Trading Faces

Want a new you?" asks a promo for TLC's midday block of makeover shows. "You're not alone!" For once, an understatement in advertising. America is the home of the new you, the uncharted land where pilgrims, convicts and Gatsbys set out to remold themselves from scratch. We ran out of uncharted land, but we didn't run out of the urge for self-reinvention. So we turned that desire inward in ever tighter circles, expressing our idealized selves through our homes, our clothes and our bodies.

Television has followed a similar pattern. A few years ago, led by the TLC hit Trading Spaces, came a new breed of home-makeover shows that were really homeowner-makeover shows. A designer would look into your soul and give you a living room that expressed your true nature--all on a $1,000 budget! Now TV is giving out new wardrobes, new lifestyles, new careers and even new noses in an onslaught of makeover series that use reality TV's titillation and tear jerking to offer a new you, vicariously, dozens of times a week.

This new genre, like America itself, received most of its seed from overseas--the BBC's cruel-to-be-kind hit What Not to Wear, now in reruns on BBC America. "There are things not even your best friends will tell you" about how you look, say fashionista inquisitors Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine. "But we're not your best friends. And we will." For instance, those track pants make your rear end look like a watermelon. Your overtight bra makes you look as if you have four breasts. And that casual outfit is "a little bit Mr. Garbage Collector." What Not subjects win a £2,000 ($3,300) shopping spree, with a catch: they have to turn themselves and their closets over to Woodall, Constantine and a battery of hidden cameras for a detailed, unsparing, public dressing down.

The show works, however, because the duo, two fashion journalists, are blunt but never mean. They represent opposite poles of the female form (Woodall is a twig, Constantine is Rubenesque), and they are as frank about their own bodies as about their victims'. There's a towel-snapping, locker-room sexuality about them--they spend a lot of time grabbing their guests' and each other's breasts and butts--and real heart behind their snippiness.

Deep down, What Not is not about fashion; it is about accepting your limits and your mortality. Almost every episode identifies the point when the subject got too old, busy and tired to update her look. "People hold on to the era when they felt most beautiful," says Woodall as the two dissect a fortyish woman whose wardrobe is frozen at the time of Charles and Diana's wedding. (Of course, if this were the '80s, they'd be preaching the figure-enhancing wonders of the shoulder pad.)