by Mary Killen

'Party', says the dictionary, 'a gathering for social entertainment'. And in 1988 the innocent stimulation of gaiety, fun, dancing, flirtation and introductions, were all a party-giver hoped to preside over. Oh and the paying back of hospitality. Nowadays the opulence can be just as great - excessive sometimes as, for example, at the party for Madonna in the private room at the Ivy where, guests grumbled, the smell of the white roses covering the ceiling ( in December ) was 'too strong'. But the difference between an opulent party in 1988 and an opulent party now is that in 1998 your host may have a hidden agenda, may well have something to sell...

Having something to sell is one of the reasons why the sight of a champagne-wielding reveller has now become so commonplace in the media. Time was when only Tatler and Harpers & Queen ran 'Party Pages'. Now every publication makes space for them. the photographers are invited, the media is 'handled'-either because someone wants to blow their own trumpet with a view to career advancements and networking, or because a pr firm hopes to lodge the indelible impression in consumer's minds that there is a link between their product and social success.

Private parties, given for private pleasures still happen in England, they are given by grandees and those who have held onto their old money or even made substantial amounts of new. But the hosts are now windier about requests from social diary editors for coverage. It was different in the days when only fellow glossy-readers from one's own extended circle would be having a look but now, if you've got it, surely it's foolhardy to flaunt it?

As one grandee commented to me 'Now that you can no longer be rude or make jokes about any minority groups on grounds of race or religion, the only ones you are free to attack are toffs, so why ask for trouble by courting publicity?' ( It was recently noted that English toffs are now the only baddies allowed to appear in films nowadays since Gypsies, Indians, Germans and 'Natives' must only appear in heroic lights for pc reasons ).

It was different then. Tatler, which had been effectively dormant for many years was resurrected in 1980 by Tina Brown. Debutante balls, society weddings and lawn meets were then about as fashionable as a convention of chiropodists would be now. There was an idee fixe that the upper classes consisted only of buttoned-up braying buffoons since these were the only faces, smiling straight to camera which had tended to appear in the Tatler's little-read social pages.

Under Tina Brown these pages were suddenly filled with physically attractive members of the upper classes and Tatler took off. Could she have wreaked the same magic with chiropodists were she asked to do so today. Probably not because one major reason that the public had become more interested in high society was because the Princess of Wales had come into their lives and they now had an appetite for any information at all about the world she came from.

The Tatler's secret weapon was the photographer Dafydd Jones who had been discovered in Oxford by Tina Brown. Jones's eye for the movement or gesture which somehow says it all about a person, plus his ability to blend into the background of any social event and photograph people almost without their realising it, was a rich asset. He caught them pushing one another into swimming pools. screwing up their faces into ludicrous but characteristic grimaces, spraying champagne around the place when they were Hooray Henries and dressing up in drag at the Piers Gaveston such as Hugh Grant and allowing themselves to be photographed snogging other boys.

In the Bystander office of the Tatler where, in 1988 I presided with my little assistant Camilla Cecil, now Jennifer of Harpers & Queen, we had no problem with persuading people to allow their parties to be photographed nor in persuading them to be interviewed on the flimsiest of pretexts.

It wasn't that they were showing off, just that their world seemed smaller and more confined so doors were thrown open to photographers because, it was thought, it would be fun to see the photographs a couple of months later and people had bought such lovely dresses and the house was looking so nice.

Mark Boxer, under whose editorship I joined the Tatler, had a theory that if Dafydd attended twenty events a month then at least two thousand people would buy the Tatler in the hope that their own photograph would be in. The reality was that only about one hundred and twenty people would appear each month. Craig Brown, who worked there at the time, always thought it was hilarious that it should take a month to produce a glossy magazine when it took only one day to produce a newspaper with exactly the same amount of words in it, but the truth was that the Tatler text was more titivated. the hosts and hostesses of parties were sucked up to by members of staff who rang or wrote to ask if their party could be covered. They sometimes came into the office to look at the photographs and be given some spare prints and although they were allowed to beg that certain people might not be included in the magazine on the grounds, for example, that they had gate-crashed the party and would therefore be unrepresentative of their friends. Sometimes a guest did not want to be caught out as being present, since they had cancelled a former invitation to go to a better one, but the final selection was mine, Mark Boxer's and the art editors choice.

People genuinely enjoyed being in the social pages of a glossy in 1988. It was simple fun and that was all there was. One of my best friends, Gerry Farrell, whose wife Jo's thirtieth birthday party is featured here, has always had a huge social network. I used to ring him from, the offices of Tatler on occasion-'Gerry we want to do a spread of party pictures showing black women who really good dancers...can you think of any?'

'Oooh, please, said Gerry, can I be in it?'

And his response was not at all atypical.