Susannah Constantine: Shops have no clothes for women in their 60s

She used to advise the nation on What Not To Wear. But at 62, Susannah ­Constantine now has a different ­clothing dilemma on her hands.

The TV presenter has claimed the fashion industry fails to cater for older or bigger women – and that the main design houses' outfits are created by 'misogynistic gay men'.

The lack of suitable clothing in retail stores infuriated her because it is ­'ageist and sizeist', she said.

Ms Constantine, who co-presented What Not To Wear with Trinny Woodall, made her comments on the Dirty Mother Pukka podcast.

Asked if she thought difficulties in finding even size 14 clothing in top stores was 'sizeist', she said: 'I would absolutely agree with that.

'I think it is ageist, and I think it is sizeist. There's this bandwagon 'Oh, we cater for everybody', it's like 'embrace your body' – and it's bulls***.

'That is not reflected in the retailers. It's not reflected with designers. All the big design houses for example – if you might be lucky enough to buy something from them – they're misogynistic as far as I'm concerned.

Read More

Susannah Constantine reveals Prince Phillip helped her after she 'flashed him'

'They're gay men designing for gay men. It really makes me so angry.' Even where there were bigger sizes available, the clothes tended to be dowdy, Ms Constantine suggested.

She told host Anna Whitehouse: 'If there are retailers who cater for larger sizes – our body changes, when you've had babies, your body does change irreversibly, your ribcage gets bigger in my case, I've gone from a C-cup to a G-cup – there are no clothes out there that I can wear and find easily without looking like a kind of matron.'

She argued that it was part of a bigger issue. It wasn't just fashion that was letting down older women: despite having money to spend, they were neglected across the board.

'It's not just fashion. It's everything. We are the ones who maybe have a bit more disposable income because we're not still paying for a mortgage, or our kids have left home, and they are missing a trick.

'But it's the same with television, with radio. The only people who watch television today are women of my age, people of my age in their fifties or sixties, because they don't know how to watch anything online. And yet there's nothing for us.'

On the podcast Ms Constantine told how Prince Philip helped her to 'recover her modesty' after a wardrobe malfunction at a Windsor Castle dinner in the 1980s, when she was dating Princess Margaret's son David Linley.

She was wearing a Valentino dress with thin straps when the duke put his hand on her back. She said: 'Then he went round to my front, and I thought he was going for one of my boobs!' However, he was actually trying to pull her dress up after it had come undone.