Gok Wan Reinvents the Cheongsam for the Curvier

If you don’t live in the UK then you’ve probably never heard of the force of nature that is Gok Wan. He’s everywhere on TV advising “ordinary” women around the country what to wear and how generally to feel better about themselves with his show How to Look Good Naked, Get The Look For Less! and others. He’s very camp and a mixed race lad from some provincial town somewhere. Apparently he used to be fat and have the usual range of “issues” but now he’s not fat. His TV shows are top rated and his autobiography Through Thick and Thin (geddit?) was a bestseller. So Gok Wan should be massively annoying, a sort of gay Clarkson. Yet strangely I don’t find him so and actually rather enjoy his positive messages and ability to make people look great in High Street fashions without resorting to extortionate designer labels they could never afford in real life. He is pretty funny in a British way and partly stands in the great tradition of camp TV hosts of whom there have been too many to name in the UK down the decades. But why does he appear on China Rhyming you may well ask?

Good question. But as regular readers will know we’ve commented on all manner of things Chinois and particularly the fascination displayed by book publishers with sticking cheongsam clad women on the covers of any book remotely Asia themed (and invariably without their faces showing for some reason – just look at everything from the rash of geisha novels to anything Chinese themed and slightly in the past). This reached a ridiculous height with the cover for Janice YK Lee’s The Piano Teacher which featured a cheongsam clad, parasol twirling woman with, obviously, her back to us – the book was not even about a Chinese woman but rather British ex-pats in post-war Hong Kong and nobody wears a cheongsam in the book at all!!

Yet the cheongsam is, of course, an iconic item of clothing design, wonderfully tailored to the archetypal Asian female body form and when worn at its best (think Maggie Cheung in In The Mood for Love etc) sensational. I’ve had cause to write about cheongsams a few times – from Carl Crow’s use of them in inter-war advertising in China to (in some current writing) using them to show women as sexy in a 1930s Shanghai way. The cheongsam works – yet perhaps not for the curvier woman. This issue of curves and cheongsams is germane given that many western women have curves while more and more Chinese girls (see my book, with Matthew Crabbe, Fat China) have or are going to have pretty soon curves.

And so back to Gok Wan, who has designed a range of affordable clothes for the TU brand at Sainsburys. It’s an interesting collection and looks great (at least on this model!) and within it is a cheongsam dress for a rather reasonable GBP45. Little black dresses are of course massively popular and enduring fashion staples and with Christmas coming and all those office parties should fly of the shelves. This cheongsam certainly has a classic look but is designed to accommodate a few extra curves. Certainly works on this model anyway – expect to see a lot of TU cheongsams at a Christmas party near you (if you live in the UK) this coming festive season.