Young sensation

Though the fate of other American child stars makes one wonder whether to be labelled The Next Best Thing is a blessing or a curse.

Necessary accessories Lord Snowdon observed in the sixties that cameras were male jewellery. By the Eighties, fashionable male accessories included Rolexes, portable telephones and Mont Blanc pens. But by a stroke of genius the Nineties zeitgeist came up with the baby as a radical alternative for a man who has everything. They’re everywhere. At weddings, at parties, on the catwalks, in restaurants, on magazine covers, in recovery, and at the Groucho Club. Chaps who a few years ago would have been as likely to carry a Prada handbag, are clinging to their rugrats. As the trophy wife gives way to the Power Spouse, men have been obliged to bear the New Man’s Burden.

Often seen together are: Liam Gallgher with stepson, four-year-old James; Ewan McGregor with toddler Clara; Tom Cruise with his adopted children, Connor and Isobelle; Antonio Banderas with Stella Carmen, his daughter with Melanie Griffith; Sylvestor Stallone with daughter Sophia Rose; Warren Beatty, 60, with the new woman in his life, daughter Kathlyn; Jack Nicholson, 60, with daughter Lorraine; Imran Khan with son Sulaiman. Mothers may be getting older, but the idea of late fatherhood has tempted many out of retirement: 82-year-old Anthony Quinn’s 13th child was born last year. But then, such a force as can make Michael Jackson embrace fatherhood cannot be trifled with.

Royal disclosures The Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson, has protested loudly on an American television at being “excluded” from the Queen’s Golden Wedding anniversary. The Duchess told Larry King of CNN that she would like a sit-down meeting with the Duke of Edinburgh to ask him why she was ostracised.If such a meeting were ever to happen, Prince Philip — not exactly known for mincing his words — would probably mention the words “toe” and “sucking”, combined with an ungentlemanly expletive. “I got an invitation via a secretary to go to Westminster Abbey,” said the Duchess. “But then I found out there were lots of things I wasn’t invited to — a ball, lunches, teas, dinners and things. I didn’t think that was right.“Why was I fine to go to the service but no private dinners? They obviously didn’t want me around.” She was right. They did not want her around. While the Duchess had been invited to Thursday’s service at Westminster Abbey, she had been left off the guest list for a lunch hosted by Prince Charles at Greenwich, and a private ball at Windsor Castle. She told Larry King she had been prepared to fly home from the US by Concorde but changed her mind on Monday after discovering she was only being allowed into the abbey. The Duchess was careful, however, not to blame the Queen.

“The courtiers, the grey men, they don’t like me because I don’t toe the party line,” she said.

Blue-blood obsession Honor Fraser is the latest British obsession and here’s how it happened. With the age of the supermodel (Cindy, Linda, Christy et al) long gone and the superwaif (Kate Moss) following close in her wake, fashion needed a new tag for the big names of the future. Honor Fraser and Jodie Kidd, with Stella Tenant and Iris Palmer, represented the perfect solution. Enter the blue-bloods, British girls who are beautiful in a haughty “I’ve got a faintly bad smell under my nose” kind of way.

When Honor Fraser walks down the catwalk, she resembles nothing more than a particularly lovely dressage pony. If she started her career looking every bit the (grand) girl next door — all flowing tresses and peaches and cream complexion — later, a tousled crop, a change of agency and a Gothic appearance in The Face earned her serious cutting edge fashion points.

Overnight, she became the most sought after girl in the world, the new face of Nina Ricci, Ungaro and finally Coutoure Givenchy. Fraser was the model of choice for the line, shot by the legendary Richard Avedon, styled by Alexander McQueen’s right-hand woman, Katy England, and art-directed by McQueen himself. But today, Fraser insists she finds labelling reductive. “It did appear, about a year ago, that there were a lot of girls who were blue-blooded — whatever that means. But being a model is all about you, what’s going on inside you and the way you project yourself. To group girls together is to lose their spark. There’s more to us than that.”