Television

Dressing lessons — TLC dispatches the fashion police

By Joanne Weintraub
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
01-18-2003

HOLLYWOOD Morna O’Keefe had heard of the fashion police, but she never dreamed they had the power to arrest people in public, convict them without a trial and sentence them to a brutal correctional program. Let alone that “people” meant her. O’Keefe, a 24-year-old New Yorker, was the first American fashion felon apprehended by TLC’s What Not to Wear, a domestic version of a British TV hit. WNTW bears a slight resemblance to TLC’s decorating favorite Trading Spaces, also based on a BBC original. But where the latter merely asks people to turn over a single room in their house, the former demands that they surrender their entire wardrobe, as well as any foolish ideas about their ability to dress themselves. “It’s a fashion intervention,” What Not to Wear stylist Wayne Scot Lukas explained to TV critics last week. “It’s the Betty Ford Center for clothes.” The new hour, which has a sneak preview tonight before a planned 10-week run beginning in March, features makeovers by fashion mavens Lukas and Stacy London, who like to say that, between them, they’ve dressed everyone from Janet Jackson to Roseanne Barr. Not every civilian can take the blunt appraisals and unbreakable rules handed down by the pair, who tend to describe people in terms of “hip problems” and “chest issues.” Even after learning she’d get $5,000 to spend on new clothes, one woman said “no, thanks,” series host Jillian Hamilton recalled. Another one, Lukas said, “threw up three times in one morning, in the studio. You’ll see that (on the air). I think that’s the fourth show.” “And someone else just disappeared the (second) day. Never came back. She was gone.” But O’Keefe, a marketing coordinator for a cosmetics firm, toughed it all out, from the rigors of shopping in pricey stores to the agony of having her hair cut and her makeup done by experts. “The whole experience was honestly pretty trying,” said O’Keefe, who accompanied the show’s stars to the TV industry’s winter preview sessions for critics. “These two” — she gestured toward Lukas and London — “are a handful. I wasn’t quite aware of what I was getting myself into, standing there being criticized and having to take it and not run out of the room.” The worst thing, she confessed, was knowing that she’d been turned in to the fashion cops by her own friends, who described her as an attractive woman with an unfortunate devotion to shapeless pants, Birkenstock sandals and hooded sweat shirts. As in the British version, all WNTW participants are nominated by friends or relatives, who also help the producers videotape the unsuspecting women or, infrequently, men. The fashion criminals are then confronted in public by Hamilton, who delivers the bad news that their friends think they’re a walking disaster, followed by the good news that TLC is offering $5,000 in emergency aid. O’Keefe’s crash course in fashion, from initial confrontation to dressed-to-kill conclusion, will be seen in tonight’s preview episode of WNTW. Official WNTW site: tlc.discovery.com