Taste: The Secret Meaning of Things

-Design-guru Stephen Bayley approaches the thorny and sometimes elitist topic of 'taste' with typical wit, drawing on his expertise in a number of fields from fashion to food -A new edition of a classic book, brought into the new millennium by Bayley's concise critique of modern design How do we define taste? The only certainty is that it shifts and changes - sometimes abruptly. With the explosion of vulgar consumerism in the mid-nineteenth century, the Victorians seized upon the notion of good taste as a way of codifying middle-class mores. A century later, to talk about taste had become almost taboo, since judgments made about dress, manners, food and art can often be painfully revealing. And today? When this classic text was first published in 1991, Stephen Bayley illuminated the nuances and niceties of our mercurial understanding of taste. In this new edition, he ranges far and wide to bring us exquisitely up to date. 'I don't know anybody with more interesting observations about style, taste and contemporary design' Tom Wolfe on Stephen Bayley

Stephen Bayley is an author, critic, columnist, consultant, broadcaster, curator and founding director of the influential Design Museum in London. Over the past thirty years his writing has changed the way the world thinks about design. He is the author of Death Drive, one the most talked about books of 2016.