B is for Bauhaus, Y is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World from A to Z (2015)

Making sense of taste represents a certain challenge for intellectuals. They understand the subject in class terms. They understand, of course, that they themselves are a class, but mostly prefer not to talk directly about their personal tastes, and they certainly do not like the idea of being typecast by them.

German philosophers and sociologists and French structuralists, from Immanuel Kant to Pierre Bourdieu by way of Georg Simmel, have understood taste and fashion (which for them is almost the same thing) as the means by which class is signalled and defined. In the Kant-to-Simmel scheme of things, ruling classes set fashions and create tastes, while the rest of the pack struggle to catch up but can never quite manage it. By the time the socially disadvantaged get anywhere near them, the elite taste-setters have changed the rules and skipped ahead again.

Though his analysis of everyday objects, from toasters to ice-cream vans, made him a particularly acute observer of taste, Reyner Banham did not by and large discuss fashion directly. But in his choice of neckwear he maintained a running commentary on the changing significance of fashion. It was one of the ways in which he demonstrated his perception of himself as a truculent outsider. Despite his doctorate from the Courtauld Institute, he was keener to talk about his days as an engineering apprentice than he was about studying with Anthony Blunt and Nikolaus Pevsner. He started using Banham’s middle name, rather than his first name, Peter, and he took to wearing a bolo tie.

In English usage, a bolo is a bootlace tie, a narrow strip of leather held in place by a silver clip, which had been popular with the Teddy-boy cult of working-class dandies in the 1950s. In America, the bolo tie is a manufactured tradition in the Western states with its roots going back no further than 1940. It is a form of neckwear more associated with conservative republican politicians than architectural historians. By adopting it, Banham was carefully signalling both that he knew a lot about the world of taste, and that he did not care to be part of it.

Adolf Loos had an equally detailed interest in fashion. He was a notably sharper dresser than Banham. He used the English tailoring that he had acquired on his way home from America as a way to mark himself out as subtly different from his Viennese rivals. ‘Well dressed?’ Loos once asked. ‘Who doesn’t want to be? What use is a brain if one doesn’t have decent clothes to set it off?’ He went so far as to design two of Vienna’s more fashionable men’s outfitters: for Knize, the store from whose Berlin branch Mies van der Rohe bought his suits, and for Goldman & Salatsch, among the earliest-known examples of what has become the near-universal phenomenon of the architect-designed fashion outlet.

Loos was an elegant controversialist in the columns that he wrote for two now-defunct Viennese newspapers: the Neues Freie Presse and the Neues Wiener Tagblatt. And perhaps his own interest in his personal appearance helped him come to a more nuanced understanding of taste than one that was simply class-based.

What does it mean to be well dressed, it means to be correctly dressed; for fashion we use such words as beautiful, elegant, chic, smart or dashing. But that is not the main point at all. The point is to be dressed in such a manner as to attract as little attention as possible. A red tailcoat would attract attention worn in the ballroom, therefore a red tailcoat is not the modern style for the ballroom. A top hat would attract attention when ice-skating. Among the best people, to attract attention to oneself is considered vulgar. This principle, however, cannot be adhered to everywhere. With a coat that would be perfectly inconspicuous worn in Hyde Park, one would certainly attract attention to oneself in Peking or Zanzibar.

Curiously perhaps for an architect whose sophisticated and subtle building on the Michaelerplatz in Vienna attracted so much obloquy, Loos believed in discretion, in the architectural as well as the sartorial sense. Loos was not averse to attracting attention, if not to his clothes then to his intellectual position and to his architecture. He relished the controversy that his Michaelerplatz building attracted for its confrontational attitude to the Hapsburg imperial palace, and he relished even more the chance to defend it in public.

Writing from the vantage point of the start of the twentieth century, Georg Simmel appeared to see fashion as a fundamentally anti-democratic phenomenon, one that a genuinely egalitarian society would dispense with.

Among the Kaffirs the class-system is very strongly developed, and as a result we find there a fairly rapid change of fashions, in spite of the fact that wearing-apparel and adornments are subject to certain legal restrictions. The Bushmen, on the other hand, who have developed no class-system, have no fashions whatsoever - no one has been able to discover among them any interest in changes in apparel and in finery.

There is not much evidence about the extent of field work carried out by Simmel to explore the dress sense of Southern Africa, or that of Florence, but that does not prevent him from concluding that:

Occasionally these negative elements have consciously prevented the setting of a fashion even at the very heights of civilization. It is said that there was no ruling fashion in male attire in Florence about the year 1390 because everyone adopted a style of his own. Here the first element, the need of union, was absent; and without it, as we have seen, no fashion can arise. Conversely, the Venetian nobles are said to have set no fashion, for according to law they had to dress in black in order not to call the attention of the lower classes to the smallness of their number. Here there were no fashions because the other element essential for their creation was lacking, a visible differentiation from the lower classes being purposely avoided.

The very character of fashion demands that it should be exercised at one time only by a portion of the given group, the great majority being merely on the road to adopting it. As soon as an example has been universally adopted, that is, as soon as anything that was originally done only by a few has really come to be practiced by all - as is the case in certain portions of our apparel and in various forms of social conduct - we no longer speak of fashion. As fashion spreads, it gradually goes to its doom.

The way in which the fortunes of Thomas Burberry, once a shopkeeper in Hampshire, then a Yorkshire-based garment maker, once associated with the British officer class and its trench coats, then with a working-class football cult, and lately a revitalized high-fashion label, has fluctuated over the last two decades might seem to prove Simmel right in that observation.

When British football teams started to play in Europe in the 1980s, their working-class followers, themselves the products of a culture in which clothes were a passion, saw their Italian rivals wearing Lacoste and Fila. Their response was to acquire the same labels, or in a kind of nationalistic reflex to adopt the nearest domestic equivalent. And so, after the Mods and the Skinheads, was born the Casual tribe. And from out of the Casuals came even less fashionable working-class sub-cultures. They settled on Burberry, or what appeared to be Burberry, for their baseball caps, their scarves and their shorts. The beige/black-and-red Burberry pattern was pirated everywhere. Burberry had to address the problem, partly by dealing with counterfeiters and discounters, and partly by investing heavily in a more creative interpretation of Burberry’s identity. Christopher Bailey made Burberryness a much subtler quality than the crass application of a pattern.

It’s a process that doesn’t entirely confirm Georg Simmel’s views of fashion. Even at the height of Burberry’s proletarian associations, there were self-identified fashion obsessives prepared to wear it precisely because they understood its complex significance. The signals transmitted by taste are not developed independently of each other. They migrate from one class to another in either direction. Some affluent middle-class schoolchildren in London will adopt the speech rhythms of the children of Caribbean migrants as a defence mechanism in order to blend in with their age group on the street, rather than the other way around. Others feel self-confident enough to believe they can maintain their status even while adopting the tastes and styles of other classes.

Taste is not always a process that describes the aspirations of the proletariat to look like their social superiors. Tattoos, tracksuits and an interest in football have all been adopted by the middle classes in the last three decades. Ghetto youth in the US took to wearing their trousers very low, as a reflection of a look that most likely had its origins in the prisons where inmates’ belts were removed. It made them look tough. It is a style that can now be seen to be adopted by public-school boys in Britain by way of Alexander McQueen.

Taste has been a continuing preoccupation of institutions that promote design. They do their best to present it not in terms of class, but suggest rather that it is a means of differentiating good from bad design. Henry Cole, the founder of the Victoria and Albert Museum, gathered together a display of what he considered to be ‘bad design’ as a demonstration of what not to do. Charles Dickens satirised it. And Cole had the grace to confess that is was the most popular exhibit in the museum. The Design Council in the 1950s was doing much the same as Cole, comparing the efficiency and simplicity of ‘modern’ fireplaces with the dust-gathering drawbacks of ‘fussy’ and ‘decorative’ alternatives. This did a lot to create the impression that Good Design was something inflicted on those that knew no better by their more enlightened social superiors, with predictably negative results. In the 1980s, ‘Taste’ was the subject of an exhibition at the Boilerhouse, the Design Museum’s forerunner based at the V&A. In a text rendered in what looked like the director Stephen Bayley’s own handwriting, it suggested that ‘taste was one of the processes by which we make judgements about design’. Those items presented as in good taste were positioned on easels and plinths, others sat on top of dustbins.

As it turned out, the exhibition was in itself understood as making literal judgements about objects rather than being about the idea of taste. The architect Terry Farrell, on discovering that a model of his postmodern design for the TV-am HQ, with its playful egg-cup iconography, was being shown on a dustbin, snatched it back from the exhibition floor.

The first book that I wrote, Cult Objects, was a somewhat wide-eyed look at taste. ‘Do you speak Burberry?’ asked the cover, long before Christopher Bailey had turned the elderly raincoat manufacturer of the same name into the most successful fashion brand that Britain has ever had. What, it asked, makes a Morris Minor nicer to know than a Datsun? I never owned a Burberry, or drove a Golf, but looking back at Cult Objects now, I see that it was actually more confessional than analytical. It was an account not so much of taste as a phenomenon, but of my own tastes. It celebrated RayBans and Rolexes, Barbours, Filofaxes, the Omega Accutron (the first digital watch), Swiss Army penknives and Zippo cigarette lighters. I thought I was writing about the nature of objects; actually I was writing about a particular time, the early 1980s, and what they had done to me.

It’s a collection of objects, and indeed a book, that conforms precisely to the process so perceptively and wittily charted by James Laver in 1937 in Taste and Fashion. Laver was a curator in the department of prints and drawings at the Victoria and Albert Museum who pursued a successful parallel career as a playwright. He had a much lighter touch than Simmel. Laver drew attention to the way that our attitudes change as we become more familiar with fashions. Fashions too far ahead of their time are regarded as unacceptably transgressive, while fashion that is not past its time enough is regarded with scorn rather than outrage. But past this stage, the formerly transgressive, subsequently the dowdy, will come to be considered beautiful. Laver reckoned that it took ten years for the indecent to move through the shameless and the outré stages to become smart. One year later it would be considered dowdy, in ten years hideous. After the passing of a further century it would have become in turn ridiculous, amusing, quaint, charming and romantic.

Laver’s premise still holds good, even if the timescale that he envisaged has accelerated and telescoped.