THE COCKTAIL PARTY: BAZAAR & LANCOME FETE KATE WINSLET

On Friday, I had the good fortune to go to a cocktail party thrown by Lancôme and Harper's Bazaar to celebrate the BAFTA's and British fashion talent. Hosted by star guest, and face of Lancôme, Kate Winslet, and packed full of the great and the good of fashion and film, plus a lot of rising British talent, it was as glamorous an invitation as one could wish for.

I arrived seconds before Kate Winslet, and I was right next to the logo-board as she did her obligatory five minutes posing for the cameras - I took it as a perfect opportunity to have a really good stare at her, safe in the knowledge that she was too busy being photographed to notice me gawping like a star-struck teenager, something that I knew I'd be far too well-brought up to do when in the throes of the cocktail party itself. The photograph below is taken on my iPhone - hence the appalling quality.

I confess I scrutinised her very carefully -I don't know whether I've been corrupted by a lifetime of reading gossip magazines, but now find I can't look at a celebrity without thinking 'has she had work done?' or 'bonkers food regime, or nutty workout schedule?'. Kate Winslet has always come out strongly in favour of women accepting the way they look - she spoke out in 2003 against GQ's heavy handed retouching of hercover image, and last year successfully sued the Daily Mail for alleging that she'd, ahem, underplayed her exercise regime: having now seen her at close quarters, she's as much a poster girl for 'normality' as one could hope from an international film star. She's neither too thin, nor too worked out - I'd put her at a UK size ten, certainly no smaller: She obviously takes care of herself, but her slender shapeliness has a refreshing touch of achievability about it. I don't know why I'd expected her to be less luminously beautiful in the flesh - perhaps one's expectation is that Hollywood glamour owes an awful lot to good lighting and the art of the re-toucher - but she was utterly gorgeous. Her skin, particularly, could have sonnets written about it, and she's a wonderful asset for Lancôme. Mr Trefusis has always maintained she has fat ankles: I spent quite a lot of time at the party trying to take a surreptitious pic of her feet on the iPhone so I could prove him wrong, but failed miserably. He'll just have to take my word - and the images here - that her ankles are every bit as perfect as the rest of her.

Of course, film and fashion is an irresistible combination: the BAFTA's run slap in the middle of London Fashion Week and the combination of the two simply piles glamour upon glamour. It was a heady, scented mix of beautiful actresses in exquisite outfits, from Westwood to Temperley and Berardi to Christopher Kane, cheek by jowl with scions of fashion, from Testino to Bazaar's Lucy Yeomans.
Sam Taylor-Wood was a little more dressed down than most, but beautiful in a way that doesn't quite come over in photographs - in the flesh she looks at least ten years younger, and he a good five years older - and she and Aaron Johnson are so clearly wild about each other that only the most stony-hearted could fail to be moved by it or wish them every happiness.


There are much better pictures, particularly of the frocks, on the Harper's Bazaar website - I was struck by what a riot of colour it was - for a fashion party, very few people were wearing black, other than Kate Winslet, in Alexander McQueen, and Emilia Fox - reds, corals, purples, and golds were very much in play. I'm afraid I couldn't get my head round the dress code - 'cocktails and canapés' can mean anything from smart workwear to full on party frocks - I was too broke to buy anything new, and borrowing something was out, being too much on the wrong side of cake and chocolate for a sample size, so ended up in an unobtrusive black silk chiffon empire line dress that has nothing to commend it other than the way it allowed me to blend into the background so I could observe the beautiful people unobserved, and tweet away to my heart's content.

Bazaar's Lucy Yeomans wearing Berardi, with Kate Winslet and Harold Tillmans, Chairman of the British Fashion Council.