A very cuspy time: Isabel Woolf helps celebrate the magazine of the Sixties

'IT was dead trendy,' said my neighbour, Paul Leith, a freelance illustrator, raising his voice above the chattering of journalists and the clinking of champagne glasses. 'I worked on it right at the end, on the very last issue in fact.' He deftly lifted a cocktail sausage off a passing tray and chewed thoughtfully for a few seconds. 'It was very Chelsea,' he continued. 'Very Kings Roady, very Sergeant Pepper, very . . . how can I put it . . . boutiquey. But I don't suppose it meant that much to anyone in Huddersfield.'

We were making small-talk in Notting Hill at the launch party for the book about Nova, the legendary women's magazine which was also bought by men. Almost 20 years after its demise, Nova is still discussed in hushed and reverential terms. Launched in 1965, dead by 1975, it was the pre-Sunday-supplement-style magazine which regularly broke taboos. It printed photographs of pubic hair and girls on toilets. It was a fashion magazine, but in among the glossy spreads on Paco Rabanne were features on impotence and immigration, abortion and women terrorists. Everyone worked on Nova - le tout beau monde - Terence Donovan and Helmut Newton, Jeff Banks and Germaine Greer, Molly Parkin and Barbara Hulanicki. And they were all invited to the party. I adjusted my leopard spot mini-skirt and pushed up the sleeves on my black polo neck jumper. This was going to be fab.

'If Nova was so brilliant,' I asked Mr Leith, 'why did it fold?'

'It belonged to a certain era,' he said. 'It was like a kaftan. People don't wear kaftans any more, do they?'

'It was a very cuspy time,' said the agony aunt Irma Kurtz. 'It was on the cusp, between two decades. It was both ahead of its time and of its time.'

'Excuse me,' I said to the PR lady, 'Is Mary Quant going to be here?' 'I don't know,' she replied. 'She was invited but she's terribly busy.'

'What about Jean Shrimpton?' 'She lives in Cornwall.' Terry O'Neill?' 'Not sure.' ''Michael Parkinson?' 'No.'

'I loved writing for Nova,' said the journalist Ann Leslie. 'But I rather got sidelined into doing 'miserable women' pieces, I was always being asked to find women who'd abandoned their children or women who'd had cancer, so in the end I went back to newspapers. But you always had a great sense of occasion when Nova came out.'

''Nova was terribly fashionable,' I said. 'Do you think, looking back, that you were all a bunch of Chelsea trendies?' 'Absolutely not,' said Ms Leslie. 'I lived in Hampstead.'

I glanced around the half-filled room. Still no sign of Twiggy. And where was Jean Muir? I'd seen her name on the guest list.

'What was the most shocking thing Nova ever did?' I asked David Hillman, the magazine's long-time art director, and co-author of the book. 'We printed the word c. .t and f. . .k in a piece about vaginal politics,' he replied. 'Unfortunately was a half-page ad for Tampax on the opposite page, and we lost the entire account after that. Apparently the chairman's wife disapproved.'

I decided to leave. It was obvious by now that Terence Stamp wasn't going to show.

'I feel rather sorry for all you journalists today,' said one former Nova designer to me as I collected my duffel coat from the cloakroom. 'There's nothing that you can do now that Nova didn't do 25 years ago. I think magazines these days are all incredibly boring.'

She gave we a sympathetic smile. 'Never mind, I expect you've had a really interesting evening.'

(Photograph omitted)