‘Of course, women are quite fashionable at the moment,” Steve Coogan quipped at the Baftas. It is true: there was a huge array of female talent on display – “display” being the right word, for the red carpets of awards ceremonies are now catwalks of women stitched into dresses.
Have there ever been so many ceremonies for already successful people giving other already successful people prizes? It is all rather mystifying – as is the fact that, when you bring together a room full of writers, directors and performers, the gongs are presented by people reading the lamest of jokes very badly from a teleprompter.
Never mind. I would have given every award to Daisy May Cooper for her rubbish outfit. She was magnificent in a dress of black bin liners, made by her mum with the help of her mum’s friends Viv and Sharon.
I am au fait with bin-bag fashion, if no other kind. I have even worn a bin bag myself, because it was a go-to in DIY punk times. You just cut a slit for the head and two for the arms. This dress, though, was a work of art, with frills and a trail of “detritus”, accessorised with a bin lid and a fake pigeon. Everything that could be said about the miserable red carpet “lewks” was said brilliantly. “The reason I’m wearing this,” Cooper explained, “is that, if I wore a normal dress, that would have cost a lot of money and I thought I’d donate that money to a local food bank and wear bin bags instead.”
The result was pure joy – the complete opposite of the contrived oufits at the Met Gala in New York last week, with its theme of camp, which turned out to be the most humourless affair possible. As far as I am concerned, Cooper won the whole show.