Went to a film premiere last night, for the new Peter Morgan film about Brian Clough called The Damned United. I really enjoyed it - and I hate football.  I went as Nick Hamm, a film director, because Jennifer Hamm is my best friend and Nick couldn’t attend.  Now obviously if I was really going as Nick Hamm I would have worn … well, what would Nick have worn?  Trousers, shirt, he’s a snappy dresser but no dandy.  The fencing shirt could have been left behind. The bondage trousers.  Thinking about it, it must be so boring being a man.  You never really get to dress up. 

In the end I wore a long black dress, the other option was a black pencil skirt with a pale pink chiffon blouse, which might have been a better choice.  Jen wore some pale blue wide leg jeans, a classic white shirt, belted, a pale blue Stella McCartney coat.  I’m telling you all this, because it got me thinking about film premieres and what you’re supposed to wear.  How you think it’s all going to be princess dresses but really so much of it depends on the film.  

So what was everyone else wearing?  Susannah (as in Trinny and Susannah) looked gorgeous in a black knee length coat and dress ensemble, lots of jewellery. (what is it about that word ENSEMBLE that makes me think of the fourth floor of John Lewis and all those ghastly wedding outfits)  The girl from Harry Potter was there, looking pretty and fresh faced but I can’t remember what she was wearing.  And Peter Morgan’s wife, Lila, looked elegant and sexy in a short black and white dress, but then she has a Helmut Newtonesque figure to carry it off.  She laughed at how Peter loyally always puts his arm around her whenever there’s a photo opportunity, but then she gets cropped out of the pictures later.   Which made us think of clever Liz Hurley for wearing that safety-pinned Versace number all those years ago… 

If I’d really gone for it, I should have worn a Leeds United shirt, or a Derby shirt, and gone slightly 70s, but the 70s styling in the film wasn’t the glam disco era, oh no, this was England in the 70s, where all cars were square shaped, the kind you could knock up quickly with a couple of cigarette boxes.  Wallpaper was bold, graphic, and invariably brown.  And as for the players, apart from a couple of times when they ripped off their shirts to reveal Beckham-esque torsos, they resembled a bunch of misfits in their purple crimplene tracksuits (does anyone remember Crimplene?  this was before Lycra!), their bad perms, their blotchy skin, and their serious nicotene addiction.  They scarcely looked fit enough to run, let alone win matches, which most seemed to do with bullying tactics rather than with any particular skill with the ball. 

Let’s just say, lucky I didn’t go for it.