DAY 1, Friday morning: I am in Nice airport. Security is X-raying my case. A guard points accusingly at the collar of a borrowed Elspeth Gibson dress, blinging on screen. “Beading,” I say. “And this?” He points to a waistband on another dress. Give me strength: now even airport officials act like fashion police. “More beading.” He grunts. “Beautiful workmanship.”
Afternoon: I am in Cannes, blinking in the glare of 500 sets of Chopard diamond, emerald and sapphire-encrusted jewellery, the combined worth of which no one dares tell me in case I pull out a gun. New pieces are flown in daily from Geneva for actresses to borrow. Given this embarrassment of riches, Audrey Tautou’s decision to wear just the one Chopard earring to the premiere of The Da Vinci Code last week might seem contrary. But the asymmetrical arrangement has received positive reviews (unlike her film) and is widely deemed a good thing, not just for Chopard, but for the fashion industry.
“That earring and the Balmain minidress she wore proves that Cannes is more interesting than the Oscars,” says Rachel Zoe, probably the world’s most in-demand celebrity stylist (she put Keira Knightley in Vera Wang for the Oscars, rescuing her from another fashion disaster). “There’s a much more spontaneous feeling. Actresses are less afraid than they are at the Oscars, so they look cooler.”
The actor-turned-director Nick Moran, whose Nigerian-funded film Amazing Grace is being screened, puts it thus: “Cannes is like a posh Glastonbury: no mud, but a similar vibe. Everyone is here because of a passion.” The Chanel team, which has taken rooms at the Martinez Hotel for the second year running, this year with around 20 dresses (half from the haute-couture collection), is positively evangelical about films, which is why they don’t mind visiting actresses in their suites day or night. Next year Chanel will hire its own suite. “Four or five years ago Cannes still had a tacky image,” says one of Chanel’s taskforce. “Most designers had little interest in it. That’s changed completely.”
Completely may be putting it optimistically.Sophie Marceau experienced a distressingly tacky Wardrobe Malfunction only last year. But Cannes is nothing if not a celebration of optimism. The critics hope that Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver, which has its premiere tonight, will raise the bar after The Da Vinci Code. Chopard hopes that Penélope Cruz will wear its diamonds at the Volver premier; Chanel hopes that Virginie Ledoyen will wear its dress; starlets hope that a designer will deign to dress them. In the Versace suite they’re hoping that one of the sewing machines can be fixed. Behind the crash barriers outside the Martinez and the Carlton the public hopes for a glimpse of movie flesh made real, and hover round patches of red carpet. Actually it’s hard not to hover round red carpet — it’s even been installed outside the smarter boutiques.
Chanel is not the only fashion house to have detected Cannes’s rise from the ashes of past fashion crimes. Alongside Versace’s suite at the Martinez is Elie Saab’s suite, Armani’s, Tod’s, Swarovski’s. Dior is in town. Ditto Sergio Rossi and Fendi. Givenchy sunglasses have taken over the Carlton Terrace; Elizabeth Hurley is staging her first fashion show on the beach (bikinis and Chopard “day” jewellery); Roberto Cavalli has moored a purple gin palace on Pier 1, a few boats along from Alberta Ferretti’s (she is dressing Andie McDowell and Miranda Richardson; Tautou was in love with one of Ferretti’s dresses, too, but felt that she had to choose a French designer).
The truly excellent news, everyone agrees, is that there are no American designers (there is a feeling that since they’ve got the Oscars on their doorstep, this is as it should be).
Other news to perk everyone up: Al Gore is in town. Vanity Fair is throwing a party. The AmfAR (American Foundation for Aids Research) dinner — tickets $5,000 each, 100 per cent more than last year — has sold out. You can’t get classier than that. Well, you can: Colette, the ultra-fashionable Parisian boutique, could decide that Cannes is groovy and throw its own party. And it has. “It’s the ultimate sign,” says a celebrity liaison officer at Chanel, “that Cannes is cool.”
DAY 2: Dispatches from the front are good: Cruz wore Chopard to the Volver premiere, as did 13 other actresses. (Chopard provides each with one or two bodyguards, depending on the jewellery’s value. If an actress keeps them overnight, the bodyguard stays with her. “Outside her room,” notes Caroline Gruosi-Scheufele, Chopard’s chief executive. “Even our bodyguards don’t all look like Kevin Costner.”) Virginie Ledoyen wore Chanel (with her long tousled curls and white lace shirt dress, the verdict is that she is a picture of spontaneous, relaxed South of France glamour and that, along with Tautou’s lone earring, you would never see such innate chic at the Oscars). The bad news is that Harvey Weinstein’s party got a 1½ Martini-glass rating in The Hollywood Reporter, and Versace’s sewing machine is a goner.
1.30: I’ve managed to drag myself to Ferretti’s exquisitely converted 1950s Russian ice-breaker in the old port. She has installed a gym, whirlpool, Indian and Chinese antiques and hired a nine-strong crew (including a masseur). She brought it to Cannes as a haven for female friends, and “because the combination of culture, film and fashion is irresistible. Cannes is beautiful; it has a glamour that nowhere else has. It’s all about the new and avant-garde as well as the commercial.” Next year she may host a discreet dinner. “The Oscars have become classic and stiff. As a designer, half the time you’re dealing with stylists. But in Cannes very few stylists come so you communicate with the actresses directly. It makes for a much better relationship and that gives their endorsement more integrity.”
3pm: The Versace team has driven to Nice to buy a sewing machine. Luckily, some of the fittings with Halle Berry, Hugh Jackman and Monica Belluci have already taken place in New York or London. In any case the Versace team are paragons of serenity. “You have to be. This is a job where you can work until 4am. You can get ten people wearing Versace [as they did at the Oscars] or none, and you must be tactful, whether it’s telling them that the outfit doesn’t look good or somehow relaying the message that Donatella doesn’t want to dress them.”
9.30pm: I am teetering out of the Martinez behind Samuel L. Jackson and Willem Dafoe in my highest heels when someone takes a picture of my shoes. They are so excited about my footwear that they don’t notice the thesps. (That’s what I call getting your priorities right.) Surreally, the Croisette, the hotel-lined boulevard that sweeps round the bay, is crammed with people in evening dress. Strictly speaking, not all of it is elegant (the Porn d’Or runs in unofficial parallel to the main competition, and it shows) but there is something charming about all this effort. And maybe, just maybe, the dress code, which dictates that accredited photographers on the red carpet must wear black tie, encourages a certain gentility.
Or perhaps not. All hell threatens to break loose outside the Chopard party at the Carlton. Some 600 invited guests and several hundred uninvited ones are craning their necks to see Sir Elton John, Hurley, Cruz, Ledoyen, Tautou and Marilyn Manson. Joaquím Cortés and Dita Von Teese provide the cabaret. There are oysters for 700 (though the VIPs can’t get to them from their sectioned-off quarter) and toy seals attached to the ceiling for the sheer hell of it. Sir Elton slips off to his villa in the hills early because he is ill. “If he had his way, he’d stay at home watching the football every night,” says his friend Patrick Cox, the shoe designer.
DAY 3: Lunch is co-hosted by Tamara Mellon, the chief executive of Jimmy Choo, and Brett Ratner, the director of X-Men 3 and the past two Jimmy Choo ad campaigns, aboard a boat in the harbour. The sea is so rough that most of the other yachts and gin palaces have sought shelter in the marina. Here I learn two significant things about Cannes: the importance of Yacht Hair (it’s vital to cultivate the kind of long, bed hair that looks good even when drenched with seawater) and the chicness of having simultaneous lunch appointments. Half the guests on board have at least two other boat lunches to attend — this means that no one has time to eat anything, but then, eating, like getting out of bed too early, is for losers.
Mellon is on an exploratory mission. Next year she’ll take a suite at the Martinez — Jimmy Choo is expanding its retail outlets in Europe, “and Cannes is a vital marketing tool. The Oscars are about America but Cannes is international. Plus a lot of actresses wear short dresses here for some events, so everyone gets to see our shoes.”
What is extraordinary about both Cannes and the Oscars is that for a relatively small outlay, designers get global coverage for months, even years, after. As Gruosi-Scheufele says: “At the Oscars you get one hit. It’s all or nothing. Here there are 11 days of non-stop parties, premieres and press conferences. There are so many more opportunites for clothes and jewellery. Cannes is bigger for us than the Oscars.”
She should know. She spotted the town’s potential nine years ago and charmed the committee into letting Chopard redesign the Palme d’Or awards. Chopard is now the festival’s official partner, runs a fleet of cars in the town to ferry the 300 guests it flies in and even sponsors a new-talent award, the Chopard Trophy (winners include Tautou). For, lest we forget, Cannes is still about talent as well as frocks, marketing and parties. I even made it to the premiere of one film: Volver. Alas, scrupulousness compels me to reveal that several journalists took this screening as an opportunity for a snooze.
Cannes do
Understated glamour calls for major jewellery. Sir Elton John wore an 80-carat diamond to the Chopard party, making for one ecstatic insurance broker. No Cannes do
Food: there’s mountains of it everywhere, but eveyone’s too busy networking to eat. And you might spill it on the borrowed frock.
