Published: Monday, 16th June, 2008 09:00
Amanda - not queen of strops
By Lucy Crossley
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A BOUTIQUE owner has hit back at television producers who made her appear “size-ist” on a popular BBC show.
On Monday evening viewers watched as struggling Ascot shop owner Amanda Collins was put through the mill by fashion guru Mary Portas on hit show Mary Queen of Shops.
Portas, dubbed fashion’s Gordon Ramsay due to her no-nonsense attitude, visited The Fit (formerly Blinkz) on Ascot High Street where she found a rails full of dowdy clothes which Amanda was seen unsympathetically saying she “wouldn’t be seen dead in.”
Mum of three Amanda was shocked at how she came across on the show which made her look size-ist and scathing of her fuller-figured customers.
Amanda, 43, said: “It’s very clever the way it was edited, a lot of my positive qualities weren’t shown and they focused on the negatives.”
One of the negative parts seen on the show was when Amanda was telling Mary about her plus-size customers’ body shapes, describing them as having bouncy castle bellies or a “bullet” shape.
She said: “That is what customers have called themselves and that editing made me look disrespectful to my customers which was a bit harsh.
“But the feedback I’ve got so far has been good and customers have told me they know I’m not like that really.”
Amanda, who has run the shop for three years, agreed to take part in the programme which began shooting last October after her business began to struggle.
She was down £27,000 and had to go back to work as a part time gym instructor to cover her costs.
But now she is starting to reap the rewards of her time spent with Mary who changed the name of the shop to The Fit and introduced Amanda to new designers and to the fashion experts at magazine Marie Claire.
Amanda said: “The doors Mary has opened for us have been wonderful and we got on like a house on fire. We’ve had a lot of interest in the shop from people from outside Ascot which can only be a good thing for all the shops on the High Street because we’ve all struggled.”
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