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.

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...

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.

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...

The White Company offers its loyalists an altogether better, whiter world. The White people have edited out any colours that aren’t white, off-white, milk chocolate, grey, taupe or black. They can’t be doing with Johnnie...

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.