I found SUCH a strange article on the Daily Mail site the other day.

First of all, I have no idea who Vicky Ward is, nor why I should care what she thinks, but she struck me as a woman who has absolutely no sense of perspective. How self-obsessed can one person BE, exactly?

She shows a perfectly nice picture of a happy young woman in a pretty wedding dress on her wedding day and decries her (former) self as fat, frumpy, ugly. No she wasn't - she looked perfectly nice. Really. The dress is lovely - low neck, tight on her neat bust, crisp silk fabric. I think what she really has a problem with is the man on her arm. 

Vicky Ward is a woman who clearly has a problem with herself. Herself as she is now - in 6in stilettos, bleach blonde and a skimpy little frock that's far too young for her - is a creation she's spent many years creating. 

But one wonders why. And what kind of person she might have become if she had worked on her personality instead of turning herself into a teenage boy's idea of what a woman should look like. 

The Daily Mail is full of this sort of crap lately - not that it's ever been anything other than a filth rag of an excuse for a newspaper anyway. But it used to be faintly readable on the Femail pages. Lately, though, I pick up a lot of pro-surgery, pro-Botox, pro-putting-women-back-in-a-Barbie-box articles that I feel must come from the (male) suits up on high. Gone is the lovely size 14 Alexandra Shulman, for instance, but the skinny size-8 body-dysmorphic Liz Jones remains. 

Still, at least Vicky Ward's readers retain a sense of perspective. I particularly loved this comment:

"Please no more articles about this vacuous waste of energy, I am so bored of it already and by the looks of the comments here, other people are too! Someone needs to sit her down and make it clear that, having overhauled her NORMAL body and replaced it what something she clearly considers as better, her husband RAN OFF with someone else! He married her in 1997 for her, and oops she turned into a high-maintenance NYC lady who lunches - nice to look at but perhaps not someone you'd want to share your life with. What a result... at least she'll never be lonely with her fake body and fake friends and fake lifestyles. If she had no money to maintain this facade, would her "friends" and admirers love her for herself? Umm, wouldn't think so from the article content."

Couldn't have put it better myself.  

I watched a couple of makeover programmes on telly last night, with mixed results.

The first was How to Look Good Naked, presented by Gok Wan. This is new to me, though if memory serves, my sister is a fan. I think it's been going for a couple of years on British telly.

I can see why my sister likes it. Although the programme is a tad formulaic and also a bit loud for me, like much of British culture, Gok is the kind of gay best friend every woman needs - frank, encouraging and full of endless fillips. He is also very kind, which is a marked contrast to Trinny and Susannah. He was apparently very fat in his youth, so he has an understanding of body image.

The amount of nudity shown would have been shocking on prime-time TV even a decade ago, but it must be a relief to many women to see women of normal height and weight and degree of hairiness shown on television, talking openly about their bodies, rather than the stick-thin teenagers we're all supposed to emulate. I was once a member of The Sanctuary, so I have no illusions about what real women look like...

Essentially, HTLGN is a self-help programme aimed at improving a woman's self-esteem and in the episode shown, Gok played a couple of simple tricks that were very telling. The subject had an obsession with her 'huge' post-childbirth belly, so he lined up a bunch of women of varying waist sizes and asked her to position herself where she thought she fitted (this is apparently a staple of the programme). She placed herself with a waist measurement of about 36 inches. In fact, her waist measured 30 inches and she was a UK size 10 - her image of herself was completely off kilter. Not one subject, so far, says Gok, has ever put herself in the right place, because we all suffer body dysmorphia, thinking of ourselves as bigger than we are. 

He also got her to stand in front of a mirror and then pinned back her loose baggy clothes and cut off the excess fabric to show her quite how much she was wearing - two or three dress sizes too much, every inch of which made her look larger. This is something I wish I could do with a lot of people, to be honest. He also made her chuck out her godawful hippy wardrobe and attempt a degree of personal grooming. By the end of the programme her confidence had been so boosted that she was in her first relationship for three years, pregnant and about to get married. So much for appearances not mattering.

The programme I watched afterwards was Trinny and Susannah Undress the Nation, which was a poor offering in comparison. I have always enjoyed What Not To Wear, but the new programme (on UK's Channel Four rather than the Beeb) lacks the in-depth focus on one or two subjects that always made the old series worth watching no matter how gimmicky the presentation.

Our relationship with our appearance is always a complex one, especially as woman is traditionally the 'observed' sex (read John Berger's Ways of Seeing for more on this concept), and without the psychological aspect of WHY a woman presents the appearance she does, Undress the Nation was simply a whole bunch of double-quick makeovers of people you neither knew nor cared about.

Nor did most of the women look much better afterwards than before, as they were simply dressed off the rack with whatever the presenters had to hand, rather than choosing a whole new wardrobe according to a new set of criteria, as on What Not To Wear.

On the whole, this made it much less involving, and although I might give it a couple of more tries, I have a feeling this is a programme I won't find unmissable.   

I was watching What Not To Wear the other day.

It is a guilty pleasure for me. I always get the feeling that I should really be doing something more intellectual instead, but the truth is, I love it.

I speak, of course, of the former UK version with Trinny and Susannah. Since we get things in France some years after they were broadcast in the UK, I have no idea how old this programme was, but it was the one where they made over women in their 70s.

It set me thinking about whether, and why, clothes are important. Because personally, I think they are, though I sometimes find it hard to articulate, and this programme partly highlighted why.

One woman, whose husband had clearly left her some years before, felt frumpy and unsexy and old. In an interview, he admitted that he couldn't remember her, in their marriage, EVER looking sexy. Right there, I couldn't help thinking, was possibly one reason that they had split up. Don't we all - male or female - want our partner to look attractive, so that we can show them off?

This woman was also a member of a theatre troupe but never took to the stage, preferring to remain in the background and do the costumes. She also enjoyed dancing, but only did it at home, alone, because she felt too frumpy to go out. Clearly, a huge makeover was called for.  Once thoroughly fettled, she felt more confident to take part in things and re-engage in life. Such is the power of a 'trivial' matter like appearance.

Another lightbulb moment was a comment from Susannah when she and Trinny were trying to pick two women from their shortlist of five. She was looking at a very ladylike old lady in a hat and tasteful clothing, and she whispered: "It's just that if I was a mugger, I'd think: YES." And she was right - this woman looked like a pushover, like the kind of little old lady you could just knock over and nick her handbag. Let's face it, we don't live in a perfect world and nobody in their right mind wants to look like a victim.

We will never know if Trinny and Susannah could have made this woman look more current, because they didn't pick her. But the two they did pick were utterly transformed. OK, they took 20 years off the pair of them, though I don't like to focus on the 'young' angle. But the combination of decent haircuts, some makeup to brighten up pallid faces, current spectacle frames instead of ones 20 years out of date and casual, comfortable, trendy clothes made these woman suddenly look like women you'd like to talk to rather than inmates of a nursing home. Like 'us' instead of 'them'. 

Perhaps clothing, and our appearance generally, is important because it's something that we choose. And in choosing, we send out messages about who we are and what we think of ourselves.

Often, this is all people have to go on and our appearance therefore gets us judged before we even open our mouths - what's the saying: 80 per cent how you look, 20 per cent what you say? Something like that, anyway. 

I have a friend, a man-of-the-people leftwinger, who protests volubly about this kind of thing. People shouldn't judge on appearances, he says, and I know what he means. But there's no sense in railing at the world for what it isn't. We are visual animals, and we take visual cues when summing up situations. "You do exactly the same," I said to him. "If you were waiting for two people to turn up, and one was the insurance agent, and the other was the plumber. And one person comes to the door and they're dressed in overalls, which one are they?"

"Yes, but..." he said.

But there is no 'but', is there? We all of us, every day, put on a sandwich board of sorts that proclaims:  this is me, I'm such-and-such. The trick, as we get older and as our lives change, is to find the sandwich board that is appropriate to our current lives and to who we are inside.

It was instructive in What Not To Wear to see how many of the women featured had not bought new clothes for 20 years. In their 70s, they were wearing the clothes they had bought in their 50s, when they last felt like themselves. The truth is, you need a tweak, and an honest look at yourself for every decade. I am not the same at 45 as I was at 35. I will not be the same at 55. And the person I was at 25 is another country altogether.

We all of us need to live in the present, not the past.