Jade Goody Funeral Fashion Show

JADE Goody: Anorak’s at-a-glance look at Jade Goody’s post-reality career, with funeral fashions, souvenir issues and sniffs…

Daily Mail:  Liz Jones is having an “I was there” moment…

Liz Joens is, of course, minder to The New Jade Goody.

“Jade’s funeral was a mecca of bling and chavdom… but also of hope and strength”

Why the “but”? Few Snoots have ever stormed the castel of chavdom.

The scene was like stepping back in time. There were women named Iris and Pearl and Sheila. There were East End accents and faces etched with a life of hardship and disappointment and stoicism.

South London is a zoo to the human spirtit. Ther are accents that pre-date EastEnders. But unamarried, former anorexic Jones - and a cat-lover! - can sense disappointment. Boy, has Liz Jones suffered.

A Jones gem from Mail past:

“Rare is the school-age child in this country who has been allowed to experience hunger… I have a friend with three young children who admits to spending more than £400 a week on food. There is no longer any concept that you might make do towards the end of the week.”

As Anorak’s Ed Barrett put it:

But there was a corollary: if South-East London hadn’t existed, then someone would have had to invent it as a symbol of everything the cosmopolitan metropolis across the river was not. And in a way, that is exactly what did happen. Over the years, a caricature of this hinterland emerged, summed up in the phrase ‘Sarf London’ - a phonetic stab that fittingly bears no resemblance to the local pronunciation. The bottom right-hand corner of the London map became the modern equivalent of ‘here be dragons’.

Jones:

There were grannies on fold-up chairs eating fruit cake and waving daffodils.

Ed Barrett:

Today, the white working class has neither political power nor cultural cachet. One consequence of this is that the rest of society sees no reason to hide its distaste when discussing it. In these politically correct times poor whites are just about the only section of society that it is permissible to insult. The council estate, once a symbol of progress (albeit of a bureaucratic penny-pinching variety), is now regarded as the British equivalent of the American trailer park, and its inhabitants, once the harbingers of a coming classless age, are derided as ‘white trash’.

Jones:

Granddaughters stood next to them, the next generation strapped in prams. Policemen were being sweet and helpful. People rummaged in bags for cough candies.

That’s cough sweets to you chavs…

It was also strangely surreal that the funeral of Jade Goody, a young woman who made her name via such a thoroughly modern medium – reality TV – had inspired such an old-fashioned scene. The bars and restaurants charging at first £1 and later £2 as people became more and more desperate to use their loos. The candles and T-shirts on sale bearing Jade’s beaming face.

Paying for loos in Costa Coffee; official candles and the SkyCopter overhead. How terribly old fashioned. Quaint. Surrrreeeeeeal (which a modern word for weird)…

The crowd outside the church awaiting the arrival of the hearse bearing Jade’s body was a garish sea of pink and highlighted hair and square-cut French manicured talons and scraped-back pony tails and leopard print. The designer shades were so enormous they could probably be seen from outer space.

Very soon everyone tuning in via their North Koream satelite will be getting the look.

There were quite a few mini Chihuahuas, dressed in pink wool, with names like Paris and yes, you guessed it….

…Liz…

….Jade.

Women:

The young women’s faces – for this was a sea of very young women and very old ones, with few in between – were uniformly baked dark brown.

Like that Shilpa, or that Obummer fella…

This was a mecca of chavdom, of bling, of working-class women coming out for the day and telling anyone who wanted to listen what they cared about for a change… I asked one young woman with gold hair in a gold bomber jacket and sprayed-on jeans whether she admired Jade’s style. ‘I don’t care what she wore, I care about who she was.’

How very quaint.

For her expedition into the South London hinterlands, Liz Jones wore her hair long and her face pinched.

Anorak

Posted: 5th, April 2009 | In: Celebrities, Key Posts Comments (7) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink