Stacy and Clinton (and to a lesser extent, the friends and family) most definitely know what's best for the "subjects," and the unquestioned way in which they substitute their judgment for that of the person who is most affected by the whole thing. I don't disagree that often the final result is something that is meaningful for the subject, and can indeed help the outside of the person match the inside, but the ultra-directive, top-down approach still make me cringe.

It was a very different time, for sure.

I never saw the US version but avidly watched the UK version and read the books. I still follow Trinny on Instagram - she makes me laugh!! And I love how she dresses and her bravery.

But yes the rules and way of filming feels dated.

Responding to Fashintern's comment, and speaking from and about my own experience, a fresh coat of paint may not do much for a decayed inanimate object but clothing can change the way a person connects with other people and that can be transformative.

If this were not true there wouldn't be organizations providing clothing to people of a cost and type that might not be available to them otherwise.

I don't say this is what I love best about the world, but that I have experienced the evidence and fallout of this type of judgement in my own life and I've concluded that visual appraisal, including of clothing, is a natural function that we may never be able to control in other people or even ourselves.

Phoebe, good point about the need for professional attire in some workplaces. I was referring to the more general idea that worrying about clothes and wearing the right thing would lead to self-esteem. In my experience, self-esteem comes from knowing who you are & being comfortable with that.

I didn’t have cable or whatever so had to watch some much later , randomly on YouTube.

I mostly enjoyed seeing IRL modeling and trying on- like vicarious shopping and getting to see various garments in motion. I liked how they dressed such a range of body types and ages that you would not see in any magazines of that day, or stock retail photos. So in a lot of ways more realistic than “ fashion”. I did read tgat there was actually a LOT of tailoring done to the wardrobes, so, not as truly off the rack as portrayed. That’s not wrong- just wrong that it was never a feature of how important that may be you get the look and fit you want, with more emphasis on “ it’s the clothes’ fault, not yours”.

In terms of “ dress how you want”- to me they seemed to pick pretty way out there dressers— not just quirky types but pretty bad fits and not , um, architectural. So it would be hard for me to think that if you were say, a real friend of any of the “ before “ examples, you would give thumbs up and “ you look great, it’s all good, no rules” IF an opinion were desired.

I was a devoted watcher in the day, and I agree it will not hold up well now. My gorgeous sister-in-law was always begging me to nominate her for the show! But there were several things that they did that I just loved: they talked about how to recognize good workmanship and quality fabrics, and they also talked about tailoring. In almost every episode they commented that you could get something altered to fit you, and that is a very important concept that people are in general not aware of.

They worked with many people who could not find clothes to fit them off the rack, and I am definitely one of those people. So helping people understand that if pants fit in the hips and the thighs, you could take in the waist, that was news you could use. Or why it was much much harder to alter fit in the shoulders, than it was to take up a cuff on a jacket.

I was also a big Nick Arrojo fan, and to this day I use his hair products and nothing else will do. I remember tons of criticism about the hair styling, that they gave everybody the same hair cut, and that was certainly true.

I agree with MsMary, and I very much appreciate that there are fewer "rules" than there used to be. I cannot count how many times I tried to force myself into a box into which I didn't fit.

However, I think we lose sight of the fact that the people on the show AGREED to be on. Yes, the initial "ambush" might have been a surprise, but they needed the participant's permission to do the rest of the show. These people knew the show was mean-spirited and participated anyway, so I cannot feel too bad for the people who were made over.

I agree that featuring “real people” instead of model figures was an important departure. This was pre Instagram and most style blogs so seeing regular women of all ages and sizes go shopping, try things on, etc., was pretty revolutionary.

Great to have your son so well outfitted for his new position. The guys I shop for all love Robert Barakett. The tees have worn like iron.

As to WNTW, I watched a few shows and agree with your discomfort. We have had quite a run of makeover programs and segments, for people and homes. I enjoy the fun, mishaps and adventures of transformations; prefer it as a joint effort towards a goal, rather than a shaming exercise.