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. Peter York Read Quote
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. Peter York Read Quote
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. Peter York Read Quote
There is an interior style we intellectuals and design policy wonks know as Haut Euro Pooftastic, which really takes the biscuit. Peter York Read Quote
There are pop managers, and then there’s Simon Cowell, who isn’t gay, Jewish or particularly riveting. He’s not without interest but he doesn’t exactly have the hinterland of, say, Brian Epstein. Peter York Read Quote
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. Peter York Read Quote
The old process of social assimilation used to be mainly about English new money – generated in London, the mucky, brassy North or the colonies – buying those houses and restoring them, and doing the three-generation thing, mouldering into the landscape, and the ‘community,’ identifying with the place in a familiar way. Peter York Read Quote
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. Peter York Read Quote
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. Peter York Read Quote
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. Peter York Read Quote
