White vest works wonders for Clive

There's a scene in Gosford Park, the new Robert Altman film set in an English country house in the Thirties, that has joined the all-too-brief list of truly sexy cinema moments.

It is the scene where Clive Owen (playing a brooding valet) indulges the theories of ladies' maid Kelly Macdonald in his garret room, while wearing his uniform trousers and a white vest. That's it - Clive Owen, stretched out on an iron bed, smoking a cigarette, pretending to read a book. It's the vest that's the key (you forget they have the same trigger effect as plectrums); it emphasises his virility in an environment populated by decadent aristocrats and emasculated servants and sums up why we had a simmering thing for him in the first place.

Owen is the ultimate white vest man: rock hard, working class, intelligent, probably dangerous, unlikely to ask before he takes what he wants. And it's this ability to wear the vest and look like you belong in it (not too tanned or worked out, not remotely self-conscious) that puts him squarely in a category with the likes of Robson Green, Sean Bean and Martin Kemp, British actors who are so comfortable playing cops and soldiers and chancers on TV that you suspect they're not even acting.

It's important to understand that WVM is exclusively British and, ideally, working-class. The Americans have their own white-vest tradition, and for some time now, getting photographed in the WV has been a rite of passage for the A-list star wanting to inject a bit of sweat and toil into their manicured image. But somehow, by the time they've got the bike on the beach and the gel in the hair and the vest rucked up over the washboard abs, the real bloke has long fled the scene. Everyone's tried to get in on the white-vest vibe, from Diet Coke to Leonardo DiCaprio, and still no one has come close to our boys.

The point about our WVM is that he's not in the big league, nor ever will be, because he's not that bothered. He isn't the one we scream for at premieres, he's the one we count on to bring a bit of raw testosterone to our television viewing (and the hours mean he can be home in time for the football). They may have gone to RADA (Owen), they may occasionally branch out into movies (let's not forget Bean is currently starring in Lord of the Rings), but these guys aren't ever really going to be stars, they just haven't got the necessary poncey gene.

It's as much as they can do to grit their teeth while hair and make-up are doing their worst. And let's face it, they're just a bit too naff to make it as pin-ups in the big film world: you need class, you need clothes and possibly a nose job. You need to smooth off those edges and walk the walk and do a bit of "Let's have lunch".

We fancy WVM, but feel guilty doing so. To us, they're a slightly shameful habit, allowing our unexorcised fantasies of menacing blokes with chips on their shoulders and a hard-and-fast attitude to the opposite sex to surface once in a while, in between scuttling off to the cinema to soak up the more PC virtues of George Clooney and Brad Pitt.

Owen was the first actor Altman booked for Gosford Park, quite something when you consider that the cast list reads like the roll call for thespian heaven. You can see exactly why he wanted Owen so badly for this upstairs downstairs ensemble piece: he is his anchorman for the simmering discontent of the below-stairs community, exuding a potency that makes his social superiors look like old socks.

Owen's presence - whoever he is playing - suggests the capacity to pulverise the floppy-haired boys at the top but the intelligence not to waste his energy.

So now the man previously known as "the one who was in that TV thing about the detective going blind" is featured in this month's American Vogue under the headline "Heartbreaker". No doubt, the next time we see him in a white vest it'll be on the cover of Vanity Fair, photographed by Bruce Weber in the tradition of all those other White Vest Man wannabees from Brad Pitt to Puff Daddy, and Catherine Zeta Jones will be badgering him to star opposite her in a film about Welsh pit ponies. Here's hoping that you can take the man out of the white vest but you can't take the white vest out of the man. We say go and see him now, anyway, before it's Armani vests only.

Gosford Park opens 1 February.