**What’s this then? **Dawn O’ Porter (LOVE HER!) navigates the world of vintage clothing in her new TV show which starts tonight.
Ah, yes, she does dress rather well. She does indeed. The presenter says she fell out of love with the high street after she couldn't find any clothes that represented who she was. Now she's far more happy in a snappy 60's shift dress.
So what does she do on the show? For starters she’s got a crack team of seamstresses and tailors who take girls’ old vintage clotyhes they’ve bought at jumble sales and charity shops and upcycle them to create totally wearable new things. Even better, they take you through the process really slowly and upload all the instructions online so you can do it at home. On girl’s boring white dress ends up as a dip dyed dream and not even joking, it looked like something we might actually be able to do ourselves without buggering it up.
Cool! What else? Dawn also takes vintage phobes – ie girls who don’t want to wear vintage because ‘someone might have died in it’ (yes those girls still exist) and take them through their grandma’s cupboards and to vintage shops to prove to them that they can get better clothes than they could on the high street with a little bit of digging.
Ah, so it's fighting back against that whole 'fast fashion' thing? Exactly. Dawn’s really against disposable fashion. Throughout the series she takes a look back at the history of vintage clothes and how different clothes were made in a an effort to get people to think a bit more about their clothes and where they came from.
Nice one. Does she find any old amazing pieces? This first episode sees a dress from the 30s probably worn by an Italian socialite so glamourous that she spent over £800 million on parties. The entire dress is made of glass beads which means it's see-through as soon as it comes under lights. The guy who owns it says it costs as much as a three bedroom house in central London.
Ha er, not for us then. So is the show any good? It's fun. The anti-vintage girls feel a bit silly if you're already vintage-savvy but learning the history of vintage clothes and how to upcycle your own stuff makes This Old Thing definitely worth a watch.
Dawn O’Porter presents This Old Thing on Channel 4 starting tonight at 8PM. A tie-in book is also available in hardback and ebook from Hot Key Books.
Follow Jess on Twitter @jess_commons
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.