printer friendly version

Having a ball By Kate Muir

For the past 20 years, no party worth its canapes has been complete without photographer Dafydd Jones on hand to capture the good times and the bad behaviour. Here, he tells Kate Muir how the hedonistic toffs’ bashes of the eighties have given way to stage-managed celebrity showcases. Is anyone out there still having fun?

Put a young Englishman in black tie, and his inhibitions drain away at precisely the same rate as his central cortex fills with champagne. At a typical party in the Eighties, just before midnight, a jolly jape tended to occur among such uniformed packs of toffs, and at that second, Dafydd Jones would slide from the shadows and quietly frame the shot. The debutante in a ball dress being tossed gaily into a pond in the darkness; a disembodied hand reaching from beneath the table for the last bottle of Bolly; the early Nigella Lawson playing croquet from a sedan chair; the members of an Oxford dining club sprinting down the table through the silver at the end of the dinner- all these delights, and those gentlemen known as "debs’ delights", are getting harder to find. Casual drunkenness, wanton destruction and tongue-tangling clinches are not longer the amusing stuff of high society. Image is all too important to risk sullying it with fun. For society as we know it has undergone a radical metamorphosis since 45-year-old Jones took his first photographs for Tatler more than 20 years ago. A retrospective of his work opens at the Proud Central gallery in London next month, and documents not merely the changing cast of the finest parties, but also the way celebrities, from footballers to royals, now take care to market themselves.

Hons must now mix with Rebels. Names like Rothschild, Windsor, Ogilvy and Spencer-Churchill find themselves juxtaposed with Halliwell, Moss, J-Lo and P.Diddy. In the past few years, all sorts of rum types have come in the tradesman’s entrance and worked their way to the top. No longer does private money pay for private parties resulting in public bad behaviour. Instead, international corporations stage carefully choreographed events resulting in perfect publicity shots. "High Society is no longer about the aristocracy of 21st-century Britain," says Jones. "Not that this is a bad thing- after all, it’s more meritocratic now."

As a society photographer, Jones spent years on the nightshift, suffering balls, stately homes and endless seasons of the Season. Handsome and diffident, he merged nicely into the crowd, his old Leica barely noticeable. He came to be trusted by those who provided access to debutante balls and charity dinners. Jones’s photographs reached the parts of parties which people don’t remember: the sad dregs; the fallen drunks; the melancholy search for coats, or a decent man, at the end of an evening.

In the Nineties, he moved to America to work for Vanity Fair to cover a similar set of parties, but with a very different cast. In Manhattan, Jones discovered the importance of being incredibly rich, and feasted his lens upon the likes of Ivana Trump and Leona Helmsley. A telling picture from that time is of lapdogs fighting over bone-shaped canapés at Brooke Astor’s Dachshund party.

Any American of import does not move without the say-so of their personal spin doctor, a trend which has now taken Britain by storm. Jones recalls a cocktail party in New York when "the designer Nicole Miller spoke briefly to me, and then handed me on to her PR who was standing behind. The PR gave me the press release for her new line. They’re not usually as upfront about it as that".

Partygoers come to conquer, to work the room. Rumour has it that a famous American editor has a tiny microphone in her ear at parties, and when a celebrity enters the room, a message is relayed and the editor homes in. Celebrities are directed towards the editor every couple of minutes, like planes landed at Heathrow.

Jones sees the same thing happening in London: "People at parties are not exactly pushy, but they’re there for a purpose- to promote themselves. They’re not there to find sometime to sleep with. Everything’s sponsored: the logos on the walls, logos projected on the floor, even on people’s faces." Partygoers are literally branded by the companies that have bought them.

So as the parties and society has changes, so has Jones’s portrayal. In the Eighties he took black-and-white close-ups, concentrating on the actors. Now he has developed a new technique of taking time-lapse shots, sometimes around 360 degrees, which show all the choreography of the event. They are best seen on his website. The Vogue or Vuitton logo on the walls is as much as part of the story, he thinks, as the famous people before it. Jones’s wider photographs show the VIPs, the entourage, the handlers, the press pack restrained by red ropes: the circus that is celebrity.

A photo of Posh and Becks records them at Jade Jagger’s party, but Postmodernity demands that it pulls out to show the pink drinks and orange sushi, the journalist with a tape recorder trying to cadge a quote, and the hangers-on smiling desperately at the camera.

In this mode, Jones did a whole series of "red carpet" photographs, of the Oscars and other awards, explaining that the drama occurs as celebrity enter the party and "work the line" of hungry media. "The parties inside are often rather boring now. It’s arriving there that counts." For some people, an event does not exist properly unless it is covered by the paparazzi. After the attack on September 11, Jones overhead two PRs saying: "There’s no point in having any parties right now. It’s not that people won’t come, but the press just won’t give us any space."

Materialism has in many ways replaced the old snobbery. In America Jones started to see goodie bags appear at the end of parties, and by the time he returned to live with his family in Britain in the late-Nineties, the bags has followed. In his office in the basement of his house in Stockwell, south London, Jones unearths a whole series of Englishfolk greedily clutching a beribboned goodie parcel from Mulberry, which looks big enough to contain a suitcase. "People spent their own money on parties in the Eighties. Now they spend other people’s money." So long as there’s some charity involved, corporate partying can go ahead shamelessly. "Even Prince Charles had a party sponsored by Burberry last summer," notes Jones.

Prince Charles is one of the few celebs who appears in the early and the late Jones photographs. Only one other man has had the same staying power, easily crossing the divide between High Society and (J-)Lo Society: Hugh Grant. There he is in the Eighties, all girlied up in fruit and flowers at the Piers Gaveston Society in Oxford, and here he is, all buffed up at film premieres in 2001. One time-lapse shot by Jones of the "De Beers and Vercase Diamonds are Forever Millennium Celebration" provides the ultimate guest list for the new Lo Society: Ivana Trump, Jon Bon Jovi, Donatella Versace, Prince Charles, Pierce Brosnan, Elizabeth Hurley, Hugh Grant, Jodie Kidd and Tamara Beckwith. This is probably not what Debrett’s Peerage anticipated when it advised in its etiquette guide that a party should contain a "varied mixture of elements that combine to make a delicious (if not intoxicating) whole."