Learning what not to wear

Deepa Bharath

Debbie Dierks hated to shop for clothes.

The clothes never seemed to fit right.

So the 39-year-old Newport Harbor High School special education

teacher always made her own clothes. She loved floral patterns

because she loved flowers.

Dierks was a good seamstress, but somewhere down the line the

clothes got shoddy. The cuts were nowhere near straight. The seams

were crooked. She didn’t have time for perfection.

And it showed in her clothes.

“It was straight out of the ‘50s,” her student Deejaye Trobman

said.

To the gym, Dierks wore “goofy shorts,” a tank top that could be

best described as ill-fitting and hiking boots.

“Oh my God, the hiking boots,” senior Jimmy Rutledge slapped his

forehead as he remembered.

“Those were...,” his voice trailed off into silence as he fumbled

for descriptors.

But on Monday, the students saw a different Dierks. One who had

just returned from spending a week in New York City, on the sets of

The Learning Channel’s “What Not to Wear,” a grueling

fashion-makeover program that offers participants nothing but the

bare facts about their fashion sense, or almost always, the lack of

it.

The teacher who wore frumpy floral frocks got lost somewhere

between the Big Apple’s Business District and Midtown Manhattan.

The Dierks who emerged from the experience was one who was

spouting designer names and wearing them. Monday was her first day

back to school after returning from New York.

More than her fancy clothes, people noticed her radiant smile,

said teaching assistant Fereshteh Amirazadi.

“She seems so much more confident,” she said. “She seems happy.

Her whole personality has changed.”

Dierks never realized people were looking at her clothes, she

said.

“I thought no one saw or even cared,” she said. “But I know now

that people do notice what you’re wearing and it does matter.”

The idea of entering Dierks in the show was initiated by her

colleague and friend Maxine Macha, who took her on what appeared to

be a lousy double date. Sometime in the middle of the date, the

camera crew and teachers from Newport Harbor walked into the

restaurant where the group was sitting, Dierks said.

“I thought and wondered if it was some kind of an intervention,”

she said. “But I remembered that I had no addictions.”

She then realized that it was a carefully planned fashion

intervention. A crew from the show had been following Dierks around

taking pictures and footage of her various fashion faux pas.

But that wasn’t the tough part. To see her clothes on a big, wide

screen with its imperfections was brutal, Dierks said.

“I’ve always been open to criticism,” she said. “But not about my

clothes.”

She left most of her old clothes behind and went shopping to

Bloomingdale’s, Anik and Searile.

The comments from the stylists on the show were ruthless, but

Dierks said she took it because of what she saw.

“I realized I needed to do this,” she said. “The shock of seeing

my bad clothes did it for me.”

Dierks has never been the one to dress up. She was the rugged,

outdoors type who enjoys scuba-diving, rock-climbing, surfing, hiking

and skating.

Being on the show also changed her own image of her body.

“I had some misconceptions which got corrected,” she said. “I

hated my big waist and my long, spidery arms and legs. But these

people showed me how to dress myself so the clothes actually make me

look good. And I realized there was some science to fashion.”

She also learned how to apply makeup appropriately, Dierks said.

“I used to wear this dark red lipstick earlier,” she said.

But the crew taught her to use a lighter lipstick and eye makeup

to complement that soft color.

Her lax attitude toward her clothes was also partly because of her

upbringing, Dierks said.

“We never had that much money growing up,” she said.

Dierks wanted to be a Christian missionary in West Africa, but

ended up putting herself through school in Europe and later in the

United States. Frugality has been an intrinsic part of her existence.

“This experience has helped me change that poverty attitude,” she

said. “I feel like a different person.”