News From Our iStylista Gok Wan Competition Winner!

Here's Emma-Louise's experience first hand.

"Gok Wan was so much nicer than I thought he'd be, I expected him to be quite rude and arrogant but he really surprised me.

When we first got there we all got name tags and then we got a free breakfast (which was quite nice). While we ate we had a Q&A session and Gok was really honest and open with us about: how he got into the fashion industry, what his clients are like and what stylists actually do on a day-to-day basis.

Then he split us all into groups of about 5, gave each group a chaperone and explained the styling challenge. He gave each group a short brief that basically described one of the 'Gok-ettes' from How to Look Good Naked but he we didn't get very much information or a picture to help us actually visualise what they looked like. For example, my group's brief was something like: Size 14, very long legs, wide fitting size 8 feet, hates her stomach, would like to become a lawyer, holistic and grew up with hippy parents so avoids hippy styled clothes.

Gok explained that we had to use these briefs to find an outfit for our 'Gok-ette', each group received £200 of credit to spend in Dorothy Perkins (Tottenham Court Road) and £50 to spend on things from other shops (eg, accessories) as well as a map with directions from Tottenham Court Road tube station to Dorothy Perkins, other good local shops and directions to 'The Hospital' the members only club that we were going to have lunch in later. We all got on the tube with our chaperones, our money, our brief and lots of ideas on how to beat the other groups.

By the time we got to Dorothy Perkins my group had decided that the best thing to do was to choose an outfit that was smart enough for our 'Gok-ette' to wear to a job interview but that could easily be dressed up for her to wear on a night out. At first we decided to split up and look separately for stuff that we thought would work but in the end the girls (Me, a girl called Meigan and our chaperone) ended up looking together and so did the boys (Nima, Lewis and Ted) which meant that when we came together to compare what we'd found we had one outfit that the boys really liked and one that the girls really liked. After a long conversation and a lot of compromise we decided to use some accessories from each outfit and to look altogether for something that would really make our outfit stand out from the other groups - we decided to stop looking for an outfit that could be taken through from day time to night time and go for a 'going-out' outfit.

We chose a silk, deep-purple dress with ruffle sleeves as well as black tights, a black mock-croc clutch bag with a gold clasp, black tights, a cropped black jacket and purple mock-croc shoes. Once we'd bought these we went on the hunt for accessories! We wanted to find earrings, a necklace, a belt, and some bangles and we only had about 10 minutes until we had to get the Hospital. Luckily, we found our belt and our necklace in the first shop we went to (Apple Tree) and then we found the rest of what we wanted (as well as a chunky gold ring) from Accessorize.

Our next challenge was finding the Hospital Club which took us a really long time as it was hidden among the other buildings and the map wasn't very accurate. When we did find it and went in I was really impressed, it was immaculately decorated and each room had a different theme, for example, the room that we ate our lunch in was called 'The Forest Room' and the walls were covered in trees (wallpaper) which looked really convincing. While we ate we had to sit in our groups and think about what we wanted to say when we presented our outfits to Gok and the other groups.

Once we'd done this, one-by-one each group, took all of the things they'd bought to one of the rooms upstairs to show Gok and dress our model. When I went with my group we were all quite nervous because we weren't sure how the outfit would look on our model or if everything would fit properly but everything went really well. After we put all the clothes on our model and we knew that everything fit her we decided that she shouldn't wear the jacket because the thing that really attracted us to the dress was the detail of the ruffle sleeves and the jacket hid this.

When all four groups had done this, we started our walk-off! In front of a team of photographers, each model walked the catwalk twice and members of the group explained why they chose what they did and answered questions from Gok. In my group me and Meigan talked about our outfit and Gok seemed really happy with it.

To finish of the day we had another Q&A session where we got to not only ask Gok questions but also all of the other people that had come along for the day (a journalist, a photographer, a cameraman, people form Allaince and Leicester and also some people from PR companies), this was really interesting and useful as we all got to learn what it's really like to do their jobs. Gok then promised us all tickets to the next season of Fashion Fix and gave us all a free book which he signed as he said goodbye to each of us individually.

I know this has been a really long email but I just really wanted to say thank you for picking me to spend the day with Gok Wan, it was great.

Thank you very much"

Emma-Louise