Peter York Quotes

Quotes about:

Art Books Branding Design Fashion House Pleasure

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

Peter York

Architecture, Chandeliers, Jewellery

408 Copy 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

Stars, Real, America

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

Peter York

Design, Style, Biscuits

8 Copy quote
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?

Peter York

Arguing, Analysts, Grows

9 Copy quote
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.

Peter York

Christian, Baby, Dog

16 Copy quote
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.

Peter York

Running, Book, Ties

6 Copy 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

Ideas, Worry, People

4 Copy 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

Real, Class, Hair

6 Copy 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

Girl, Art, Two

7 Copy quote
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.

Peter York

Book, House, Important

4 Copy 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

Book, Opportunity, Rooms

4 Copy quote
If beauty isn't genius it usually signals at least a high level of animal cunning.

Peter York

Beauty, Animal, Genius

Peter York (1980). “Style wars”, Sidgwick & Jackson

8 Copy quote
Socially smart people have always mocked the threateningly mobile, and anti-branding is a central strand of high-end status conflict now.

Peter York

Smart, People, Conflict

4 Copy 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

Mistake, Pleasure, Source

"This Much I Know". Interview with Stuart Husband, www.theguardian.com. October 14, 2007.

4 Copy quote
Rock and roll is the hamburger that ate the world.

Peter York

Rocks, Rock And Roll, World

Peter York (1980). “Style wars”, Sidgwick & Jackson

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

Peter York

Art, Relief, Advertising

4 Copy 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

Real, Writing, Views

"Writers' rooms: Peter York" by Peter York, www.theguardian.com. April 10, 2009.

4 Copy quote
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.

Peter York

Jobs, Keys, Employment

4 Copy 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

Two, Vision, Different

4 Copy 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

Fashion, Luxury, Design

9 Copy quote
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 but satisfactory about the interior. And that lovely enamel wotsit in the middle of the steering wheel. A moment of quiet 'because I'm worth it' pride.

Peter York

Nice, Pride, Smell

8 Copy quote
There was a time when formal clothes were one of life's great pleasures, as well as a way of describing instantly a man's status wealth. Toffs wore the most, the proles the least. Fast forward to 2008 and clothes are still an unrivalled pleasure but some men - and this includes many of our betters - have confused status with fake informality.

Peter York

Confused, Men, Clothes

7 Copy quote
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.

Peter York

Running, Real, Reading

7 Copy quote
Sloanes aren't cafe society or NYLON hedge-funders with million-pound bonuses, or London Eurotrash wearing upgraded style anglais. Ann Barr's and my original picture of them in 'The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook,' published in 1982, was of an upper-middle-class world, conservative and fairly homogeneous, united by old attitudes and institutions.

Peter York

Attitude, Class, Style

6 Copy quote
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

Caring, Clothes, Arrows

8 Copy quote

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Born: 1943
Occupation: Author
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