Gok’s Fashion Fix (Channel 4)

I know, I know. The world loves Gok Wan, or “Gok” as he is universally known. Gok-love is mandatory. You can see it in the eyes of his mainly female audience at the mocked-up fashion shows in Gok’s Fashion Fix. Their glazed devotion tells me that this is a church where nonbelievers are unwelcome; at which our pastor spreads his belief that high street fashion can look “high-end”. He said this phrase repeatedly with granite authority. So although Gok is meant to be camp and unthreatening (wow, another camp gay man in prime-time – we needed one right?), in his presence fashion doesn’t feel as much fun as it should.

The tone of the show is the same as 10 Years Younger and Gok’s How to Look Good Naked: breathless, witless celebrity worship, and “buy, buy, buy”. There was to be a “catwalk face-off” between Gok, who was dressing four models in high street clothes, and buyers from posh shops who were dressing four other models in expensive gear. Who would the audience choose as their favourite? Hmm, I wonder. Tough one, eh?

Gok waffled on about “street style” and went to Liverpool where he roamed the streets looking for people who showed “originality”. So there were fashion students who looked like drag queens and drag queens who were drag queens. There was a middle-aged lady who was patted on the head for not going to seed and someone who chucked paint on her tops.

The winning contestant, who will presumably be expected to take part in another “catwalk face-off” later in the series, was a young woman who wore a lot of neon and sunglasses with frames you couldn’t see out of. This was “Eighties” apparently, but she didn’t look old enough to know – and it was “Eighties” only in that it shared an aesthetic with Karma Chameleon. Anyway, Eighties fashion was pretty miserable (unless you lived near Kensington Market): Next was exotic back then.

This segment was intended to highlight what an “edgy” chap Gok was (he loves that word) and not just the manic robot the “catwalk face-off” made him seem. But his show didn’t celebrate fashion. Like so many makeover and style shows it was in thrall to the industry of fashion, and its ceaseless, enslaving and exploitative engine of trends. This show was a shop. The four “fashion queens” from fashion emporiums dressed their models in stupidly priced, not particularly flattering clothes. They squealed with delight at a pair of Christian Louboutin shoes for £525 and a Christopher Kane dress for £2,000.

Tellingly we skipped through their expensive choices (they were so going to lose) and Gok, to inject some tension, said he was “bricking it” – how would his cheap high street dresses measure up? Um, well, this wasn’t as level a playing field as we’d been led to expect. He was going to cut up all the dresses he bought and put ruches and little flowers, frills and other special touches on them. Hang on? So the high street dresses weren’t going to compete directly against the designer ones at all. Would Gok’s devoted fans buy the high street dress, then material in a haberdashery and rework their creations like him? Do many of them even know how to stitch and ruche? “Hush you, girlfriend,” Gok would no doubt admonish me.

The empty-headed flimflam churned on: “This is an It bag without the price tag”, “Platforms are the heels of the season”. “Romance” is in, which means dresses that make young women look like Stepford wives. For some reason, Alexa Chung presided over a sprint race between women wearing high-heeled shoes, which was as pointless as it sounds and looked painful not funny. Later Chung met the designer Roberto Cavalli at his Florence home and found out not one interesting fact about him, but instead tried to ingratiate herself in that wide-eyed, sly way of hers.

Geri Halliwell was humiliated (again) talking about her fashion errors, although one of the most glaring – the hideous, tiered cake-like thing she wore when the Spice Girls relaunched – went uncommented on, presumably because it was “vintage” and therefore OK. A young person won the dubious honour of taking home a pair of Halliwell’s gold hotpants just for fitting into them.

Then the “catwalk face-off”. Suddenly the competition wasn’t about which look the audience thought was “high-end” or high street but which it thought looked nicer. Shock: Gok and his adapted high street dresses won (style tip: put necklaces around shoes!) and he punched the air in jubilation. The faithful went nuts. I know dissent is futile. But this was a charmless trip to the shops, with Pastor Gok’s dubious words of wisdom drowned out by the sound of thousands of ringing tills.

tim.teeman@thetimes.co.uk

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