6.56pm Tuesday...when the good times returned
IF THERE was a single moment when real, highvoltage, in-person glamour returned, it was at 6.56pm last Tuesday with the arrival of the Duchess of Cambridge at the premiere of No Time To Die, in a shimmering Jenny Packham gown. The dress was a masterpiece of red-carpet style, with a zillion sparkling sequins, beads and crystals and an extravagant superhero-style caped back, accessorised with a pair of golden, saucer-sized drop earrings. Of course, it wasn’t the first sign of normal life powering back. But the allure of the 007 franchise, a pillar of our culture for a mind-blowing 59 years, gave the premiere’s display of glamour a special potency.
Here was the long-awaited collective exhalation of breath that said: We’re back – good times are rolling. As if to underline it there was also Daniel Craig’s fuchsia tux. Fuchsia, for heaven’s sake! Now that’s a man who’s clearly not in the shrinking violet, let’sall-stay-at-home frame of mind.
Emma Raducanu (increasingly the poster girl not only for tennis but post-pandemic partying) was there, beaming her trademark beam in lustrous silver.
Phoebe Waller-Bridge, parachuted in to sharpen up the script for these #MeToo times, was dressed in her usual cool, sexy androgyny way – a jumpsuit plunging to the navel. And not a mask in sight.
All in all, the evening was a brilliant demonstration of a timehonoured phenomenon: the way the joint forces of Hollywood (OK, in this case, Pinewood) and royalty have so often been the cavalry galloping in to rescue us from bleak times.
Back in the 1920s, after the Great Depression, it was silver screen movie stars like Jean Harlow, Clara Bow and Carole Lombard who America looked to for muchneeded escapism.
And after the Second World War, it was Cecil Beaton’s portraits of the Royal Family (especially the young Princess Elizabeth) shown in front of highly romanticised, Utopian backdrops that were released by the Palace as feelgood propaganda.
It’s not only movie stars and royalty who have been putting on their glad rags – so have the fashion crowd. British Vogue and Tiffany hosted a do in London with Emma Raducanu, but also Idris and Sabrina Elba and Claire Foy (who must feel quasi-royal after The Crown).
In Milan, Donatella Versace celebrated her collaboration with Fendi with a party that rolled out Kate and Lila Moss, Elizabeth Hurley and Naomi Campbell.
There will be those who will say this is all too soon, that we are not yet ‘out of the woods’.
And certainly there is a different edge to the celebrations now that everyone knows how precarious these freedoms can be.
But that only makes them all the more delicious.