British authors reveal ideas to camouflage those figure flaws

KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
It's the age of information. Television, books and the Internet offer advice on how to do everything from dress for a wedding and cook for your pets to build a porch on your house.
And when it comes to reality television how-tos, the tone can turn acerbic and a bit rude. They speak with the frankness of, well, your mother.
So it goes with BBC-born "What Not to Wear," which gives sometimes painfully real opinions to real women. For people who are confrontation-adverse, here is a new kinder, gentler medium, the book "What Not to Wear" (Riverhead Books, $15) from the original British hosts, Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine.
Whatever your bothersome body features, from flabby stomachs and big arms to flat chests, thick ankles and saddlebags, they provide instruction on the best and the worst ways to clothe them.
With straightforward Brit wit, they use themselves as the trash board to boost the art of camouflage. After two children, Constantine's body is "stretched beyond redemption" and her "underarms hang as dramatically as the Gardens of Babylon"; Woodall is thin "with short legs and no boobs."
For starters, flabby tummies should never be swathed in shiny fabrics or hipsters. And big arms also should be covered with sleeves.