Stephen Bayley Quotes

Interior design is a travesty of the architectural process and a frightening condemnation of the credulity, helplessness and gullibility of the most formidable consumers - the rich.

Fashion is primitive in its insistence on exhibitionism, which withers in isolation. The catwalk fashion show with its incandescent hype is its apotheosis. A ritualized gathering of connoiseurs and the spoilt at a spotlit parade of snazzy pulchritude, it is an industrialized version of the pagan festivals of renewal. At the end of each seasonal display, a priesthood is enjoined to carry news of the omens to the masses.

It is the fragrant lack of practicality that makes high-heeled shoes so fascinating: in terms of static mechanics they induce a sort of insecurity which some find titillating.

It is sometimes easier to have furniture made than to find things.

Everyone has taste, yet it is more of a taboo subject than sex or money. The reason for this is simple: claims about your attitudes to or achievements in the carnal and financial arenas can be disputed only by your lover and your financial advisers, whereas by making statements about your taste you expose body and soul to terrible scrutiny. Taste is a merciless betrayer of social and cultural attitudes. Thus, while anybody will tell you as much (and perhaps more than) you want to know about their triumphs in bed and at the bank, it is taste that gets people's nerves tingling.

Watteau is no less an artist for having painted a fascia board while Sainsbury's is no less effective a business for producing advertisements which entertain and educate instead of condescending and exploiting.

The assumption must be that those who can see value only in tradition, or versions of it, deny man's ability to adapt to changing circumstances.

I have no particular interest in antiquities or antiques, but I like things to meet a certain aesthetic.

You are what you pretend to be.

I wouldn't mind someone lobbing hand grenades at me, but having to reset the timer on the video recorder puts me into a blood-spitting frenzy.

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

It is the fragrant lack of practicality that makes high-heeled shoes so fascinating: in terms of static mechanics they induce a sort of insecurity which some find titillating. If a woman wears a high-heeled shoe it changes the apparent musculature of the leg so that you get an effect of twanging sinew, of tension needing to be released. Her bottom sticks out like an offering. At the same time, the lofty perch is an expression of vulnerability, she is effectively hobbled and unable to escape. There is something arousing about this declaration that she is prepared to sacrifice function for form.

If you were born in Britain after World War II, you see a continuous atmosphere of decline, moral and economic and political.

Fashion is the most intense expression of the phenomenon of neomania, which has grown ever since the birth of capitalism. Neomania assumes that purchasing the new is the same as acquiring value... If the purchase of a new garment coincides with the wearing out of an old one, then obviously there is no fashion. If a garment is worn beyond the moment of its natural replacement, there is pauperization. Fashion flourishes on surplus, when someone buys more than he or she needs.

My wife and I both love cooking - I am an advanced male - so we argue about who gets to rustle up dinner.

Taste is more to do with manners than appearances. Taste is both myth and reality; it is not a style.

That's one of the things about getting older isn't it? You suddenly realise that you are what you set out to be. And there are no role models any more.

While there is a great value in things that are old, it seems that the overwhelming challenge in Britain in the late 20th century is to make every effort to see value in the contemporary and in the future.

You must never aspire to 'finish' a house, you can merely hope to start it, and from then on it's an evolutionary process.

I just don't understand how you can not be concerned about your appearance. From time to time I'm vilified as the person who cares about the look of a teapot - and it's not that I believe my taste is superior , I just can not believe that other people don't care.

I have a character failing. I am quite incapable of identifying with anything whole-heartedly. Whatever I am doing, I am always planning to do something else. I would rather travel than arrive.

I have put [the word] "discoveries" in inverted commas because scientific results, perhaps as much at least as artistic achievements, are a product of contemporary taste, driven by momentary appetites rather than eternal verities.