consider what Lisa Birnbach's wonderfully accurate Preppy Handbook (sales
pushing 4 million and still going strong, so it's mainstream) says about the magic
of ...
DESIGNING BRITAIN 1945 – 1975 From solving problems to selling product: the changing role of designers in post-war Britain
Excerpt from: Peter York, ‘Culture as Commodity: Style Wars, Punk and Pageant’, Design After Modernism, (ed. John Thackara), Thames and Hudson, London, 1988 Just what is it that makes British design so different, so appealing to the waiting world outside? Well, it certainly isn’t the design qualities in most of our mass-manufactures in all the critical areas of the world trade in things … our cars, aircraft, shipbuilding, computers and consumer electronics. I’m hardly revealing family secrets to say our shares in all those businesses have gone on slumping since the war, and before; our average income dropped below even the Italians recently. What exactly is our unique contribution to the wonderful world of design? What do the Americans, the Japanese, the French, even the Italians, want from us? What they want, I would suggest is anti-design. Call it culture, lifestyle, the past, the future, Britain as a theme park, a ‘Fantasy Island’ of new primitives – anything in fact that doesn’t suggest it was conceived by a rational being called a designer, or still worse a design team working at a drawing board in an air-conditioned office with pure Stuttgart windows, Dieter Rams-type fitting, grey carpets, those French nylon door handles, Tizio lamps, or any of that stuff. The world doesn’t want designer design from Britain, it wants magic; the designer stuff it can buy elsewhere. This is not to suggest we don’t manage to sell some technical excellence under the counter when no one’s looking – Rolls-Royce aero-engines for instance – but that isn’t our big line, it isn’t what the world knows us for. In a brilliant parody of George Orwell’s 1984, America’s native genius Tom Wolfe imagined Britain in AD 2020 when the country has been taken over, as a theme park, by Walt Disney Enterprises to service viddie American tourists who all walk about with video cameras stuck to their heads, enjoying the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Aristocratic or nineteenth-century Cosy Holiday Lifestyle Packages. Millions of Englishmen become viddie-humpers – they put on costume as permanent extras dressed as Pickwicks, Brummells, bobbies, pram-pushing nannies, beadles, lamp-lighters, coachmen, stable boys, blacksmiths, Carnaby Streeters, eighties debs, and colonial officers in solaro cloth. At every major intersection are twenty-foot-high miniatures of Big Ben – designed in Britain but made in Japan. London has been re-made architecturally by revivalist architects in all the great styles of the past – it’s absolutely caked with columns, pilasters, quoins, groins, arches, spires, cupolas, clock towers, cornices and pediments. Wolfe is not often wrong.
Britain’s principal export specialities are punk and pageant, the future and the past. The past you know, it’s obvious, it’s ‘Queen and Country’. You can’t write it off as just tourism; you can’t say it isn’t relevant to a discussion of design futures. Because that stuff, the class stuff, the archaic stuff, the great dressing-up box of the past, is massively important in selling things and idea from Britain; and never more than now. The English look that a certain kind of American, French, Italian and Japanese consumer likes is ‘atmospheric’, it’s mouldered-down and patinated. It’s kind of organic, this look. They’re on about selling it as an art that defies art. The makers of English glazed chintz, like the celebrated decorating firm of Colefax and Fowler, would be ruined if they ever admitted that anyone called a designer, anyone who looked, thought, talked or wrote like one, went anywhere near those floral patterns. Those rosy bowers just grew there. And those eighteenth-century country houses just grew out of the ground, and eighteenth-century furniture grew on trees. As that English sherry ad says: ‘One instinctively knows when something is right.’ From pilgrim daughters like Consuelo Vanderbilt (who married the Duke of Marlborough and topped up the Churchill money) through the thirties decorator Lady Colefax, another American, to a kind of us magazine typically called Colonial Homes, the romance of waspy style based on the English eighteenth century has meant a lot in America. The truth is, there aren’t really enough Duncan Phyffe chairs or Maryland highboys to go round; an awful lot of them were found or faked in England. ‘Colonial’ is British. You only have to consider what Lisa Birnbach’s wonderfully accurate Preppy Handbook (sales pushing 4 million and still going strong, so it’s mainstream) says about the magic of Shetland sweaters and English shoes. And Mr Ralph Lauren, a great American romantic of our day, with a wonderfully Gatsby vision of the world, has a similar feeling about Jermyn Street menswear styles. The English past sells: it sells whisky; mackintoshes (Burberry) (why else is there a mackintosh called London Fog – made in the USA); Laura Ashley (the most successful and influential English designer of her time); tea; jam; shoes (Church’s); Rolls-Royces; interior design; spread-collar, striped shirts from makers who sound like classy law firms – Harvie & Hudson. And, of course, we’re world leaders in the Royalty market. No one comes close: all the other Royalty market contenders have severe design and ‘positioning’ (as marketing men say) faults: the Dutch are too bourgeois by half (they ride bikes); the Monegasque are pure show business; the Spanish – I ask you, re-appointed by the Government; the Scands – who’s ever heard of them? I could put the entire Royal Families of Europe, apart from ours, on a platform and you wouldn’t recognise any of them except for Princess Caroline of Monaco, and Princes Stephanie, who models swim-suits and cut a disco record. You wouldn’t catch the Queen doing that, the woman of whom Bette Midler said ‘She’s so white, she makes me feel like a Third World person’. We’re actually increasing our Royal dominance with exciting new models – this is one business that’s not winding down. The Sloane Ranger juniors like
Princess Diana and her generation of good-looking young royal people are just made for TV. I recently had one of my books published in Japan – it’s about Sloane Rangers. In the original, Princess Diana featured, but modestly. In the Japanese edition, she dominates, like Queen Kong – huge pictures of her on the cover and all over the inside. The Japanese publishers know what their market wants. The Royalty business is crucial to the apparent anti-design tradition. It’s typically English and paradoxical that the Duke of Edinburgh used to present his yearly prize for elegant design for the Design Council – he’s its patron – talking in precisely that kind of English voice and wearing that kind of English suit that hasn’t changed since the 1930s. The Duke of Edinburgh does not wear ‘designer’ clothes – he wears tailored clothes. His style is the antithesis of design as the design professional knows it; so are his houses. But that voice, and those suits, are truly influential now while those prizes he gave are mostly forgotten. So the point about all these things, these Queen-and-Country romantic exports, is that they are antipathetic to the good bourgeois profession of designer as we know it. The impression one gets is that they were produced by craftsmen in workshops or servants in kitchens, or that they were suggested by aristocrats who’d been keen on a Grand Tour. They just grew. I should stress that this phenomenon does not just apply to exports. In times of trouble or triumph there is a national Styliste resource, a nineteenth-century and Edwardian view of the eighteenth century, so splendid, so comforting, so commercial that it works at every level. It’s a style that suits new money with a Conservative cast of mind. Curiously enough at this moment it also appeals to the real avant garde which, as ever, isn’t composed of the kind of designers who draw everything in squares, nor of architectural critics who invent such things as Decorated Sheds. But good design types will be able to share in the Anglo romance. When they’ve made enough money they can put the graph paper behind them, forget they’ve ever seen Beaubourg or Bauhaus. Their aspirations to Anglo style show in their taste – half-Fabian, half-Brideshead – for stout English brown shoes that shout leather, for thick cords in moley green, Oxford shirts and bright yellow V-neck cashmere sweaters. Go to Margaret Howell in St Christopher’s Place and you’ll see the versions of Anglo style the proprietors of large design practices are settling for. Ask anyone in America, Japan or Italy – a real person, that is, not a designer – what they think of first when they think of England and of course, they’ll say Royalty, Diana, upper-class and old, old, old first. But running a very close second will be something apparently quite different; one or other of our rollcall of juvenile delinquent pop-stars or alternative comedians. Ask them to name a British car (apart from Rolls-Royce or Jaguar), a British electronics product or a British designer, and you’ll draw a blank. If the past is half our business, the other big English design export is the future – not the designer world’s fair ‘we-are-standing-on-the-brink-of-a-new-
adventure-for-mankind’-type future, but an ‘oh-my-God-I’d-never-wear-it’ future. The future is called ‘your-punks-are-wonderful’. It’s called: MTV; New Wave; New Romantics. No one seems to be quite sure what to call it, but the nearest is video style, because that original British art, the promo video that sells a record, bundles up all the key factors in one go: pop music; clothes designers; young film directors (usually trained in TV commercials); set designers; graphic designers. Any time you see the following motifs in a film, TV music packaging or graphics, remember where they come from: spiky hair; white faces (Jackson Pollock’s paint splash??); very red lips; girlish boys; boyish girls: cross-dressing; period clothes; rocking horses (think of Robert Palmer’s ‘Addicted to Love’ where those girls’ lips vibrate like a volcano designed and shot by a British photographer). All these clichés of popular, modern design – the video style – started in British design of the late seventies in music and fashion and graphics. They had never been seen on American soil outside SoHo in New York, which, as we know, contains unAmerican activity. English promo videos are postmodernism come to life. Anyone who’s even wondered what postmodernism could really mean apart from Mr Venturi’s decorated sheds will find it in an English pop promo. They’re all about dressing up and making-up and playing around. They call on the past and the future in a fantastical, ironic way. They’re about dreams, they’re like dreams, full on ambiguities and gender-confusion – another British triumph – and of course jokes. When I think of the English promo video I think of Adam Ant’s ‘Stand and Deliver’ in 1982 at the height of the New Romantic style. It featured Adam as a ‘Dandy Highwayman’ in eighteenth-century kit, Trucome hat, brilliant makeup and Walkman, swinging though post-modern English period settings to music stolen from African Burundi drummers at the suggestion of Malcolm McLaren. Ordinary Americans – real Americans – call this style ‘wacky’, they think it’s kinda weird, but they also think it’s kinda cute. Duran-Duran mean something very different from Bruce Springsteen. American design types say, ‘It’s fun but it’s really nothing. London’s so boring now’ – then they copy it and run with the ball. This British future style is a dandy one – it’s software rather than hardware. What they’re setting up is the cellar club of the future rather than the next shuttle station. They’re working on the great look, rather than the five-year plan. Now there’s no doubt that this kind of British style involves designers – of a kind – in fact it’s knee deep in them: clothes designers; make-up designers; set designers; graphic designers. And they’ve – mostly – been to art schools. But the kinds of designers who pitch in to this peculiarly British enterprise aren’t like design professionals either – they’re as far away from the masters of modern design as Princess Diana is. We’re talking about a generation of designers who took their first cues from Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols. And what they want to do hasn’t got the word ‘design solution’ anywhere in it.
These promo designers don’t want a line in monogrammed towels in Bloomingdales; they don’t want to run the design department in RCA Victor; they’re doing something quite different: they’re in show business; they’re in media; they’re not in crafts; or in mass-production things. For better or worse they don’t want to build a better mousetrap. They want to create some fun or some mischief and then get on to something else.[...] The design boom The world’s television viewers have seen a raft of specials on the ‘British problem’ – de-industrialization, unemployment etc. – familiar, painful stories to smoke-stack America and other western countries. So let me tell you instead about one of our sunrise industries, one where there’s: money, prestige, glamour on toast – and where there are new millionaires every day. It is one where Government and business are pumping money in as fast as they can. What is this 1980s Silicon Valley? It’s Design. Britain gained a crop of design millionaires during the eighties – Messrs Conran, Fitch, Michael Peters; and Pentagram don’t do too badly. Terence Conran developed a designer-led business into retailing and now controls a significant chunk of the high street. There’s nothing like a few millionaires around to give design serious social standing – it beats years of special pleading. In Britain, design business consultancies are beginning to win what I call ‘the battle for the Chairman’s ear’, over other business services like even advertising. Rightly or wrongly British businesses are beginning to think design will save them. And Government support is quite clearly sincere. The Prime Minister spends more time on it than she needs – there aren’t many votes in design. And they’ve put their money where their mouth is with increasingly huge consultancy funding. Whether it will work is one thing. The effect on perceptions of design in Britain is undeniable, however, and that’s an important start. Because traditionally in Britain a lot of the proselytizers for design have given the lie to their message by coming on so nannyish, and looking so frightful, because they haven’t really been visual men and women at all. So the reason the world doesn’t always recognize Britain’s new design is that so many designers are working in areas that aren’t called design; many, indeed, have been despised by many design professionals, because some are working on purely domestic things, and others have let foreign adapters take their ideas. But the newest, youngest breed of British design professional is a different animal, a more realistic commercial animal, with a much better grasp of the real issues. One symptom of this is their willingness to do research, and respond to user’s real needs. Architects and designers of the older school feel very threatened by market research – they’ve bad-mouthed it as stifling
creativity, as over-slick. The new breed, in contrast, do research quite naturally; they’re pragmatically interested in the social context.
Why Britain now? What can the world possibly learn from us? I’ve tried to spell out some of the ways British design is singular – and therefore often under-appreciated. A friend of mine in London called Robert Elms has made his living for the last four years by talking up English youth style. He says we’re twenty years behind and ten years ahead (or maybe it’s a hundred years behind and twenty years ahead). Anyway, what he says is that we’ve dummy-run the future in many ways: first to industrialize and de-industrialize; first to develop a successful nonAmerican commercial youth culture; first to re-work our traditions – we’ve been doing it since the mid-nineteenth century. The key British design exports are culture, and culture is, as we know, after electronics, after bio-technology. It is the industry of the future. Walt Disney knows it; the Japanese Trade Ministry MITI knows it. That’s why it’s working so hard on developing new habits of mind for the 1990s – why it’s putting so much effort into style and fashion. British design recognizes some of the truths of the modern world: it’s interdisciplinary (things change); resources are finite (we’ve always gone for cheap thrills and re-cycling); there has to be a social responsibility dimension to design (or it’ll come back and hit you in the face); realism – you don’t live forever.
