‘It’s about making people comfortable’: Is Gok Wan the nicest man in fashion?
Gok Wan
“I like to see myself as a mate. I never really think of myself as a celeb. I let people into my life — whether that's me DJing in my kitchen or letting people into my vulnerabilities, or cooking them food. And I think that's where that comes from.”
These are not the typical musings of a celebrity stylist — the brooding, gaunt, unforgiving muses made famous by Rachel Zoe.
Of course, Gok Wan, the 49-year-old bona fide industry fixture who has, for nearly two decades, developed the analytical eye of an old-school fashion critic while also reaping the benefits of being someone people actually want to work with, is something a little more sui generis.
In person, he is warm and generous; choosing long hugs over handshakes, and sitting beside you, instead of across. His skin is bright and light brown while his hair is barely graying and closely cropped. On his hands are a dozen tiny, delicate tattoos — a bowl of noodles on his left pinky, a smiley face, to mean raving, on the finger next — each of which bestow deep meaning.
“My best friend is dying of cancer, so a lot of the tattoos I’ve got, we’ve gotten together,” he smiles. Here, I notice a moustache tattoo on the inner-side of a finger on his right hand, otherwise known as a fingerstache, a trend reminiscent of the early aughts. “That’s really old,” he laughs. “I would be surprised if it was new,” I respond. “You know what, that’s a very polite way of saying that is so naff.”
To his audience, Wan is many things — consultant, director, musician, therapist, cook — yet his story is one of finite firsts. Born two months premature with jaundice, twisted legs and a hole in his heart, Wan was so small that his nappy was a face cloth. (Today he stands at 6ft 1in.) His family had little money, so they lived in a static caravan on the outskirts of Leicester while they endured the long days of restaurant ownership.
The Wan family — mother Myra, dad, John (original name Tun Shing), sister Oilen, and brother Kwoklyn — moved into a council house when Gok was two months old. “Still, today, I call myself a waiter,” he smiles.
“And that is the God's honest truth. All of what I do today I learned working in my parents’ restaurants. Every part of my job comes from catering. It's about service. It's about making people feel comfortable. It's about delivering products. It's about entertaining. I'm kind of a waiter for different products. Some days it’s for fashion, some for food, some for music. But it’s always about service. I’m always just trying to get people to feel more comfortable than before they first met me.”
Wan is a stylist with the soul of a comic and the mind of a vendor (when asked about his opinion on the neck-break speed of streaming, he replies: “as long as people are watching it”), splitting the finest hairs with unblushing lyricism. He made a career out of speaking to, dressing and appreciating women — an emotional involvement that spawns in part from nostalgia.
“I love women,” he says. “I have done from a very young age. I surrounded myself with my sister's friends and my mom and my aunts. And even at school, actually, I was always really drawn towards the female teachers. I just seem to have a lot more in common with women. I mean, I really enjoy being a man. But the company, and I guess the sociology of women, is something I’ve always been fascinated by.”
On television and, indeed, online, Wan has encouraged women to project the kind of attitude that demands attention; confident, sexy, yet, crucially, in an accessible way. He does so by acting as both therapist and stylist, soothing his subjects’ anxieties by exclaiming, as he dresses them, that their bodies have never looked better. Yet that kindness has rarely been extended to himself.
Wan started as a writer and stylist, following training at the Central School of Speech and Drama, before being plucked from obscurity to present, in 2006, the roaringly successful
At this time, he was also suffering from anorexia nervosa, and sometimes eating just two spoons of honey a day to stay upright. “I got as much out of the show as the contributors did,” he says, plainly.
“And I didn't realise that until I was fortunate enough to have hindsight. I wrote about it in my autobiography, you know, that I hadn't realised that I was going on a journey with those women, which is why I think the show was so successful and so authentic… because it was real.”
Since then, followers (he hates the word “fans”) have come to rely on him to shoot off unvarnished takes on the fashion industry’s ingrained fatphobia, fired off to his 1.1M Instagram followers.
“I want to share these pictures with you because lately, I have received a lot of messages from people who tell me they’re struggling with their body- especially due to weight gain during lockdown,” he wrote in an Instagram caption in June 2020, sharing alongside two photos of himself at different ends of the weight spectrum.
“When I look at pictures of me when my body was obese and pictures of me when my body was anorexically thin I realise one wonderful truth. Both of these bodies are exceptional — regardless of their size.”
That said, an aesthete’s sensibility hasn’t always won over audiences — not all of his projects have thrived; the 2008 series which he co-presented with Myleene Klass, was described as "vulgarity masquerading as self-help" — yet his dab-hand, multi-hypenate approach boasts endearment in a world bemusedly frustrated with itself.
Today, we’re speaking to discuss TK Maxx’s festive search for Ireland’s Greatest of All Time Shoppers; a mechanic which seeks to find Ireland’s savviest TK Maxx shoppers and reward them for their plight. It’s exactly the kind of campaign Wan shines at; average-person-centric; affordable retail; savvy to the point of gamified. (His golden tips on how to catch a TK Maxx bargain sit in a video on the brand’s Instagram profile.)
Wan’s own style has consistently been one of rigorous schematism and elegance; oversized scarves; dark, tailored blazers; and black-rimmed glasses that remain so synonymous with his style, people wear them to dress as him for Halloween.
“[My style is] completely chaotic,” he says, from a lounge position on the couch. “All over the place. I mean, if I could live in sportswear, I would. I've always been that way. But actually, you know, it’s a little bit like Lee McQueen, not that I would ever compare myself to one of the greatest masters of fashion, but the fact that he had a uniform, the dark jeans and boots and the cardigan and stuff.”
Here, I mention how his uniform, to me, is a Breton stripe. He laughs. “Do you know what? I started wearing stripes because I was so fed up with stylists and other people saying you can't wear stripes because it makes you look fat. And so I tried to debunk those myths. You should be allowed to wear anything. Whether that’s stripes or a bikini or whatever. Not that that would be a good look for me, at all, right now.”
On one hand, Wan does not see work without the frame of commerce around it; in this sense, he is a tradesman, whose survival is based on an evaluation of the market and of how the work at hand will shape the market, or be shaped by it, in future months. His take on it, however, is far lighter.
“I make a lot of different TV programs,” he says. “I'm a guest on a lot of shows. And I've got a lot of mates — you must remember I'm one of the old ones now. And so for me, it's just lovely. I love television, the whole business of it. And my mates make the programmes I watch. So for me, it’s like a youth club. With occasional jaunts to Ibiza to DJ on the side. But, you know what? I’m still learning things as I go. Like learning to say no — I’ve only learned that recently by way of my mate Dawn French. That’s a horrible namedrop, but it’s true. I needed to hear that at the time, so maybe others will, too.”
- TK Maxx’s Greatest of All Time Shopper Instagram post is pinned on @TKMaxx_ie. Competition closes at 1pm on Thursday, November 30. Winners will be contacted on Friday December 8.
