Words matter. These are the best Peter York Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
For me, wearing a tie is a pleasure, a recherche one but a pleasure nonetheless. You could say that I’m avoiding tie avoidance. My own gorgeous collection runs into hundreds and I buy them the way I buy books – I simply can’t pass a shop. I have loved them since I could spend my own money on them.
Global new money has houses everywhere, and serious helicopters, it doesn’t aspire to the Miss Marple life of St. Mary Mead.
Brands are useful ways of short-handing practically anything – look at the way Tom Wolfe first used brand name lists to sharpen up a character and a situation. Look at the most brand-referenced novel, Bret Easton Ellis’s ‘Glamorama.’
I’m certainly not a person who spends their every waking moment soaking themselves in signs and signals of the sort that cult studies people study; and it’s partly, I suppose, because some of those signs and signals aren’t worth bothering about. You have to be selective about these things.
I cling to the basic set of tenets laid out in Tom Wolfe’s ‘New Journalism’ – to get out there like the great French novelists of the 19th century and study life. I am a Tom Wolfe fan of the first order.
The newsprint thesp celebrity interview as a middle-brow art form suffers from desperate overproduction. There’ll be at least 10 in the broadsheets today and every Sunday hereafter.
All brands, whether high-ticket luxury ones such as Cartier or Rolls-Royce or ‘masstige’ ones with luxe-y overtones but altogether more affordable, all want to grow. Even brands that may have started in a modestly niche design and lifestyle fashion can find themselves under pressure to go global or to sell out at the top.
Stephen Jones’ hats are what we used to call ‘creations’; extravagant, odd things for extravagant, odd people like Madonna or Lady Gaga. They’re worn in a parallel universe.
Real writers – serious writers with serious subjects, who earn their living at it – all seem to write in small rooms with that knotty-pine 1974 look on the top-floor rear of their houses. Rooms with views.
It’s just as well that I write in the same facile way wherever I am – no blocks or anguish, no contemplation, no elaborate revision, no need for love-tokens or nice views.
Selling scent is a key job for celebrities. At any one time, there’ll be hundreds of them at it, going on the world’s talk shows, doing photo-shoots, providing employment for thousands. Celebrities are instant brands.
Been trading up recently? You have, haven’t you? You’ll be squawking that you’re too rational, too busy and too socially concerned for any of that. But go through the fridge – come to think of it, what about the fridge itself? I bet it’s bigger than its predecessor.
My friends adore ‘TOWIE’ – the TV documentary series, ‘The Only Way is Essex.’ They like it, I’m afraid, for the most unworthy of reasons: class mockery. They tune in to wonder in a ‘can you believe those people?’ way at the natives of Brentwood and Buckhurst Hill.
In the future, people will blame the Eighties for all societal ills in the same way that people have previously blamed the Sixties. The various Thatcherite Big Bangs – monetarism, deregulation, libertarianism – have been working their way through the culture ever since.
When you get inside a literary novel you feel that the author, more often than not, just doesn’t know enough about things. They haven’t been around enough – novelists never go anywhere. Once I discovered true books about real things – books like ‘How To Run a Company’ – I stopped reading novels.
By the 1980s, practically no one under 60 in the real civilian world wore hats for anything except weddings, funerals or Ascot. Hats had been in competition with hair, and hair had won. Thirty years before that, Brits of all classes and ages wore hats all the time.
London clubland divides itself between the St James’s refuge for toffs, and the Conquest of Cool, for the arts and media.
Nobody knows anything. I deal with people in all walks of life, some of whom should have some idea of what they’re doing. And they’re all clueless. It’s astonishing that any bridges stay up, or that planes don’t constantly plummet from the sky. It’s heartening, in a strange way.
Eponymous brands aren’t that popular with analysts and investors now. You can only take an eponymous brand with a living figurehead so far, they argue. What happens when they grow old and die? What happens when they misbehave and go seriously off-brand?
I can remember when anything further downtown New York than Canal Street was risky and the whole area still looked like a ’70s cop movie location; when the original loft-owners were more dash-than-cash, artistic types.
I can’t actually read interviews with thesps now because they’re almost always fantastically predictable, the men especially. Actors are forever stressing their ordinariness, their beer and football-loving commitments.
Decorators never quite saw the point of massing books. Books brought colour to a room and filled it up, but shelves bearing just one thing struck them as a decorative display opportunity tragically lost.
Chandeliers are marvels of drop-dead showiness, the jewellery of architecture.
The library was one more essential in the parade of rooms in a big 18th-century house – and part of the required kit ever afterwards. The important thing was to have the books, not actually read them.
In Britain, eponymous lifestyle branding as we know it started in the late 1960s, with two fascinating families – the Conrans and the Ashleys – who in increasingly brilliant settings and catalogues sold rather different visions of what the new ideal upper-middle-y life looked like.
Kate Middleton’s a pretty girl who sounds nice.
In the 1940s, cigarettes would be shown in classy situations, endorsed by celebrities – real A-list Hollywood stars in America – the ads would make claims about tobacco quality or manufacturing science and, bizarrely, some brands had what almost amounted to health claims.
When I hear about something allegedly happening in the world I always ask: ‘Who is doing it?’ Trends break out because they’re based on real demographics, like there being fewer nuclear families or more people living alone. If 10 people in Shoreditch are doing it, it’s a 10-minute fad.
Celebrity poverty, that’s the hidden scandal in Blair’s Britain. You can’t help but worry for them. A girl I knew developed X-ray eyes for celebrity sorrows. She taught me to read the subtext of the down-market celebrity interview, she knew all the Hollywood codes, and followed the deep backgrounds.
This may sound insulting to some of my cult studies friends, but there’s a lot of cult studies people who ignore, shall we say, the wider canvas – because they simply don’t know about its existence or they don’t know how it operates.
Girls like Diana Spencer, armed with nothing more than a guinea-pig-rearing certificate, proud to say in that old Sloane way that she was ‘as thick as two short planks,’ became the exception as girls from Benenden and Downe House started to fast-track towards the City and law, consultancy, media and the arts.
Like lots of baby boomers, I was brought up on archaic anthropomorphism. Upstanding Christian dogs. Rabbits with family values. Because the ancient texts and pictures were sacred – Potter, Milne and the rest. Even concerned parents who knew Freud and Jung never saw the contradictions in feeding us on them.
Fashion people think that the careful Nice companies are boring beyond measure. (Nice people think fashionistas look silly and should Get A Life).
