Fix it for Janet

FASHION guru Gok Wan is not impressed with what he finds inside Janet Street-Porter’s wardrobe. One silver dress provokes the comment that “you’re going to look like a jacket potato on bonfire night” from him.

He’s rummaging through her crowded wardrobe, bulging with designer outfits.

To be fair, she does produce a cashmere jumper from Tesco, although complains a button has come off and there was no spare one. As we speak, a minion from the supermarket chain is no doubt packing up hundreds of buttons to send to her.

She spends a fortune on big name goods but still ends up on worst dressed lists, although her invitations are from A-listers. One dress, she tells us, was chosen for her by Lulu when she had nothing to wear for Elton’s summer ball. That’s Elton John not Ben Elton, who is not known for his balls, summer or otherwise.

Gok’s challenge is to get Street-Porter into clothes from the High Street for a red carpet occasion. This is like getting a tramp to take a bath. She has to be dragged screaming into a High Street store, although it was John Lewis not Primark, I think.

Gok also takes on designer labels in his weekly catwalk challenge. He dresses models in outfits from the High Street while his rival – an excitable woman called Brix – spends, spends, spends on designer labels.

She has an open cheque book. One bag costs £1,295 and a dress £1,135. In these days of economic distress, such figures seem particularly obscene.

When the models walk down the catwalk in a Birmingham shopping centre you can’t tell who is wearing expensive and who’s wearing cheap. Scan the labels though, and you’ll see one look adds up to £2,323 and the other £305.75 (designer labels don’t bother with pence, I note).

Then the crowd has to vote on which look they prefer – High Street or designer.

In previous series, Gok’s cheap look has won every time. Alas, on this occasion, the public preferred the designer look! Brix was so excited I thought she was going to wet herself.

The “fix” this week concerned Dawn, from Cornwall, a 45-year-old recruitment officer with a bulging wardrobe. She is, Gok informs us, typical of the average British woman who has £300-worth of unworn or unwearable clothes in her wardrobe.

This causes him to sign up to a new mantra – shop less, wear more. All you need is 24 interchangeable items to look good which, in these cash-conscious days, can’t be a bad thing.

First he must persuade Dawn to downsize.

A male friend describes her dress sense as “a little bit tarty”. Gok inspects her wardrobe – “halterneck dresses in satin, a proper full-on rubber dress, very tarty, cleavage out...” and possibly the tightest dress Gok has ever seen which, considering Dawn’s full figure, isn’t overpleasing on the eye.

He proves just how cluttered her closet is by taking the contents – all 137 pieces, including 22 pairs of jeans and 17 “tarty little numbers that you could make Jordan look classy” – and hangs them up on a clothes line, a very long clothes line, on the beach at St Ives.

Local charity shops have a windfall when 90 per cent of Dawn’s clothes are given away.

Gok has his work cut out but, unlike some of TV’s fashion experts, he doesn’t insult his subjects. He lends a shoulder (pad) to cry on and make sympathetic noises about their psychological state that’s causing their bad dress sense.

Coleen’s Real Women (ITV2, 9pm).

I DON’T known what Gok would make of Coleen Rooney’s fashion sense, but in her series Coleen’s Real Women she’s championing “real” women against catwalk models.

In the final programme, campaign winners from the series fly off to New York City, in the US of A, to persuade a top model agency to sign them as their first “real woman” model. If they’re styled by Gok Wan, they might stand a better chance.