Has society progressed passed the need for What Not to Wear? This week for STAR⟡MAIL, writer Kylie Harrington unpacks the legacy of a reality TV juggernaut.

What Not To Want

Writer Kylie Harrington unpacks the legacy of a reality TV juggernaut. You can read more from Harrington on her Substack, Acme Thoughts.

The 2012 season premiere of TLC’s What Not To Wear opens with a montage of nervous women stepping into a hall of mirrors. “Over the last ten years, we’ve encountered countless fashion faux pas,” says host Clinton Kelly in a smirking, daytime newscaster tone. 

“But pretty much all of them fall into three major categories,” adds co-host Stacy London, over a supercut of hiked hemlines, billowing sweatshirts and ripped jeans. “Exceedingly sexy, hiding behind frump, or plain crazy.”

Then, they explain the show’s conceit, which should be familiar to anyone who came of age in the 2000s and/or has ever used a hotel television: style-blind contestants are secretly nominated by their friends and family (rude), tailed by cameras for two weeks (weird), then ambushed by Kelly and London for a very public intervention. They’re offered five days and $5,000 to completely gut, reassess and redefine their wardrobe. But of course, there’s a catch: the contestants can’t make these decisions for themselves – their choices are all outsourced to Kelly and London. The stylist-hosts act as an exaggerated stand-in for the general public, repeatedly telling the contestants just how harshly they’ll be judged if they continue dressing by their own rules. 

The resulting product feels particularly mid-2000s in its astringent, straightforward bitchiness. If Hedi Slimane and Alexander McQueen defined the fashion of the period, WNTW seemed to articulate the era’s approach to the more pedestrian work of simply getting dressed, which seemed to be defined, at least for women, by a few key goals: don’t look too sexy (read: slutty), don’t look too frumpy (read: fat) and don’t look too crazy (read: attention-grabbing). 

Despite its reductive approach, WNTW was insanely popular, spawning books, brand deals and tabloid drama. And the fantasy it offered – a complete fashion reset – seems to still resonate. Last summer, after more than a decade off the air, Kelly and London reunited to announce an 8-episode Amazon Prime Video revival, to much fanfare. But the return does feel like they’re emerging from a cryo chamber. The ways we talk about, value and buy clothes have changed radically since 2013, and it’s hard to imagine the old format adapting to fit. Evolving perspectives on body diversity and gender expression have rendered many of its points moot, and an accelerating trend cycle, propped up by one-click buying and an infinite scroll, has widened the lens of what’s considered fashionable. That’s where Amazon’s involvement starts to feel a bit suspect – but we’ll get back to that later. 

The new show is titled Wear Whatever The F You Want, and seems intent on leaving the prim rules of its predecessor behind, embracing personal choice and expression instead. In the kickoff press release, the hosts declare they want to “celebrate individual style, not prescribe it” and have “zero interest in telling people what to do, based on society’s norms — because there are no more norms!” 

The overly cheery tone seems odd, though – because in the original show, ‘norms’ were kind of the whole point. WNTW never pretended to help its subjects find their “individual style” – no one cared about woo-woo shit like that in the 2000s. It gave them what the era demanded – an unchanging template for a very specific, cookie-cutter variety of femininity. And it did it the same way every. Damn. Time.

Transformations on the show were ruthless and efficient: once contestants agreed to the gimmick, they were frog-marched into a mirrored chamber and forced to confront their “unflattering” choices from every angle. When body-based insecurities came up, the hosts offered backhanded consolation: We understand why you hate yourself, sweetie…have you considered a structured jacket? They promised the tearful subject that both their “true self” and their “best self” (which were somehow the same thing) were, conveniently, just $5,000 away. 

Then, the shopping montage. The dated faux-luxury of the mid-2000s department store could be an essay all its own, but this was where the show’s retrograde and genuinely strange view of femininity really came into play. There was a borderline-psychotic fixation on creating an “hourglass figure” and a suspicious amount of oddly-belted trench coats and fitted trousers as a result. Shirts that “bring out your eye color” (whatever that means) were the gold standard, and discussions of individual taste and gender expression were nowhere to be found. On this show, as in the era that birthed it, fashion began and ended with the body, and the body was something to be hated. 

One particularly rough watch from 2012 illustrates the approach perfectly: a woman who was only comfortable in mens-cut camo shirts is labeled a ‘tomboy,’ criticized until she submits to dresses and heels, and, at the end of the hour, proudly reintroduced to her friends and family with a bubble necklace and an HR-training-video smile. There’s a Stockholm syndrome vibe to every episode, but it’s particularly pronounced in this one.

To be clear, WNTW didn’t guide its subjects toward personal style – not in any real sense. True style is iterative, slow and thoughtful. It’s the complete opposite of the show’s compressed transformation process, requiring a careful inventory of one’s own taste and values and accumulating a patina of personal history along the way. It can’t be achieved in a one-week closet cleanout or manic shopping spree, even when cameras are rolling. You know this, I know this, Clinton Kelly and Stacy London probably know this too. 

What WNTW offered was more like a crash course in Red Lobster propriety, treating every contestant’s complex self-presentation with a uniform dose of constrictive femininity and rapid consumption. Wear Whatever the F You Want (I literally hate typing out this title) promises to champion individual expression over rigid rules, undoing some of its predecessor’s obvious damage. But the emphasis on quick, high-volume consumption remains. 

Which brings us to the cardboard-colored, pee bottle-toting elephant in the room: the reboot’s financial backer, Amazon. 

If the essential style sin of the mid-2000s was an overemphasis on narrow, highly gendered templates, the 2020s’ equivalent is the equation of consumption with expression – which Amazon, obviously, can get behind. The retail giant does promise to let users wear (read: buy) whatever the F they want, provided it’s cheap and poorly-manufactured, and will likely use the good-vibes rebrand of What Not To Wear to add nostalgic zhuzh to this corrosive view of personal style. But ultimately, a frantically-accumulated, next-day-shipping marked closet is just as ugly as those awful trench coats. It’s just based on a new set of fictions.

I’m super interested in the personal styling services of The Ethical Stylist, aka Twitter’s Lakyn Thee Stylist. Her super personalized approach seems very different than the Stacy and Clinton treatment:

On a similar wave, I love what Clara is doing to the makeover show genre with her series Clarafied:

And, lastly, my favorite movie makeover: