Retail therapists

Besides, sartorially speaking, the normal rules of engagement were suspended when I arrived at Trinny’s North Kensington home to find her dressed in pale-pink floral pyjamas, several sizes too small, with her three-and-a-half-year-old daughter Lyla sitting on her knee in a matching pair. Surely an infringement of every one of their famous style rules. “I know, I know,” said Trinny, laughing. “But my daughter insists.”

So I follow them upstairs and sit on the edge of the bed because it is the only surface in the room that doesn’t have something on it. And in the event I’m reprieved. Trinny, who is one of the most energetic and driven people I have ever met, is fully concentrated on putting outfits together in preparation for a photographic shoot to showcase their new coat and trouser range for Littlewoods Direct. She holds a beige shirt that she has plucked from her wardrobe against Susannah. “Shit colour,” she says emphatically before rushing off again.

“I’m going to do a pee that might turn into a poo,” she tells us in her perfectly rounded vowels, heading into the bathroom. Her husband, businessman Jonny Elichaoff, is apparently asleep on the top floor of the house, dispatched during the night for snoring too loudly.

It is nine o’clock in the morning, and by all accounts, an average day in the Trinny and Susannah road show, which, as well as The Times interview, includes a lunch-time Botox session for Trinny, a school sports day for Susannah (she has three children aged 8, 6 and almost 4), followed by filming for their next ITV series on body shape and a charity do for Trinny in the evening. Lesser mortals would weep at such a schedule. Susannah says she often does, but Trinny persuades her it will be fine.

“Sometimes I feel totally overwhelmed,” says Susannah, who suffers from a combination of working-mother guilt and what she describes as a natural tendency towards laziness. “When the schedule arrives I have panic attacks and Trinny will sit me down and explain the reality. Once I’m in it, I’m fine. With Trinny it’s the reverse.”

“I’m calm on the outside and a flood inside,” interjects Trinny, staring at me hard. “In situations, Susannah is an amazing rock.”

That I think sums up the only slight discrepancy between the people you see on television and their off-screen persona: Trinny, 43, is even more energetic (she says she is “very manic”), a classic workaholic, and Susannah, 45, more laid-back and tolerant. Other than that, they are uncannily the same.

Beside me, Susannah stands in a pink bra, pulling on an elegant black tuxedo coat from their Littlewoods range, which she describes as “prescriptive clothing”. There are trousers and coats designed to shrink big bums, reduce thighs or flatten tummies. Some do all three.

“For us, it’s all about shape, and how that is going to cure a bodily defect,” explains Susannah, who is fond of medical analogies. She is trying to see past a glass cabinet filled with vintage handbags into the mirror. Trinny is definitely a hoarder. Her shoe cupboard is open and I lose count when I reach 78. “We’re like clothing doctors,” Susannah continues. “It’s like going to a doctor and saying, ‘I’ve got f****** huge hips, what can I do? And the doctor prescribes a coat that covers up the hips and makes your waist look tiny.” The coat she is wearing is particularly good for “big tits”, she says. It looks great.

A clothing range is the next logical phase in their mission to revolutionise the nation’s dress sense by convincing us to dress to suit our shape. It follows the huge success of their Magic Knickers, four best-selling books, and all those television programmes where ugly ducklings are turned into swans by reinventing their wardrobe.

Since they began a newspaper column 13 years ago, advocating affordable high-street fashion for women and using their own bodies to illustrate what might suit different shapes, Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine have slowly moved down the food chain to become unlikely clothing advisers to the masses and champions of the female form in all its imperfections. They don’t advocate dieting. Their target audience is the Sun reader, the Littlewoods buyer and the ITV viewer. “The kind of women who never put themselves first,” says Susannah. They fervently believe that we can all look good in high-street clothes if we can learn to wear what suits us. In a curious way they have democratised fashion.

They have an almost messianic mission to change the way women think about how they dress, especially those who have neither the time nor the money to think about themselves. Although Susannah describes herself as “officially destitute” (unlikely, apart from the fact that she and her husband have just bought a 120-acre property in Sussex), and jokes about wanting to make “shitloads of money”, and Trinny is fearsomely ambitious and talks about things like “longevity of career,” there is no doubting their passion for what they do.

“If you ask anyone why they are driven, it’s not just money, it’s not just a need to prove themselves, it’s a combination of things, and for us if we can get women to look at themselves in terms of shape, not size, if Suze and I achieve that as our little gravestone thing, then that would be a f****** big achievement,” Trinny says.

They throw around statistics and interesting facts that they have unearthed: 36 per cent of British women are size 16; 46 per cent of British women wear a uniform to work. They have identified 12 core body shapes. Their exhaustive investigations into the relationship between clothes and body shape are reminiscent of Isabella Beeton’s scientific approach to cooking and cleaning. In a recent experiment for their next television series, they discovered that in a group of 1,000 women, 976 were wearing the wrong sized bra. Their book signings take hours because they spend hours giving advice. Susannah has even been known to lend her bra (she is a big fan of Elle McPherson’s range) for other women to try on.

They are, however, unlikely advocates, because despite their protestations about big tits (Susannah), and lack of tits (Trinny), by the standards of most fortysomething mothers, they have amazing bodies. Trinny is on the wrong side of skinny, but not anorexic, one of those people who burn calories because they never sit down. She says that her idea of relaxing is tidying her wardrobe. “Trinny is a natural worrier,” says Susannah. “Once the thing she’s worried about has been resolved, she’ll start to worry about something else.”

Susannah, in contrast, is on the right side of voluptuous and more laid-back. She loses things likes credit cards and keys. When I ask her whether she has anyone to organise her, she answers wryly, “Trinny.” She works out with a trainer three times a week, and despite complaining about rolls of fat around her stomach, it looks pretty flat to me. But they illustrate the fact that few women are satisfied with their bodies, and the books that followed their huge success with the BBC television series What Not to Wear prove they are not afraid to have their own flaws photographed if it helps to get a point across.

But mostly they are improbable because their democratic fashion credentials are so at odds with the privilege of their background (think country houses, ski chalets and very famous friends). They first met at a dinner party given by Susannah’s former boyfriend Viscount Linley (others include cricketer Imran Khan). Susannah, now 45, was a kind of It Girl of the early Eighties and a favourite of Princess Margaret. Both have wealthy parents – Trinny’s father was a banker and her grandfather, Sir John Duncason, ran British Steel during the war; Susannah is the daughter of shipping magnate Joseph Constantine – Eton and Coldstream Guards. She went to St Mary’s Wantage, the classic posh girls’ boarding school, which she says she hated because she was homesick, missed her parents and animals, and was too shy and insecure to make friends. She tells a funny story about the school writing to her to ask whether she would come back and speak to current pupils about her success. “I wrote, ‘No f****** way’ on the top of the letter, and my PA accidentally sent it back,” she says. “They wrote a horrified letter back saying they will never let me anywhere near the school again.”

After school, Susannah did a year of Montessori training and drifted into PR, both classic Sloane Ranger territory. She worked for various clothes designers and became a style consultant for Harrods before heading to The Telegraph, where she wrote pieces for the sports pages. When she met Trinny, who had the idea for the column, she had the contacts and experience to make it happen. Trinny did various jobs and worked briefly for a commodities firm in the city. Their natural stomping ground should be Kensington and Chelsea (where they both, at different times, attended Queens Gate school).

There is no attempt to shy away from the class issue. There are no faux East End accents. Trinny confesses that she initially confused Littlewoods with Lillywhites. Susannah talks about horses and dogs a lot. They are typical of those strident, uninhibited, eccentric women who characterise the British ruling class.

Sounding like a bossy, horsey woman clearly isn’t an impediment to a successful television career. Millions of people watch their programmes. And there are precedents: the Two Fat Ladies and Barbara Woodhouse spring to mind. But it could have presented a barrier to dealing with ordinary folks, who might have resented the plummy accents and acerbic comments. Because for those of you who haven’t watched What Not to Wear or Trinny and Susannah Undress, they are sometimes breathtakingly direct.

They have no compunction about telling someone their outfit is “shit” or asking a couple how often they have sex. It is difficult to understand why people would put themselves through that kind of public mortification at the hands of two bossy, posh birds. But they seem to bond with people, and although caustic, they are never gratuitously nasty and always compliment people on their good points. The people involved in their programmes genuinely seem pleased with the results.

“When it comes to aesthetics and how a woman looks they will take anything. But none of it is gratuitous. It’s totally from the heart,” Trinny interjects. There is sometimes a seamless dialogue between them. It is a bit like talking to twins.

Their new ITV series has come in for particular criticism. While What Not to Wear cleverly exposed the complex emotional relationship between what women wear and how they feel, the ITV incarnation pushes the boundaries much further with its aim of helping couples resolve relationship difficulties by transforming the way they dress. Many of the female participants in particular have pitifully low self-esteem. Doubts have been raised about whether Trinny and Susannah are properly qualified to deal with the depth of problems exposed.

It makes gripping, and often excruciating, viewing. The format involves Trinny and Susannah deconstructing a couple’s emotional relationship from the way they dress and interact with each other. There are plenty of direct questions about their sex life. “Are you gay?” Trinny asks one shocked-looking husband, when she discovers that he and his wife sleep in separate bedrooms. The emotional climax of the show is “The Naked Truth”, when couples stand naked behind a screen and use a hand-held camera to highlight bits of each other’s bodies that they particularly like. In one case, this involved a woman who had had a mastectomy showing her husband the scar for the first time in six years. In another, a wife admits to having an affair. Then just when it all feels way too voyeuristic, there is catharsis, as husband and wife undergo a total transformation under Trinny and Susannah’s watchful eye. Although in every case participants look infinitely better after the Trinny and Susannah treatment, it is difficult to believe that some of the deep-rooted unhappiness exposed by the programme can truly be remedied by a makeover.

Trinny and Susannah clearly think so. “Susannah and I have always felt that the psychology of clothing does make people change a mind-set, so if we use that and we help someone feel more confident about themselves and build them up that’s great,” says Trinny. “That’s the qualification we have.”

What is perhaps most revealing about this series is the empathy that they have for the people involved, particularly the women. They both say that filming the series is emotionally draining. Susannah says she often goes home “in pieces”, but that Trinny cries more.

There are still trenchant comments, but they are tempered by an unexpected compassion. “You have got to stop seeing yourself as a victim, take control and take responsibility,” Trinny tells one woman. One senses it is the kind of thing she has learnt from experience.

I ask whether they can relate to these problems because of difficulties they have overcome in their own lives. Perhaps surprising, given her apparent on-screen confidence and lack of inhibition, Susannah says she has suffered from bouts of shyness and insecurity since she was a child. Endearingly, she says that even now she feels ill at ease at parties unless she is with Trinny and her husband, Danish entrepreneur Sten Bertelson. “In social situations I still feel scared. My best friend and husband give me the freedom to be myself.”

Susannah describes how she became very close to a 24-year-old mother in the series, who was suffering from anxiety. “I identified with her a lot. I couldn’t step out of it. There was something inside her that I felt in my solar plexus. I knew there was a part of her that came from the same place I did. I don’t know if it was the vulnerability, the insecurity. I don’t know if it was something to do with her past, but I felt it. I was close to tears with her a lot of the time.”

She looks close to tears as she talks about it now. I ask whether her empathy might have stemmed from the fact that she suffered from post-natal depression. “I did have therapy sessions. It’s not something I want to talk about,” she says.

Trinny was sent away to what she describes as a “cruel” and “sadistic” boarding school with her elder sister (she is the youngest of six children, the eldest three from her father’s first marriage) when she was just six and a half for three years, until her family went to live in Germany. She had terrible acne from her early teens until her early twenties when she took a course of Roaccutane and had laser treatment to remove the scars. Most significantly, she was an alcoholic and addict of one kind or another – she is reluctant to talk about the specifics – from her late teens until she was 26. She still regularly attends Alcoholics Anonymous and is an active campaigner for the Chemical Dependency Trust. She has had periods in rehab and therapy. She also underwent nine rounds of IVF until she conceived Lyla, and suffered two miscarriages.

This is not territory that she is comfortable exploring. “I much prefer in my friendships that people come and tell me their problems than I tell them mine. I’ve always felt uncomfortable in that role, in the role of revealing too much of myself,” she says.

When I ask her how she can reconcile her apparently happy childhood with the descent into addiction, she says staring at me steely-eyed from her kitchen that “it is an impossible question to answer”. Susannah interjects with a question about the order of outfits for the shoot. They are very protective. If they sense the other is uncomfortable with a line of questioning they change the subject.

They are stronger together than apart. I ask Susannah about Trinny’s well-documented meltdown on a celebrity version of The Apprentice (she cried after Piers Morgan manhandled her and was so frantic that another contestant asked if she had obsessive-compulsive disorder), and she says that she wished she had been on the show with her friend to “anchor the mania”. If anything, their off-screen rapport is stronger than their television partnership, perhaps because it is rooted in genuine friendship. “We were not manufactured for TV,” Trinny says proudly. They even go on holiday together with their families so that they can have quality time away from work.

They clearly have a great depth of friendship and ultimately that is, I think, one of the things that makes them most attractive. Women can relate to that. And it is the kind of friendship that is inclusive of other people. Interestingly, most of the people who work with them regularly have been with them for years. They make people feel comfortable and they make it a lot of fun to be with them. By the end of the interview, I pluck up the courage to ask Susannah whether she thinks my bra fits. She stares at my chest: “You’re wearing a 34C and you should be in a 32DD.” I get home and check. She’s right.

The Trinny & Susannah range for Littlewoods Direct is available at www.littlewoodsdirect.com. Their new book, The Body Shape Bible, will be published in September (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)