With his infectious energy and charisma, Gok Wan has an incredible gift of making women feel more confident within themselves - but it's not until you read his own inspirational story that you find out where he got that gift from. Gok grew up on a Leicester housing estate, with a loving family who ran a Chinese restaurant. For his parents, food meant love - and Gok was so well loved that by the time he was a teenager he weighed 21 stone. Being Asian and gay as well, Gok felt lonely and out of place. He was an easy target for bullies and suffered terribly at their hands. In a moment of inspiration, he decided to reinvent himself with his first style makeover and a larger-than-life personality to go with it. But his next move was to lose a devastating ten stone in nine months. In Through Thick and Thin, for the first time, Gok reveals all about that life changing period. The lessons Gok learnt during this time helped him bounce back to become a stylist to the stars, every woman's best friend and a national treasure. In this intimate memoir Gok tells his full story in his own words. Whether he's recounting the horrors of childhood bullying or riotous anecdotes about his loving family, behind the scenes in the fashion world or TV shows, Gok's voice jumps off the page with all the honesty, wit and warmth we've come to know and love him for.

""It's not difficult to have fun out of economizing (up to a point), both because of the sense of achievement it gives you and because everyone else is doing it, too. . . . A slight financial pressure sharpens the wits, though it needn't sharpen the disposition. But it takes an interesting person to have an attractive menage on a shoe-string and to run it with gaiety and charm. . . . Maybe you would rather play polo than pingpong, but if you've got an old pingpong set and no ponies, you'll get a lot more fun out of life from being a pingpong champion than from taking a dispirited whack with a polo mallet every now and then."" First published in 1937, "Orchids on Your Budget" gives advice on all manner of subjects, from entertaining and creating the perfect capsule wardrobe to relinquishing the family estate. Easing worries about how to put the advice into practice, each chapter concludes with a case study providing examples of women who heeded--and those lamentable souls who ignored--Marjorie's wise words.