Going out of fashion hit me for six but I refused to take it lying down
Author Susannah Constantine tells Hannah Stephenson about her days in the spotlight and overcoming a midlife crisis
TV FASHION guru Susannah Constantine has been reminiscing about life in the 80s and 90s.
It was a time when she mixed with royalty, could be spotted at the hottest clubs and went through a rebellious phase – just like the heroine in her latest novel.
She dated Princess Margaret’s son Viscount Linley and cricketer Imran Khan (who later became prime minister of Pakistan), enjoyed a glamorous job as a fashion publicist and had access to the most exclusive parties and clubs, where drugs were readily available. Susannah said: “When I was in my late teens and early 20s, 80 per cent of my good friends were heroin addicts.
“Thank God I never did drugs and to this day, I don’t know how I managed to bypass that. I was offered it but I was too scared to try.
“But I liked being in the aura, the reflected rebellion of other people. I was a bit of a parasite in that way.”
Susannah, 58, is still best known as one half of Trinny (Woodall) and Susannah, who co-presented BBC’s What Not To Wear.
They were forthright, seemingly obsessed with boobs and dressed everyday women in styles designed to give them confidence.
Brutally straight-talking, they shattered their victims’ fashion confidence on camera before building them up again with a sharp jacket, heels, maybe a flowery or fitted dress to show off their figure to its best. Today, Susannah divides her time between writing novels and interviewing famous faces for her podcast, My Wardrobe Malfunction, which she hopes will resume after lockdown.
Her latest novel, Summer In Mayfair – a sequel to After The Snow – finds her heroine Esme leaving her middle-class home in Scotland in 1979 for the art world of London.
Arriving in the capital, she gets a job in a prestigious art gallery and is taken by her new glamorous friend Suki to the most exclusive bars and clubs in the city, where drugs are rife, and introduced to the emerging gay scene. Susannah can relate to the settings. She said: “I felt more at home in the gay clubs. I felt there was a freedom to be myself, without having to put myself forward sexually or as girlfriend potential. It was just like being with a bunch of girls, but they were guys.
“I’ve always felt the most comfortable with my gay friends. All my best male friends are gay.”
Celebrity cameos also feature in the novel, including Elton John. She added: “I know him well. I love the idea of having real people in my books. Andy Warhol is in there, I met him a few times, and Princess Margaret, who I knew very well. I like putting real characters in fictitious situations.”
Susannah, whose fashion career started when she worked for Armani and Galliano in her 20s, later became a fashion writer and her TV partnership with Trinny raised her profile.
Yet when the TV bubble burst, she found herself in a midlife crisis, which no makeover could mend.
Susannah said: “It was very tough
for both of us when it ended. In a sense, we went into mourning. It was our lives, it was like losing a family member. We saw more of each other than we did our families.
“I felt slightly lost, which was when I started to write in earnest and found a sense of purpose and identity. It was about reinvention. Trinny always had a passion to create a make-up line and I always wanted to write. We both followed our true loves.”
Now, Susannah is in a much better place. She has just celebrated her silver wedding anniversary with her husband, Danish entrepreneur and businessman Sten Bertelsen. They
After our TV careers ended, in a sense we went into mourning
have three children – Joe, 21, Esme, 19 and Cece, 16, and live in a 127-acre country pile in Sussex, where she writes her novels.
But she has suffered from anxiety for most of her life and battled her own demons, fearing she would go the same way as her mother, who had bipolar disorder.
She said: “I’m very protective of my mental health and having seen how it ravaged my mother, and by association my father and my sister and I, it’s something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.
“I had therapy for a long time to accept and understand my mother. I eat healthily and exercise a lot, give myself time to pause and try not to get overwhelmed by things.”
During her midlife crisis, she put on weight, lost her confidence and started to worry about ageing.
Susannah said: “It was tough. It’s the only time I’ve had any sense of vanity, looked at myself and been constantly disappointed by my ageing body and face. I didn’t cope very well.
“I’d never really considered how I looked before. It may have been the menopause but, looking back, lots of men and women get their self-esteem through their work – I certainly do.”
Sten, she says, didn’t realise how hard it had hit her. She said: “Like a lot of women, it’s something you keep to yourself because you feel ashamed.
“I didn’t want the person I love and respect most in the world to know that this was how I felt about myself.
“You feel concerned that they’re going to feel the same way that you do about yourself. I didn’t want to alert him to that.
“I talked to my daughters about it a bit and they were like, ‘Well, Mum, you are old but you are very good for your age’.”
A turning point came when she was asked to do a fitness challenge for Sport Relief in 2018 and embarked on a gruelling regime to get active again. In recent years, she has appeared in reality TV shows. She was the first to be voted off Strictly Come Dancing in 2018 and had a similar fate in the 2015 series of I’m A Celebrity.
She said: “I loved every single thing about Strictly, apart from the dancing. Anton du Beke is now a really good friend and Stacey Dooley and I have become close.
“I hated dancing. I was so bad and I was never going to be good. I was like the love child of an ironing board and a gorilla.”