WHATEVER HAPPENED TO GIRLS IN PEARLS?
Once THAT Country Life page was only for posh gals. But now they all have something to sell...
GROWING up in deepest Devon in the Seventies, there were two things I liked to read. One was the wedding announcements in The Times, which prised open a peep- hole into that impenetrable social group known as ‘society’.
Despite the fact I hadn’t a clue who any of the people were (and nor, most likely, had anyone else), the ultimate thrill was when the announcement ended: ‘The honeymoon will take place in Kashmir.’ How exotic!
My other great fascination was — and still is — the Girls in Pearls page in Country Life. My grandmother’s copy somehow always fell open at this page.
For 120 years, the frontispiece of the ‘hunting, shooting and fishing set’ magazine has featured a full-page portrait of a young lady. Anybody might appear, from the Queen (who has been included five times) to Louise Pickering, an unknown country girl from Surrey.
You just can’t help being drawn to it. No wonder editor Mark Hedges very proudly claims it is ‘one of the most famous pages in any publication’.
Yet last week, the magazine had heads shaking ruefully when Millie Mackintosh, of reality TV fame, appeared in a pair of skintight PVC trousers promoting her own fashion line. How did it go from royalty — to this?
In the early days, the criteria for inclusion were fairly obvious. Royalty, however minor and now forgotten, required nothing more than their title: thus Princess Henry of Pless in June 1897 and Princess Pauline Duleep Singh in January 1911.
Princess Elizabeth first appeared in September 1943; Princess Anne in 1971, ‘on the occasion of her 21st birthday’.
The fascination with ‘society’ among readers meant that other young ladies could be safely included. They were always someone’s daughter; someone’s wife-to-be. Details were scant. They seem to gaze out, calm and untroubled, from some other and better world.
Then the Eighties happened. A middle- class Grantham girl called Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister. Old orders were challenged, and private citizens suddenly found themselves cast as Girls in Pearls — some simply after having an engagement photo taken.
Yet while the portraits retained the timeless aura of the deb, details started to creep into captions. Degrees and careers, for instance. Some GIPs were launching businesses.
Traditionalists sensed rebellion in the air, and by the time we reached 1999 and a semi-nude Sophia Burrell, a seafood restaurateur, who appeared as Botticelli’s Venus, they were reaching for the smelling salts.
They’d barely recovered when, in 2015, Dorothy Scott occupied the spot, clad only in a skimpy dress and a pair of gumboots, cuddling a pig. ‘Dottie’ had founded a piggery, apparently. At least, by then, readers were used to the idea that GIPs often had something to promote.
But why does everything have to come back to nudity — and money? While I wouldn’t want to return to the time when women were defined by the men in their lives, I miss those more innocent days when a girl was celebrated for her grace and poise, rather than because of the opportunities that exposure (sometimes literal) can offer.
LIPS are sealed concerning the selection process for GIPs. All Mark Hedges will say is that ‘we don’t necessarily choose the most eager’ and that the page has its own editor.
But why Millie Mackintosh? Has Country Life been dazzled by the cult of celebrity? Absolutely not, he insists. ‘We’d have chosen her anyway.’
Seems she has the right background, being boarding school educated and the descendant of the Quality Street makers.
As for the Botticelli shot: ‘It was a superb art photograph,’ he says. ‘Whenever we show someone with a tattoo or something slightly outrageous, there’s a tremendous fuss. The Girls in Pearls has never changed.’
Really? Browse through the page’s 120 years and see what you think. True, the girls do still come from a certain comfortable ‘drawer’, bound about in the more upmarket counties and the posh boroughs of London.
But for me, they’ll never be the same as those elegant ladies in my grandmother’s magazine.