Ready To Wear: Grace Jones rocked but other Jubilee looks flopped

Susannah Frankel
Sunday 10 June 2012 12:42 BST
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Leave it to the attendees of the Diamond Jubilee Concert to come up with every fashion faux pas in the book– and not just we, the sooty-faced, Union Jack-waving commoners.

First up, JLS. The violent emerald green that this conversely studiously unremarkable boy band chose to parade was only upstaged by the fact that they appeared to be aspiring to some sort of modern-day attempt at co-ordinated dressing, Grace Kelly style. This was hardly achieved with the finesse of a neurosurgeon. There was a green jacket here, green trousers, an emerald panel on a baseball jacket, an emerald-green trainer there. Finally, an emerald-green accent of colour (yes, really) was cunningly included in the form of an emerald-green earpiece. Woeful.

Next: more piping on a lapel than has been seen since the 1980s and it wasn't a good idea then, either. Stand up and be counted, some woman of a certain age in the royal box (knock me down with a feather if it wasn't Norma Major) in a white jacket with blue piping on a lapel so wide and sharply defined that further emphasis was not called for. Then there was Sir Cliff Richard's blush-pink (blush pink!) two-piece complete with white piping that begged the question: does a crying, talking, sleeping, walking, living strawberry daiquiri need more embellishment?

Nul points, too, to Annie Lennox's spectacularly stupid angel wings. "There must be an angel...." Geddit? And could someone please tell the artist formerly known as Cheryl Cole that glamour in this day and age isn't judged by the size of a gratuitous explosion of sequins/feathers/ tulle at the hem. it just makes anyone wearing it look like they grew out of – and/or are rooted to – the ground.

The exceptions that proved the rule: Elton John in rose sparkle with shades to match (the aforementioned Kelly meets Liberace); Kylie Minogue as an unashamedly slutty Pearly Queen; the Queen herself, glorious in gold, and, of course – inevitably – Grace Jones, a goddess of a woman whose Philip Treacy hat and moulded corset left everyone else in the shade.

As my good friend Lee opined: "Outstanding."

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