Sports Calendar

There may have been a concomitant rise in the number of celebrity magazines (the latest, Look, launched this week, billing itself as a high-street Grazia) but there are stringent rules about who features in them and why — rules entailing a degree of sensationalism and, ideally, humiliation.

Less than 20 years ago, manifestations of bad taste could kill a career. Cher’s Hollywood journey ended when she wore a transparent burlesque-showgirl dress to the Academy Awards, even though she was there to collect an Oscar for Moonstruck. The dress was partly tongue-in-cheek but the Academy never forgave her for being insufficiently reverent. The Oscars may be the last bastion against deliberate bad taste — and very dull they have become.

Perhaps this is the crux. Good taste, now that it can so easily be bought via the ubiquitous “celebrity” stylist — is no longer a story. Bad taste, on the other hand, is.

What Heat! et al have dubbed “car crash couture” provides us with the illusion that we are somehow sneaking a glimpse of the “real” person behind the glossy packaging. Céline Dion in her back-to-front Dior-trouser-suit-and-fedora get-up garnered more publicity than a moderate, pleasant outfit ever could have. Ditto Patsy Palmer in a truly astonishing transparent dress-and-knicker ensemble. Vivienne Westwood, though not a serial offender, provided what will surely prove an iconic 20th-century image when she donned a see-through dress to an event at Kensington Palace.

Bad clothes provide both celebrity and media with a narrative arc (terrible dresser discovers secret of style, weight loss and eternal happiness). They foster empathy rather than adulation, which chimes with the anyone-can-be-a-celebrity attitude of the era. And they fulfil our need to heap ridicule on those whom we elect to fame. Finally, as Coleen McLoughlin has found, with redemption comes the likelihood of a multimillion-pound book and DVD deal.

As Britney Spears discovered, yo-yoing pictures of a celebrity airbrushed to perfection one day and whacked out the next can fill the void where once there was a stream of pop releases. A wildly indiscreet dress can even help a Redgrave scion, as Joely Richardson realised when she wore Julien Macdonald’s crocheted gold cobweb to the premiere of the awful Maybe Baby and found herself on the front of The Sun, which was almost speechless at the flawless condition of her hitherto hidden talents. Three years later she was starring in Nip/Tuck, one of America’s most-watched television shows, as a hot fortysomething.

No wonder it is becoming hard to ascertain whether the outré apparitions that flit through the pages of our magazines and newspapers are deliberately ignoring all received style wisdom or are genuinely clueless. All we know is that the flouting has become endemic; even the normally infallible Kate Moss wore a dress recently that showed far more of her than it needed to.

But screechy opprobrium or gushing praise — it all amounts to pretty much the same thing. More column inches.

A good night, Sienna? What the experts say

THE PR GURU

Max Clifford

I don’t know much about fashion, but this kind of public display reeks of desperation. It will succeed in terms of media coverage — Sienna Miller’s name and picture will be everywhere. But it tends to suggest that media attention is important to the person because it isn’t there already, and the public can sense that. The media should always need you, not the other way around.

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