Fashion Unzipped podcast: Trinny Woodall on beauty disasters and why she’s quitting TV
When What Not To Wear debuted on the BBC in 2001, it became a water cooler topic of conversation overnight. Trinny Woodall - and her co-host Susannah Constantine - were occasionally accused of being overly prescriptive, even cruel to the women who faced their 360 degree mirror, but "I remember once some red top said, 'do you have a story about Trinny and Susannah's show, a bad experience' and they didn't get one story to publish," says Trinny. Why? "Susannah and I revealed ourselves too."
The pair's tough-love makeovers - and this new format of reality TV - spawned spin offs and copycats. But while the time might seem ripe for a comeback with a revamped Queer Eye series going from strength to strength on Netflix, Trinny has carved out a different niche for herself on social media, sharing videos on Instagram, Facebook and Youtube offering fashion and beauty advice.
"Somebody pitched me a TV show on a mid-channel, not a main terrestrial channel, and I said 'in a week I'll be able to talk to half a million women, and I control the edit, I talk on the subjects I want to talk about, and I'm in control of the conversation. Why would I want to do a TV show?'
Her audience is so engaged with her bathroom-mirror videos that she's turned from beauty guru to entrepreneur, launching the Trinny London beauty brand in 2017.
The format may be different, but Trinny's signature frankness hasn't changed; she'll talk about her teenage acne and make-up mistakes ("I used to all this orange fake tan mousse from No7: it was orange, I was an orange. And I had acne - it was a pizza skin") her experiences of Botox, her weight.
A current trend on social media is for perfectly filtered images; Trinny will occasionally apply her make-up messily on video, since she's not wearing her glasses. Another is for unconditional self love; while she likes the sentiment, she thinks it's "clear sky thinking. It's what the nirvana should be, but the reality is always a little bit different. Women all have things that press their buttons. And it's just: how do you circumnavigate around that?"
"People would say to me, 'but Trinny, you're skinny, it doesn't matter', but still I know I have really short legs - that's just my thing. It's just putting our thing in perspective."
Instead of ignoring what we don't love, or filtering it out, Trinny would have us dress to minimise it, and maximise what we do love. She's relaxed some of those famous rules, though. "I was very strict in those days with Susannah, and there was that sense: 'you can't even go near that'. And now I'm like: 'you can go near it, you can actually touch it, but think about things around it that you do to make it work with you."
For those - myself included - wishing for a revival of Trinny's makeovers, there's hope. A new franchise saw her make over five women starting with a trip to Zara on the King's Road and new hair and make-up, and culminating in a photoshoot. "I had sent it to Charles and he said, 'call Netflix now', and I was like: 'no, I think I want to put it on Facebook or YouTube.'
"I did enjoy it, because I'm like a homing pigeon: the 360 makeover of a woman, there's nothing more exciting for me to watch. I love to see that story, otherwise I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing."
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