Explore Columnists August 2006
Style guru Stephen Bayley on the ‘design world’; Bill Knott champions the humble waistcoat; and Diana Howie laments the Z-list celebrities appearing on most chat shows
SPEAKERS’ CORNER
FORM OVER FUNCTION IS ONE THING, BUT MATTERS ARE GETTING OUT OF HAND, ARGUES STYLE GURU STEPHEN BAYLEY, WHEN ACTRESSES START VYING FOR A PLACE IN THE ‘DESIGN WORLD’
WHEN MANHATTAN SOCIALITE Gloria Vanderbilt allowed her name to be put onto the butt of mid-market denim jeans 30 years ago, the melancholy ‘designer’ phenomenon began. By the mid-1980s, there were some people who, un-selfconsciously, spoke of ‘designer water’. It meant ‘expensive’.
At the time I was judging a national architectural competition. I asked a proud client what a certain feature of his building did. He replied: “It doesn’t do anything. It’s been designed.” So a subject that once involved Palladio, Brunel, Edison, William Morris and Alec Issigonis, a subject that was defined as intelligence made visible, had been traduced into something that was precious and meretricious. Silliness made visible, in fact.
The great challenge of the modern world is to make beautiful goods and practical services economically available. The ‘designer’ phenomenon – self-absorbed, solipsistic, inward-looking – is perversely at odds with this civilised quest. Designers live in what is called the ‘design world’, a self regarding parallel culture which travels, relentlessly and remorselessly, from expo to furniture fair to festival, from Milan to Tokyo, from this hip hotel to that cool bar, screaming and clamouring for attention on the way. Of course, wanting to be cool is a self-denying ordinance.
Any annexation of the ‘world’ word – as in ‘art world’ or ‘literary world’ or even ‘dog world’ – suggests a sense of separateness which invites mischievous speculation about the morbid pathology of mental illness. Why is the ‘design world’ different from the real, undesigned world which everybody else, including the Queen, inhabits? Going by the furniture and fittings of the Royal Yacht Britannia, it seems Her Majesty did not take the designer option terribly seriously. Bevelled glass cocktail cabinets, plaited vinyl chairs with splayed metal legs, chintz, ditsy little things all over the place, tangles of grim wiring and hand-painted notices: council household taste.
Take, by way of contrast, the ‘designer’ hotel. How my mood slumps at the prospect. A ‘designer’ hotel is not one dedicated to beauty and practicality, but one intended to be featured on double-page spreads in magazines in thrall to a brainless neophilia. You get nauseating colours, difficult lighting, awkward furniture, staff better dressed than guests, an agonised straining for effect in every department. Philippe Starck has contributed substantially to this category. In the lobby of one of his New York hotels, someone was prevented from moving a chair because it spoiled the composition. Starck’s product designs – from motorbikes to trainers – photograph brilliantly, then go on sale almost immediately.
The celebrity designer is a depressing travesty. Design was at its most interesting when designers were least well known – say in Detroit and Milan in the 1950s. But in the real world, as opposed to the ‘design world’, influence of design diminishes the better known the designer becomes.
This has its parallel in business, where recent US research showed there to be an inverse relationship between a CEO’s media profile and the company’s share price.
But the absurdity is, if designers can become celebrities then celebrities can become designers. The Habitat stores had a recent promotion that let actresses and athletes ‘design’ products. These will not go down in history. If you believe what you see on television, a designer is not a practical genius who embraces the intellectual, commercial, technical and aesthetic in pursuit of ingenious and lasting solutions to everyday problems. No, a designer is nowadays anyone who can rag-roll an old pine dresser.
The best design is as little design as possible: subtle and understated work better than strident and evocative. But celebrity is at odds with subtlety, as readers of Hello! magazine may have realised. Celebrity and design have always been poor companions. Design may be intelligence made visible, but ‘Celebrity’, in novelist John Updike’s words, “is a mask that eats the face”.
FLYING THE FLAG
WAIST NOT, WANT NOT, SAYS THE EVER-STYLISH BILL KNOTT
PERSONALLY, I BLAME Diane Keaton. Ever since the release of Woody Allen’s film Annie Hall in 1977, in which Keaton’s eponymous heroine spends most of her time dressed in a Ralph Lauren waistcoat, that peerless staple of a gentleman’s wardrobe has been in terminal decline.
There are but few ways for the smartly-dressed man-about-town to mark himself out from the crowd. Red socks are favoured by entrepreneurs and adulterers, while garish neckwear is the mark of the advertising agent or antique dealer, but there is little that a man of taste can wear to escape the pinstripe.
In truth, the demise of the waistcoat probably stemmed from the rise in popularity of two other accessories: the wristwatch, originally intended for women, which became popular during the Great War and obviated the need for somewhere to keep one’s pocket watch; and the belt, instead of braces. No gentleman should ever wear a waistcoat with a belt.
The waistcoat may be a brightly-coloured, cheerful affair, even, as Jeeves would have described it, “a trifle sudden”, or it may be fashioned from the same cloth as the suit. But it is always, above all things, practical. One need only witness the attempts of middle-aged men to stretch a belt around their spreading stomachs to observe that a waistcoat and braces would be a far more felicitous solution.
It is an eminently sensible sporting garment, too: snooker players use them to avoid inadvertent contact between shirt and balls. Rumpole, the famous Old Bailey hack, used his to keep cigar ash off his shirt, while Edward VII, after one too many state banquets, started a trend for leaving the bottom button undone, a style still favoured by gentlemen.
The waistcoat is, apparently, enjoying something of a vogue amongst German politicians and businessmen, which may – or may not – help its revival elsewhere. Sadly, it is also becoming a fashion item for women, thanks to Kate Moss. What a waste of a coat.
PEOPLE WATCHING
ONLY TRUE STARS SHINE ON SCREEN, SAYS DIANA HOWIE
Early this year, we at UKTV Gold announced the arrival of the new series Wogan: Now and Then, a contemporary take on the traditional chat show. The premise was simple: Sir Terry would re-interview the star guests of his original series of the 1980s, alongside some of today’s stars.
The more controversial characters from the original programmes (such as David Icke and Freddie Starr) grabbed the headlines but the others were no less compelling. The star quality of the likes of Joan Rivers, Dame Edna Everage, Larry Hagman, Christopher Lee and Liam Neeson (pictured) simply made great TV.
And then there were the contemporary guests, including Simon Cowell, Amir Khan and Alex Kingston, who all lit up the screen with their funny, thoughtful and informed conversation. They were guests, again, with real star quality.
But it was the guests we were offered but whom we turned down that revealed what is apparently deemed acceptable on other chat shows: a deluge of self-promoting, ex-reality show participants, bland pop singers, little known TV presenters, DIY experts and regional DJs. Agent assurances that they would make compelling and entertaining television, “because they’ve been a guest on loads of other shows”, fell on deaf ears.
I am at a loss to work out why some think that success in the tabloids equates to success on TV. Leading sports people, artists, designers and academics have all earned their right to be interviewed – but C-list celebrities and dysfunctional former Big Brother evictees?
These ‘lazy bookings’, as I call them, are offered freely to deadline-driven production teams, and it is tempting, when you are under pressure to fill a weekly chat show, to take the easy option. It takes strong editorial commitment not to compromise.
Somebody once said that, “in America, only the famous were allowed to walk on the red carpet but that in Britain, walking on the red carpet was enough to make you a star”. Not true. It may make you a celebrity but never a star.
Diana Howie is Commissioning Executive UKTV (Entertainment): www.uktv.co.uk
