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Trinny Woodall has never been a woman you want to mess with.
At the age of 5, she cut off another girl’s pigtail for making moves on a boy she fancied. She doesn’t regret it, either, although the consequences were dire. “I was sent to boarding school six months later,” she says. “I was 6 and a half. So I paid for it.”
Britain’s most famous makeover queen and the founding CEO of beauty and skincare brand Trinny London (valued at $300 million), Woodall has dialled into our Zoom call from her hotel room in Perth.
Fresh off the plane, she looks effortlessly fabulous, dressed in a long-sleeved, silver-sequinned top thrown on for our call. Apparently, she nearly didn’t bother wearing anything from the waist down. When Woodall tells me that, I believe her. It’s just the sort of thing she’d do.
Later, when I hear she changed into a different top for her next interview, that doesn’t surprise me either. A posh kind of earthiness is one of her most endearing features — “She says ‘darling’ a lot. And ‘f***,’” reported the Guardian recently — but she’s also an astute businesswoman who’s always right on brand.
About to wrap the final leg of a United States and Australia tour, Woodall has been on the road promoting her new book Fearless and appearing at sold-out events where “Trinny Tribers” have queued around the block.
The Australian woman is refreshingly candid, she says, and when she went shopping in Sydney, a cute shirt and one-piece swimsuit combo by New Zealand designer label Maggie Marilyn caught her eye.
Next year, Woodall turns 60. She doesn’t look it, of course, although she’d scoff at the suggestion there’s a way women ought to look, whatever their age. Let’s just say she makes a good shopfront for her philosophy on the transformative powers of fashion, style and a statement lip.
It’s hard not to be charmed by the curated intimacy of her Instagram posts, from Trinny’s outfit of the day to a live feed of her looking comparatively haggard after dragging herself out of bed to do an online yoga class after a rough night with not enough sleep.
Women feel as if they know her, and they feel that she knows them.
“We talk about the real shit,” she says, of her relationship with the devoted online Trinny Tribe communities that have mushroomed across Europe, Asia, the US, the Middle East and Australia. There’s even one here in New Zealand.
“We don’t just say, ‘Here’s a pretty woman with a bit of photoshopping and you should buy makeup or skincare from us.’ We’re a brand where it’s about how you feel and the need to emotionally connect.”
To the suggestion that cynics might see the “fear less and be more” female empowerment message of a book about fashion and style as a bit of a reach, she replies that her events are full of women who’ve made a shift in their lives.
“It’s a joy to see,” she says, in that familiar, velvet-throated voice. “They’re magnificent! I find it profoundly important how we view ourselves as women. And I know from experience, with a lot of the women I’ve made-over through the years, that just by helping them feel full of energy and present on the outside, it really moves things along on the inside.”
Woodall’s tour schedule is tightly packed and it’s been tricky to pin her down. This is our fourth attempt to hook up. By the time we finally do, I’ve read all about how her real name is Sarah-Jane and that she was nicknamed Trinny by a family friend, director Frank Lauder, whose St Trinian’s film series in the ‘50s and ‘60s was set in an anarchic school for girls.
I hadn’t been sure whether to believe the story about her taking scissors to a little girl’s plait, though; those British tabloids can’t be trusted when it comes to celebrity scandals. However, she confirms it immediately, with not a hint of chagrin.
“I remember exactly,” she says. “It was a party at a weekend. There was a boy, James. Blonde hair, very pretty. I really liked him. There was this thing where you had to lick the lollipop off a string, and she went and helped him lick his lollipop.
“It was the only time I’ve ever in my life been jealous about a guy. It taught me never to be jealous [again]. When I’m in a relationship, I don’t have jealousy. Maybe that’s a bad thing. Maybe men like to see you feeling jealous. But I don’t.”
A late bloomer, Woodall hated her 20s — the age her daughter, Lyla, is now — and describes her 50s as her most freeing decade. In 2017, she launched her beauty company, Trinny London, financed by the sale of her house and $125,000 worth of clothes from her wardrobe.
The brand, aimed at women aged 35-plus, has now extended its signature makeup range to include skincare. In tandem with her new book, she’s also released a Fearless podcast series, featuring the likes of Queer Eye fashion designer Tan France, perfumer Jo Malone and Will & Grace star Debra Messing.
It’s hard to believe but more than two decades have rolled past since Woodall and sidekick Susannah Constantine came in like a wrecking ball with their BBC series What Not to Wear, which screened for five series in the early 2000s and peaked at seven million viewers.
“Audiences couldn’t get enough of these two clomping toffs with little respect for personal space,” writes Charlotte Edwardes, in that entertaining Guardian piece. “Woodall doesn’t like to be reminded that they measured the cup size of hapless women with their hands.”
When it eventually fell out of favour in the UK and was canned, they took the show on the road, filming 20 series in nine countries. The pair, who have remained good friends, came to New Zealand once on a promotional tour. Woodall doesn’t remember much about it, other than the Māori welcome that greeted them at the airport.
Woodall’s father was a banker and although the family weathered a financial setback when Trinny was in her teens, it was a privileged childhood by most standards. Bizarre as it seems now, one of her first jobs was as a city trader, dealing in future commodities such as cocoa, sugar and coffee. “The arse end of trading.” She was the only woman in the team and hated it.
Before our chat, I’m given a list of topics that are off the table for discussion: her long-term relationship with Charles Saatchi (Nigella Lawson’s ex-husband), which ended this year; the suicide of Lyla’s father, Johnny Elichaoff, in 2014 (he and Woodall had parted years before); and the drug and alcohol addiction she battled in her 20s that led to two stints in rehab.
And fair enough. Woodall has spoken candidly many times about all these traumatic experiences, and shares some personal stories in the “life” section of Fearless, including her struggle with infertility. Last year, she was a guest on the How to Fail podcast with British journalist Elizabeth Day.
The relationship Woodall has with her daughter Lyla — Bunny, she calls her — is delightful. The pair often collaborate on social media posts and it looks as though they have a lot of fun together. In fact, I can hear them signing off on a call when my video link kicks in. “That’s Lyla, just saying goodnight,” she says. “Sorry, my daughter is still up in Spain at six in the morning…”
Lyla, who’s just turned 20, is studying at an international university in Madrid. Woodall says her daughter has a much stronger sense of self than she did at the same age. Lyla also grew up essentially as an only child (her half-brother, Zak, Elichaoff’s son, is a decade older), while Woodall is one of six.
“We both have this thing where we love to be sociable and then we have had enough and just want to be in our room by ourselves. We both love food and shopping and clothes and makeup. All those girly things. She has an amazing sense of humour and she doesn’t take life too seriously. I sometimes take it too seriously.”
Fearless is broken down into three separate parts: style, beauty and life. You can identify your “colours”, find the best sunglasses to suit the shape of your face, learn how hormones change with age (Woodall went into early menopause in her early 40s) and see which neckline best suits the size of your boobs.
The style section includes a dazzling multitude of photos showing Woodall in various outfits and poses, including the breakdown of seven “style personalities”: modern classic, always sexy, boho, minimalist, softly feminine, rock chic and eclectic.
Her own safe space is modern classic — navies with a white collar and elegant silver cuff. Sexy looks are outside her comfort zone and were the most challenging to shoot. “I like to be kind of buttoned up and coolish because I don’t know how to do sexy. Maybe I’m scared of it.” Pushing through that, she says, was “immeasurably freeing”.
What other fears does she still grapple with? Heights, for starters. Tall buildings make her break out into a sweat. “Can I run a company? Am I doing everything right? I have fears for my daughter, probably more than anything. Will she be okay? Everything else is much smaller in comparison.”
A WOMAN OF INFLUENCE
Woodall has more than a million followers on Instagram and double that on Facebook. Whether it’s a live-streamed yoga class, a guide to the best vintage shops in New York or a ruthless trans-seasonal decluttering of her wardrobe, she knows how to work a room. Just don’t call her an “influencer”.
“I hate that term. I really hate that term!” says Woodall, who posts what she genuinely likes on social media and doesn’t do commercial deals. “I don’t deride what an influencer is, because there are a lot of people who have created a very good revenue and career. But I see myself as a CEO of a business and a writer and a broadcaster, and I happen to do social.”
Accounts she personally follows include a fact-from-fiction current affairs journalist — “There’s so much false news out there that you just want to find out what’s actually going on” — and Mrs Solomon, a woman in her 50s who she met in New York. “We like the same clothes and she challenges herself. I quite like women who challenge the norm.” Here are five of her favourites:
Tim Spector @tim.spector: British scientist, epidemiologist and author, with a special interest in the microbiome. According to his website, he’s in the top 1 per cent most-cited scientists in the world. The book: Food for Life: The New Science for Eating Well.
Jessie Inchauspé @glucosegoddess: French biochemist and New York Times bestselling author of Glucose Revolution and The Glucose Goddess Method, on how to avoid spikes in your blood sugar. The hack: “Put clothing on your carbs” (add fats, proteins or fibre to reduce how quickly the glucose is absorbed).
News Not Noise @jessicayellin: Emmy award-winning American political journalist and former Chief White House Correspondent for CNN. The pitch: “We separate the news from the noise, so you know which stories matter and which you can ignore.”
Rose Li @thecreativeclassicist: Raised in Melbourne and now based in New York, she describes herself as a full-time corporate professional, part-time student of style. The post: “How to: Barre to Brunch”.
Rachel Solomon @heymrssolomon: A midlife perspective on finding your style DNA. The vibe: “Have you seen Mrs. Robinson lately? Because she’s the only one in the movie going after what she wants. And looking exactly like herself. Just saying.”
• Fearless: Style - Beauty - Life by Trinny Woodall (HarperCollins) is out now.
This story was originally published on November 5, 2023
