Dressing down

I was watching What Not to Wear the other day and as usual was amazed to see how much a change in the way a person looks can affect the way they feel about themselves and interact with the world around them.

For those of you who don't know the premise of the programme, let me explain: a fashion disaster is nominated by their friends and family for a make-over by two plain speaking fashion journalists (Susannah Constantine and Trinny Woodall), who ambush the said nominee in a public place, tell the poor unsuspecting victim what it is they're doing wrong with their clothing choices and give them £2,000 to go shopping for a new wardrobe.

Susannah and Trinny monitor what they buy, all the while being brutally honest with the shopper when they don't follow the rules.

Inevitably, there are tears and tantrums and more often than not a refusal to believe that they have a fashion problem in the first place or that the fashion experts know what they're talking about but at the end of the process every single make-over results in the 'victim' looking and feeling like a new and far more attractive person.

Male or female, everybody ends up admitting that their quality of life has gone up and that they feel much more confident about themselves. It seems like such a frivolous programme and when I first started watching it I thought it was sad that people placed so much importance on looks but as the episodes went on I realised that it went much deeper than that.

A shy woman who couldn't find a job because she was too introverted to interact with people around her, turned into a confident and successful woman with a career she loved. A middle-aged woman who had given up and let herself go after her husband divorced her turned into a fun loving man magnet and a brassy, in-your-face, mutton-dressed-as-lamb woman whose family and friends were too embarrassed to be seen in public with her was transformed into an elegant and stylish creature whose daughters wanted to borrow her clothes.

These are just a few examples of the people that have been helped and whose lives have been changed for the better and if a change of clothes, a hair cut and a lesson in how to apply make-up can do that much for a person's self-esteem then maybe it's not so shallow after all.

How we feel about ourselves goes a long way to determining how we deal with the world around us.

Whether it's something as seemingly superficial as refusing to go for a night out with the girls because you're having a bad hair day or something more emotionally damaging such as not wanting to be seen in public after a bad accident has left you seriously scarred, the way we feel about the way we look can seriously impede the way we choose to live our lives.

Looking good makes us feel more confident while looking bad makes us want to hide away from the outside world. And sadly looks are a two-way street. Just as we're affected by our own looks, so are others around us.

The fact of the matter is, right or wrong, it's human nature to judge people on the way they look and more often than not, if we don't like the way they look we dismiss them out of hand.

A person walking into a job interview wearing tatty jeans and a T-shirt that shows off arms full of bawdy tattoos isn't likely to make it past the receptionist.

They may be highly intelligent and better qualified than anyone else but will never get the chance show how well they could do because the way they look gives the impression that they can't be bothered making an effort to look presentable.

Personality and ability is all well and good but like it or not, until we get to know a person, looks do matter. And if something as simple as a change of clothes can have a substantial and lasting effect on a person's life then a programme as seemingly frivolous as What Not to Wear is in fact a life altering concept.