Suzannah Martin’s friends will tell you that before last fall she wasn’t a total fashion disaster. “She was just a rugged Vermont girl,” says Suzi Crawford, a friend of Martin’s fiance who’s gotten to know the 36-year-old mother of two over the last three years. “She’s down-to-earth, and her style and clothes reflected that.” But to DeCarla Hilliard, the office manager at the Evanston Koenig & Strey real estate agency where Martin’s worked for three years, down-to-earth wasn’t good enough to make the leap from selling north-side condos to million-dollar North Shore homes. “It wasn’t so much that she dressed badly,” says Hilliard. “It was just that her professional look needed help.”
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The producers of the TLC makeover show What Not to Wear agreed: they contacted Hilliard within hours of her initial e-mail, impressed by style gaffes like the purple feather scrunchie that Martin had borrowed from one of her young daughters and the Trader Joe’s bag she was using as a briefcase. “One night she had me looking for it–she thought someone had thrown it away in the trash,” says Hilliard. “That put her over the top.”
Last Friday friends, family, and clients gathered at Pete Miller’s Steakhouse in Evanston to watch Martin’s small-screen debut, noshing on bruschetta and fried calamari and keeping an eye on the four or five young children darting around the room. Martin, a petite redhead, nursed a martini. She made sure all her guests had drinks as well: “There’s no watching this show without alcohol,” she warned.
On-screen, Martin’s smile was tight, but in the bar she threw back her head and roared, even when the other host, Clinton Kelly, said she looked like she was “selling empty lots” instead of houses. Later, when Martin itemized the problems with a couple outfits they’d picked out, Kelly accused her of overanalyzing, at which point Megan Matthews, a college friend from the University of Chicago, started chanting: “U. of C.! U. of C.!”
