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...

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.

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...

As one of the most successful and longest running bands in Christian music, Audio Adrenaline has made tremendous impact in the lives of their loyal listeners. They have also been a strong influence and positive...

Fashion people think that the careful Nice companies are boring beyond measure. (Nice people think fashionistas look silly and should Get A Life).

There is an interior style we intellectuals and design policy wonks know as Haut Euro Pooftastic, which really takes the biscuit.

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.

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...

By the late Nineties, we had become a more visual nation. Big-money taste moved to global standards – new architecture, design and show-off contemporary art. The Sloane domestic aesthetic – symmetry, class symbolism and brown...

It was associated with people who did bad stuff, who went wild on the terraces,

Kate Middleton’s a pretty girl who sounds nice.

Global new money has houses everywhere, and serious helicopters, it doesn’t aspire to the Miss Marple life of St. Mary Mead.

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...

If you’ve done a bit of journalism, everyone assumes you must be moving into PR. We’re absolutely not becoming a PR agency and we’re not turning into Brunswick. We will remain SRU, but we will...

Advertising has always been a huge unrecognised source of outdoor relief for the arts.

George Bush is by American standards rabidly Upper Class – Eastern, Socially Attractive, WASP, 19th-century money, several generations of Andover and Yale (and, while we’re at it, his father, George H. W. ‘Poppy’ Bush, was...

London clubland divides itself between the St James’s refuge for toffs, and the Conquest of Cool, for the arts and media.

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...

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...

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...

If beauty isn’t genius it usually signals at least a high level of animal cunning.

Haagen-Dazs (a clever Scandi-sounding name invented by Americans in 1961) was bought for its Euro-sounding sophistication by the kind of Americans who first bought those Mercs and Beemers, while Ben & Jerry’s (now owned by...

There’s no Peter York Foundation, and you’re no one without one.

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...

In London – and forget those extra public pressures on politicians – the lovely old Sloane world of manor houses simply hasn’t cut it since Big Bang in 1986, the point at which Mrs. Thatcher...

Have you got a Beemer, an Audi, a Saab or a Volvo that replaced a Ford, Vauxhall, Rover or Nissan? Many Brits have. Your first Beemer. A particularly nice smell of leather. Something rather plain...

One should never learn from one’s mistakes. Making the same mistakes, over and over again, is a source of unremitting pleasure.

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...

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...

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...

Marmite – like that other little black-jar job, Bovril – is so much a Mark 1 staple-of-Empire brand, so much part of the Edwardian world of enamel advertising signs, the history of grin-and-bear-it industrial food.

Tabloid discussion of bad children always blames baby-boomer liberals, careerist mothers and fashion-crazed Nathan Barley types who think it’s all enormously funny. But the centre-leftish psycho-thinker Oliver James says it’s all down to the Thatcher-and-after...

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...

Imagine a State occasion where the Queen is wearing trainers with her tiara because she thinks it will make people like her better, more folksy. It’s unthinkable. But that’s patently the thought process Gordon Brown...

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.

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...

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...

Rock and roll is the hamburger that ate the world.

Successive generations of middle-class parents used to foist their own favourite books on their children. But some time in the late Eighties it began to wane – not because children had lost interest in adorable...

Men turn to formal wear when they want a new job or when they think their current one is in danger. They try to present themselves as powerful and successful.

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...

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...

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.

Pop managers are fixed in the dramatic stock character repertoire too, ever since the first British pop film musical, Wolf Mankowitz’s ‘Expresso Bongo’ of 1959, with Cliff Richard as Bongo Herbert and Laurence Harvey as...

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...

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...

All I’m saying is that Louis Vuitton and L’Oreal didn’t invent branding at some point in the mid-Eighties. Big, reassuring names have been around a long time.

Prince William looks good in uniform and Man-at-Hackett black and white tie (he has grown up wearing it constantly); less certain in his suits, which sometimes look borderline archaic; and variable in casual. But completely...

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...

Chandeliers are marvels of drop-dead showiness, the jewellery of architecture.