I often find myself worrying about celebrities. It’s an entirely caring thing; it’s not like the people who commission those photographs with cruel arrows to go on the covers of the celebrity magazines. The photographs show botched plastic surgery, raging eczema, weight gain and horrible clothes for maximum schadenfreude. Peter York Read Quote
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. Peter York Read Quote
People are fretful about lifestyle retailing because the idea that anyone’s immortal soul and deepest longings can be quite so readily anticipated and consolidated with several hundred thousand other like-minded types is worrying. Peter York Read Quote
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. Peter York Read Quote
Across the Atlantic, commercial therapy of all kinds provides so many more comfortable outlets for people when they are under pressure. The English tradition is to get a grip, whereas the American version is to get in touch with your feelings, to say: ‘I’m a good person. Isn’t it terrible when bad things happen to people like me?’ Peter York Read Quote
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. Peter York Read Quote
One should never learn from one’s mistakes. Making the same mistakes, over and over again, is a source of unremitting pleasure. Peter York Read Quote
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. Peter York Read Quote
