Stephen Bayley Quotes

Style is about the choices you make to create the aspects of civilization that you wish to uphold.

It's true that obscenity is a matter of taste and in the eye of the beholder.

The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines.

Fashion is a reflection of the time.

My mom told us that we should have good shoes, a good suit, and a watch, so I was running around at age 10 looking like a little old man. But somehow I grew to understand that a watch is a representation of myself, of my culture, taste, awareness and aesthetic.

Everyone's personal style evolves based on upbringing, exposure, influences, personality, etc. Style is subjective.

"There is no disputing about tastes," says the old saw. In my experience there is little else.

Do women dress for men or women? I’ve always wondered why that eternally provocative question is put in terms of approval - as if the heart of the matter, the answer, were indeed a question of approval by either sex. But the question is never satisfactorily answered because it is incorrectly posed. It’s disapproval, the fear of it, that motivates most women, and with disapproval it doesn’t matter where it comes from.

my mother ... took the fact that my taste differed from hers as a personal insult.

I'd like to put across the notion that bad taste is actually good for you.

Our self-love can less bear to have our tastes than our opinions condemned.

[Culture] denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms, by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.

Culture itself is neither education nor law-making: it is an atmosphere and a heritage.

I'm not doing it to pander to people. I just always knew what I liked versus what I don't like. I never liked things with too many zippers or spikes and stuff. That weirds me out. I like things that are pretty. And I think it's great to be pretty. I like being feminine. I think it's good to be feminine. We don't need to look like men or dress like men or talk like men to be powerful. We can be powerful in our own way, our own feminine way.

The only really firm rule of taste about cross dressing is that neither sex should ever wear anything they haven't yet figured out how to go to the bathroom in.

What kind of dining set defines me as a person?

There is a mandate to impose a voluntary return to traditional values.

And I find perfect beauty excessively boring, don't you?

Everything I do with BLK DNM is more personal than anything I have done before. I've worked hard to go deeper in my true intuition, and therefore I am definitely more pure in my personal taste than ever.

I guess I have a gift for expressing pedestrian tastes. In a way, it's kind of depressing.

I'm going to pull myself together for a while and think-try to determine what character of a woman I am; for, candidly, I don't know. By all the codes which I am acquainted with, I am a devilishly wicked specimen of the sex. But some way I can't convince myself that I am. I must think about it.

I think there's so much that's not said about sex in the United States. Even from an educational level. And I do a lot of work on human trafficking and I connect a lot with girls that come up and end up in this trade and partially because of a lack of education about sex in the country.

Sex is the great leveler, taste the great divider.

The universality of a custom is pledge of its worth.

Vulgarity is simply the conduct of other people.