With 25 years of experience hosting parties at Vogue, I consider myself quite knowledgeable about party etiquette – both from the perspective of guests and hosts. While Vogue parties may not be the same as having friends over for a casual gathering, the underlying issues remain strikingly similar, as bad manners are universally frowned upon.
Here are a few of my top do’s and don’ts for anyone giving, or going to, a festive party.
Hosts
- Dress codes are ghastly – why make people wear something they don’t necessarily look good in and will probably never wear again. PS: Fancy dress is totally unacceptable.
- Never seat couples next to each other at the table unless you are in America, where, for some reason, the practice is common. It amazes me how often people do this for weddings. Who wants to sit next to the person they are sharing the car ride with?
- Allow people to bring a plus-one – but perhaps not their mother. Leonardo DiCaprio once brought his mum to a Bafta dinner, but not everyone is Leonardo DiCaprio.
- Don’t apologise to your guests for anything – let them assume everything is just as it should be.
- Remember that young people don’t drink wine – they inconveniently love cocktails.
- Don’t fret about the food as no one remembers what they ate if they had a good time. Although Daylesford Organic founder Carole Bamford’s ‘caviar and carols’ party is an exception because even the grandest guests are like pigs at the trough when it comes to caviar.
After 25 years hosting parties at Vogue, I reckon I’m something of an expert on party etiquette, according to Alexandra Shulman. Pictured alongside Kim Kardashian and Peter Dundas
The then Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker Bowles attend a Vogue-hosted party with Alexandra Shulman in 2001
Guests
- Never accept an invitation to an event you know you’ll want to skip when the day arrives. Nigella Lawson refers to this as the ‘distant elephant’, the obligation that lurks in the mind and gets larger as the day comes closer.
- Don’t ask who else is invited.
- Never involve the host in your transport issues.
- Don’t bring flowers. No host wants to scramble around for a vase.
- Never fiddle with the seating plan that the host has spent hours working out. Recently, I sat next to a man who wasn’t supposed to be in that chair. He had switched the seating because he didn’t want to be opposite someone whose wife he’d had an affair with. Understandable to a degree, but before learning the circumstances, I thought the person meant to be next to me had moved to avoid me.
- Make a French exit and just slip away. Hosts don’t need to know you are leaving, and when they have just got around to being able to relax, they don’t want to start saying goodbyes.
- Don’t sit in a corner with your best friend.
Leonardo DiCaprio once brought his mum to a Bafta dinner, but not everyone is Leonardo DiCaprio, Alexandra Shulman writes
Forget furoshiki – just fix the potholes!
Our local council, Brent, in North London, has given residents an A-Z guide to Christmas recycling.
I once received advice from the same group of people suggesting that if I found myself with excess food for the recycling bin, I should consider using leftover cheese to create a quiche instead of disposing of it. Given this context, I was intrigued by their latest guidance.
Bows and ribbons, apparently, can’t be recycled and should be kept for next year; metallic mince pie cases and sweet wrappers should be scrunched into a ball to be put into the bin heading for landfill; and we should think about adopting the Japanese practice of furoshiki – using fabric, rather than paper, for wrapping gifts.
Personally, I’d rather the council did something about the terrible state of the pavements.
Figures aren’t Clive’s specialist subject
Lame excuse of the week: Clive Myrie, the BBC newsreader and Mastermind host, who is clearly an intelligent guy, claims that he muddled up the paperwork as the reason he didn’t declare more than £150,000 of freelance speaking fees. With those earnings, on top of the £310,000-a-year he gets from licence-payers, he can surely afford an accountant.
Would Gregg say I’m middle-aged?
When Gregg Wallace claimed it was only ‘a handful of middle-class women of a certain age’ who objected to his distasteful behaviour, I wondered if I qualified.
Middle-class, yes, but am I middle-aged? What’s the cut-off point when you become elderly rather than middle-aged?
And did he consider that Gen Z, who we all know are the most censorious generation ever, would give him a free pass?
Brilliant Eddie, the baby-faced assassin
Thinking of age, it’s not only policemen who are looking younger, but assassins.
Eddie Redmayne as the assassin in the latest iteration of The Day Of The Jackal (left) and Edward Fox in the same role in 1973
Eddie Redmayne, brilliant as the killer in The Day Of The Jackal, looks like a fresh-faced undergraduate compared to how I remembered Edward Fox in the same role. Eddie is 42 but Fox was only 36. At the time, though, when I was a teenager, Fox seemed nearly ancient.
The show goes on – without canny Anna
Anna Wintour at the first night of The Devil Wears Prada stage show, with Elton John, who wrote the score
Judging by the reviews, it sounds as if the musical The Devil Wears Prada has fallen into the usual trap that anything based on the fashion industry falls into. They’re almost always a bad caricature and never convey anything like the glamour of the real thing.
To support Elton John, who wrote the score, Anna Wintour was at the first night, wearing Prada, but sensibly slipped away before watching the show. No one knows better than her that it’s all about the optics.
Will the last shopper turn out the lights?
Oxford Street used to be the high point of London’s Christmas lights. But now the big money is on Bond Street where the spectacular decorations outside stores such as Dior, Cartier, Louis Vuitton and Brunello Cucinelli cause traffic to grind to a standstill because of crowds taking selfies.
But is anyone going inside to shop? Well, not so much.
