Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. My cast away this week is the stylist Gok Wan. He seemed to spring perfectly

created onto our television screens, all sculptured hair, designer glasses and an almost architectural

sense of poise. Dispensing fashion advice and hugs in equal measure, he aims, he says,

to make women feel like women, not like turkeys.

Yet, although he made his name as a stylist, his special talent isn't, it seems, for fashion, but for gaining people's trust. He understands only too well the

emotional journey he is asking women to make. The first person he had to

transform was himself and that's very much work in progress. I'm still that insecure little

fat boy in sight he says who's a bit scared of people not approving of what he's

doing. So Gokwan you worked as a stylist for a good while before this

somewhat stellar television career took off. I wonder if you were surprised when you

started working in television, how emotional the journey is that you go on with these women.

I had no idea at all and when the show started and I started hearing from the first words from

my lovely women

they were saying things like you know I hate my body and I you know I haven't had

sex for four years and my husband's never seen me naked and and then all the tears

started coming and I have no idea at all that the emotion was going to be

there the tone was going to be there it something clicked inside my head and at

that point I hadn't told the press or told anyone that I used to be big and it was it was I almost went into a trance it was like a memory of how I felt about my body I never expected that to happen.

What about this the self loathing then that you witnessed in these women and continue to witness.

...