Читать книгу Gok Wan - Emily Herbert - Страница 7

At first sight, it looks like a brilliant idea – inspired, even. Gok was clearly not turning out to be the sort of person who would have a job in an office, so a career on the boards seemed an obvious choice to make. Even now, watching Gok flitting across the television screens it’s possible to imagine him in dramatic roles. It wasn’t long, however, before Gok discovered that it was not going to be ideal, either.

Initially, Gok obtained a diploma in performing arts at the Charles Keene College of Further Education in Leicester. ‘I wanted to be on stage,’ he said.‘I was obsessed with the idea of putting on a character and hiding myself.’ This was, in many ways, what he’d been doing for years: he’d been hiding behind the weight, the bombastic personality, the sheer force that was not quite the real Gok. And he’d been doing it so successfully, there seemed no reason he wouldn’t be able to transfer this talent to the stage as well. What had he been doing as a teenager if not acting all along? And now it seemed he was going to make a career of it. It was a logical move, in many ways.

From there Gok went to the Central School of Speech and Drama in North London, where his dreams soon crashed and burned. New to living in London, Gok might have been relieved to get away from Leicester, but it was still familiar and it was his home. But this was an alien city, ‘the big smoke’, and he soon discovered that he was on a course he hated. Ironically, he would soon fit into London life far more easily than he ever did in Leicester, but for now it was miserable and bringing him down. He was lonely, he didn’t fit in and it all felt as if it was going wrong.

The problem was quite simple: Gok discovered he couldn’t act. Worse still, he still felt cut off from everyone around him. They took their acting very seriously indeed, in a way that Gok certainly didn’t, and coming from smart backgrounds they (whisper it) looked down on him for being working class. The course was an unmitigated disaster, and left Gok feeling worse than he had done before he left home. To this day he remains convinced that he was accepted only because it suited the school, rather than any innate talent that he might have possessed.‘Ticking boxes for public funding is what I call it,’ he said. ‘Chinese, fat, gay: I’d got in for the wrong reasons. I was a regurgitated product of Thatcher. My parents were uneducated, I’d never written an essay in my life, but I was told: “Yes, you can do this” – and I couldn’t! Ooh, shit!’

Rarely for Gok, he went on to display some bitterness at the behaviour of the college by raising expectations in him that could not be fulfilled.‘You did me no good by telling me I could!’ he went on. ‘It was awful. I missed my family and friends and I was landed in white middle-class hell. I was literally surrounded by double-barrelled names and Porsches. They walked the walk [i.e. they pretended to be all street and cool] but then dad’s helicopter would arrive to take them shopping in New York for the weekend, and I was in a bedsit, trying to get a job in a takeaway.’

It was an experience he referred back to again and again after he’d found fame. This was the first time he had encountered people who considered themselves to be full-on intellectuals (whether they really were is a different matter), which made him feel yet more insecure. ‘I felt like “Gok from the Block”,’ he said on another occasion. ‘I felt like everyone around me was talking non-stop about [German playwright Bertold] Brecht and [Russian director Constantin] Stanislavsky. I didn’t know how to join in. At Central it’s all pretty serious, but my talent was for making people laugh and I loved the West End. I know it’s cheesy, but I love a good sing-song and I think if I had gone somewhere a bit more “jazz bands”, maybe I would never have become a stylist.’

It was a hideous time: going from being bullied in Leicester to being patronised in London, with still no obvious route for him to take, was driving him to despair. But what was the alternative? Gok would barely have been aware that the job of stylist existed at that stage, although he was going to come across it soon enough.

Finally he dropped out. ‘As with everything I’ve ever done, I let my confidence and sense of humour carry me through for a while,’ said Gok. ‘But there comes a point when you need the talent to back it up and I had to admit I just didn’t have it. [But] I was gutted to be leaving drama school. Acting had inspired me to sort my life out and I was scared to leave it behind.’

Ultimately, it was probably inevitable that he would have had to leave. Academic institutions and Gok just didn’t mix. ‘I had always found school and college stifling,’ he confessed. ‘I’m not good at being marked or taking exams.’ As it turned out, it was the best thing he could have done, but at the time, it felt like just another failure. And for a boy who was so close to his family to go through all this without them – although emotionally he was as close to them as he had ever been – made it harder still to bear.

But it was around this period that the Gok of today began to appear. When he went up to drama school, he still weighed 21 stone, which could not have helped matters, but that perhaps provided the impetus for change. Gok had begun to realise that he was not happy with the weight and wanted to lose it but, initially at least, he had no idea how that was to be done. ‘I went on a diet when I first went to drama school and I ate an entire bag of dry pasta with two cans of tuna and a whole tub of mayonnaise – I thought that was a healthy meal because it wasn’t deep-fried or served with chips,’ he said.‘I was really uneducated about food, but I found out more about it.’

Food had become an addiction by this point, and like many addicts, Gok was nervous about turning into a different person from the one he’d become. Not, by his telling of it, that the person he presented to the outside world back then had much to do with the reality. ‘In fact, I was more uncomfortable about losing the weight, which I did when I was 20,’ he recalled to one questioner, who’d asked him about coming out.‘I’d built up this personality. It wasn’t really Gok. It was a loud, brash, camp person to match the physicality.’

In truth, both the weight and the personality had become a kind of defence mechanism. Both held people at bay: they were the way by which Gok didn’t allow himself to get hurt. Losing weight and toning it down meant more than just changing his appearance and behaviour: it also made Gok more vulnerable to the outside world. There is psychological safety in sticking to long-held habits, such as overeating. Change, on the other hand, can open up a whole new world and for someone who’s already feeling insecure, this can be very hard to bear.

Once he’d begun, it took Gok about a year to lose all the weight. ‘It was a competitive thing,’ he said. ‘I just decided. It was ridiculous crash-dieting: it was the totally wrong way of doing it but it worked.’ It also made him realise there was a different world out there and that, having totally changed his appearance, it was going to treat him differently, too.‘You know, if you’re a fat kid, half-Chinese and gay, you are treated completely differently to how you are if you’re 11 stone, like I am now,’ he said in an interview in 2008. And carrying all that weight for so long was going to make him the ideal person for women to confide in about their insecurities about their own appearance: they could trust him because he’d been in exactly the same position.

Meanwhile, some good did come out of his time at drama school, even if Gok wouldn’t quite realise it yet. He had always been obsessed with clothes and as a trainee actor, he began to learn about the importance of costumes and appearance. ‘If you give an actor the wrong character, you misrepresent their character and it might take an hour or two of dialogue to undo that first impression,’ he explained. ‘The same principle applies to real life. Whether I’m dressing ordinary people or pop stars, I’m giving them an image to project.’ It was perhaps the most important lesson he learnt at the time and one that was going to remain with him for many years. Indeed, it was the making of his career.

Slowly but surely, however, Gok was beginning to find his way. He was in London now, with all the opportunities the capital could afford him, and he was going to do what it took to get on in life. In retrospect it’s quite clear new avenues were opening up, but Gok had to find out where they were. All he could see back then were dead ends.

‘I bummed around for a little while,’ Gok said of his time after drama school. Asked how he got into fashion, he continued, ‘It was completely by accident, really. I just floated from rubbish job to rubbish job, with no self-esteem and no idea what I wanted to do. Then I went into hair and make-up. I was a session hair-and-make-up artist, and I learned on the job, really. I started working with a fashion stylist and loved what she did, and that kind of inspired me to do it myself. It was all by chance.’

But it was more than that. Gok came from a hard-working background and he soon began to show the hard graft that had kept his parents going throughout their lives. Fashion is a very tough industry to break into: low pay, long hours and unbelievable competition. But Gok stuck to his guns.‘I come from a working-class background where there were not many opportunities and you had to create opportunities for yourself,’ he said. ‘Me and my brother were brought up in this kind of environment and we’ve all done well for ourselves. Go, Team Gok! I’m a firm believer that drive, initiative and motivation are just as important as which university you manage to get into.’

Many years later, when he was a big name in the fashion industry, he returned to the theme time and time again.‘I’m definitely not knocking education, but it isn’t just about which university or school you go to,’ he said. ‘When I’m looking for a new assistant, I don’t even bother looking at their credentials or which course they’ve done. It’s not that I’m saying it’s not a stepping stone to getting where you want to be, I just hate the idea that children leave school thinking they have to go to university and get a first degree if they want to get anywhere in life. I think it’s important for them to know there is more than one route – there are other options out there.’

Indeed, so convinced of this was he that Gok went on to develop rather an unusual way of measuring the people he was to work with. ‘The first thing I get them to do for me is clean my flat,’ he declared. ‘Not because I’m being pretentious or precious – it’s because it’s a really good way of finding out about that person’s sense of style as well as picking up on other skills they might have from the way they arrange things.’

In short, he was searching for a person’s innate sense of what looks right. ‘You can teach people to sew, to set up a fashion shoot, send emails, deal with the media, but what you can’t teach is a sense of style,’ Gok continued. ‘You’ve either got it or you haven’t – it’s as simple as that. By getting them to arrange my flat I get a really good idea about their individual sense of style.’

But all that was to come. Back when he’d just dropped out of drama school, Gok was only beginning to learn his trade in the fashion industry while subsisting on less than nothing in one of the most expensive cities in the world. He would never have imagined that one day he was going to be in a position to choose his own assistants, let alone be getting them to clean his flat. In fact, his first job was working for Habitat: ‘I rocked up to work at Habitat years ago in head-to-toe beige,’ he recalled. ‘I looked like an artificial limb.’ As for the job itself, it was not a great success. ‘I was terrible,’ declared Gok.

But he had at least made a start. The little boy who’d been obsessed with fashion had grown into a young man who not only loved clothes, but knew what to do with them – and not only on himself. Equally importantly, he also loved women, and he was going to be able to combine those two loves to spectacular effect. He was also fortunate in that he was going to be able to learn his trade out of the limelight: it was only when he was good and ready that Gok was going to finally take centre stage.

Something else was happening back then, too, although Gok could not have known it would have anything to do with him. Television was changing: reality shows were emerging and a couple who had started out before him were leading their way into a territory that had not been fully explored. It was going to be remarkably fruitful, not just for them, but for a great many people who came after them. Seeds were taking root that would one day grow into huge trees.

In brief, two rather plummy journalists, Susannah Constantine and Trinny Woodall, had started writing a column called ‘Ready to Wear’ in the Daily Telegraph in 1994. The idea was that women could look good whatever their shape, and do so using clothes from the high street, not a designer shop that was beyond most people’s financial reach. The girls – bossy, opinionated and posh – had already got quite a following and they were attracting an increasing amount of attention.

A book, Ready 2 Dress, and a dot-com business, ready2shop.com, followed, and although neither was successful, the duo were very much rising stars. While there had always been stylists, they had never been quite like these two, and the potential for them, and for the genre of television they would go on to front, was huge. Soon they were to be commissioned to present their very own television series, which was to prove a spectacular triumph. It was the start of the obsession with the makeover show.

No one realised at that point quite what a phenomenon it would prove. The timing, however, was perfect: a combination of the growth of reality television when women were becoming obsessed with their bodies as never before, while at the same time they had more money than ever to do something about it. It provided all the ingredients Trinny and Susannah – and Gok after them – needed to become a success.

Of course, Gok had no inkling this new phenomenom would one day be the making of him. He continued to flit from job to job, searching for what was going to be right for him, but all the while gaining knowledge and learning more and more about how to style someone’s looks. He was slowly but surely making contacts, and as his own body shape was changing, he was gaining confidence in the new slimline Gok. He was beginning to see how differently people treated him when he was slim and fashionable from when he was obese and slightly threatening, and it was a change he liked.

Meanwhile, in the background, Gok’s family remained as supportive as ever. They might all be in Leicester while he was in London, but the close emotional ties between all of them grew stronger by the year. Gok, the baby of the family, was out on his own now, but he still had his parents and siblings to support him, and knew he could call on them in his hour of need. But that hour of need was receding now, because fate had great things in store. Little did he know it, but in about a decade hence, Gok was going to be one of the best known and much loved faces on TV.