There is something strangely exhausting about what is called modern glamour.

Not merely excessive — glamour has always depended upon excess to some degree — but curiously hollow. One looks at the endless procession of events, luxury launches, themed charity balls, celebrity galas, “iconic” red-carpet moments, and social-media coronations, and is struck less by envy than by a peculiar emotional flatness.

Everything appears to be there in theory: couture, jewels, famous institutions, impossible sums of money, extravagant themes, theatrical staging, borrowed diamonds glittering beneath museum ceilings. And yet so much of it feels oddly weightless, as though modern culture has mastered the mechanics of spectacle while forgetting the purpose of glamour itself.

The problem is not that contemporary society lacks wealth. Far from it. Ours may well be one of the richest civilisations in history. The problem is that wealth alone cannot produce prestige, beauty, mystery, elegance, or enchantment. Those things require something far rarer: cultural memory.

Prestige and legends require memory. Attention only requires interruption.

That, perhaps, is the central distinction of our age.

For centuries, Western civilisation created a kind of cultural ecosystem through which standards travelled downward into wider society. Courts, monarchies, aristocratic houses, salons, hostesses, artistic patrons, collectors, editors, decorators, diplomats, couturiers, and great cultural institutions did not merely concentrate wealth; they concentrated symbolic literacy. Europe built much of that language first, though it later travelled magnificently to places such as New York, where society in certain circles still retains traces of ceremony, hierarchy, aspiration, and theatrical intelligence.

People looked upward culturally.

Not only toward royalty or aristocracy, but toward figures who embodied refinement, conduct, beauty, and form. The visible elite — at their best — acted as custodians of standards. They demonstrated how one hosted, dressed, conducted a dinner, built a façade, commissioned a portrait, wrote a letter, behaved in public, or moved through society with grace and self-command.

Earlier glamour, however imperfectly, encouraged people to aspire upward culturally. It suggested that life could be elevated through taste, knowledge, discipline, wit, beauty, and attention. Modern spectacle, by contrast, increasingly encourages people merely to consume.

The system was flawed, often unfair, frequently absurd, and certainly inaccessible to many. But it existed.

Today, after two world wars, the digitisation of life, mass culture, and the permanent theatre of the internet, and a pandemic much of that structure has collapsed.

We still possess luxury, but increasingly without style and without civilisation. We still possess visibility, but rarely mystique. We still possess spectacle, but often stripped of symbolic depth. Glamour survives mostly as an aesthetic shell severed from the cultural framework that once sustained it.

One sees this most clearly in the modern obsession with the grand themed galas. Enormous sums are spent attempting to recreate the illusion of old-world splendour — masked balls, mythological references, outrageous historical dress codes, theatrical settings — and yet the result often feels strangely synthetic, less like genuine social theatre and more like content production disguised as glamour, staging the egos of those hungry for visibility, influence, and ‘cultural’ power.

This is because the great parties of the twentieth century were never simply about money or exposure. People wanted to be seen, certainly, but the aspiration was more subtle, more coded, more intelligent than the blunt mechanics of virality.

They were ecosystems of influence, conversation, intelligence, and inspiration. The guest list mattered profoundly because the guests themselves contributed to the atmosphere intellectually as well as visually. Artists inspired decorators. Designers inspired photographers. Writers inspired hostesses. Collectors inspired couturiers. Most of them arrived carrying references, knowledge, wit, cultural memory, artistic curiosity, social confidence, and the ability to sharpen one another through conversation.

Society at its height functioned almost like a living salon.

That world was not merely expensive. It was literate.

And literacy — cultural literacy especially — cannot be purchased instantly, no matter how much money enters the room or one donates to an institution.

Luxury is always for sale. Taste never entirely is.

The famous Bal des Siècles in Venice still lingers in the imagination precisely because it now feels culturally impossible. Not financially impossible, but psychologically and culturally impossible. Most of the people attending were genuinely accomplished or influential in some meaningful way — not merely famous, but talented, stylish, intellectually alive, or creatively formidable. Many possessed that rare combination of glamour and substance modern culture increasingly struggles to produce or recognise.

Most are now dead, and the last few belong to the final fading generation of a world already disappearing during their lifetime, leaving us largely with fragments, echoes, and increasingly expensive imitations curated by those with immense resources but little instinct or knowledge of the worlds they are attempting to recreate.

It represented one of the last moments in social and cultural history in which fantasy, architecture, scholarship, costume, mythology, beauty, wit, confidence, theatre, and immense wealth aligned naturally within the same atmosphere. Many great balls came before it, but I suspect — without wishing to sound overly mournful — that an equivalent may never truly occur again, simply because very few people still know how to create such worlds, and fewer still would fully understand and appreciate them.

In many ways, it resembled those final brilliant evenings that so often appear at the end of entire eras: the glittering last seasons of the Belle Époque before the First World War swept Europe into catastrophe; the final dazzling winters of St Petersburg before the Russian Empire vanished into barbarous revolution; the salons, country houses, and cafés of interwar society still dancing elegantly at the edge of another collapse. The Bal des Siècles carried something of that same atmosphere — not decadence exactly, but a civilisation staging one final magnificent performance before quietly disappearing into memory.

By the 1970s and 1980s, much of that world had either died, dispersed, democratised beyond recognition, or simply dispersed itself over time. ‘Cocktail society’ increasingly replaced the old society; visibility began overtaking ritual, continuity, discretion, and inherited cultural fluency. At the same time, enormous new fortunes emerged from entirely different geopolitical realities: global finance, the collapse of old empires, the liberalisation of markets, and the accelerating internationalisation of luxury itself. New people entered the room, as they always had throughout history, but increasingly without the old systems of cultural transmission that once taught society how to absorb wealth into an existing aesthetic and civilisational framework.

The issue was never new money itself. Every great age has had arrivistes, outsiders, social climbers, ambitious dynasties, and newly powerful figures eager to enter established worlds. The difference was that older societies still possessed enough confidence in their own codes to shape newcomers into the atmosphere rather than allowing the atmosphere itself to dissolve around them. As those codes weakened, glamour slowly ceased to function as a shared cultural language and became instead a performance of wealth, visibility, access, and increasingly, exposure.

Many of the last true figures of that older world are now dead, or belong to the final fading generation formed before the complete flattening of culture accelerated. What remains are fragments, photographs, inherited objects, anecdotes, fading hotels, and increasingly expensive imitations curated by people with immense resources but little instinct for the worlds they are attempting to recreate.

Today, by contrast, many ‘elite events’ feel visually overloaded yet intellectually alarmingly thin. One senses enormous effort directed toward visibility rather than enchantment. The evening exists primarily to circulate online — admittedly not entirely different from appearing in Tatler decades ago — but today the image matters more than the atmosphere itself. The goal is interruption for the sake of attention rather than memory.

The old great parties resembled opera.

Many modern galas resemble meticulously branded spectacles whose primary purpose is less enchantment than exposure.

And exposure, unlike glamour, rarely ages well.

Mystery, after all, has always been central to glamour. Old-world elegance understood the power of distance, concealment, anticipation, and restraint. Not everything needed to be revealed instantly, photographed endlessly, explained publicly, or emotionally excavated for strangers. Part of glamour’s allure was precisely its slight unavailability — the sense that something remained just out of reach.

Civilisations require mystery as much as visibility.

The modern world, however, increasingly distrusts mystery because mystery cannot be fully monetised, quantified, or algorithmically managed. Everything must now be visible, immediate, explained, documented, and emotionally accessible at all times. The result is a culture of permanent exposure in which intrigue slowly suffocates beneath endless disclosure.

This cultural flattening extends far beyond celebrity culture. It touches architecture, manners, hospitality, dress, politics, interiors, even ordinary social behaviour. We have not merely lost certain rituals; we have lost the expectation of them.

People no longer expect elegance or things done in a certain way because many have never properly encountered them.

In one of my earlier essays, I wrote about the small gestures that make life beautiful: proper table settings, handwritten correspondence, polished shoes, candles lit before dusk, flowers arranged thoughtfully in a room, the quiet polishing effect of making an effort even when nobody is watching. Such things are often dismissed now as performative, elitist, unnecessary, or old-fashioned.

And yet civilisation survives precisely through such repetitions.

A society is not maintained only by economies or laws, but by habits, rituals, standards, and forms of conduct repeated often enough that they become instinctive. Etiquette, at its best, is not oppression but choreography. It allows people to move gracefully together. It transforms appetite into form.

Once that grammar disappears, society becomes louder, flatter, more anxious, more improvised. One sees it in restaurants where nobody removes their hat whilst at the table, in interiors designed entirely for social media, in architecture that mistakes scale for grandeur, in public figures who confuse vulgarity with authenticity, and in luxury obsessed with immediate recognition rather than symbolic or artisanal depth.

The rot sets in from the top.

Historically, visible elites — for example monarchies — fulfilled an important symbolic role even when politically imperfect. They embodied continuity, restraint, ritual, aspiration, and ceremonial memory. They reminded society that not everything should behave like entertainment. The point was never that everyone should live identically, but that civilisation itself should possess visible standards worth aspiring toward.

Now, by contrast, prestige has largely been replaced by attention.

And the two are not remotely the same thing.

Prestige accumulates slowly through memory, continuity, conduct, context, and symbolic weight. Attention survives through interruption, shock, exposure, virality, and constant reassertion. This is why so many things now described as “legendary” feel strangely disposable. True legend requires time. It requires continuity. It requires cultural memory. One cannot become legendary in a fortnight simply because one dominated the algorithm for several hours.

Attention is immediate.

Prestige is inherited, accumulated, and remembered.

The old world understood the difference between private excess and public form. It understood that civilisation depended not upon perfection, but upon containment. Decadence existed, certainly. Vanity existed. Scandal existed. But public life still demanded composure, discipline, restraint, and symbolic order.

Modern culture increasingly collapses the distinction between public and private, intimacy and performance, confession and identity. Everything must be visible. Everything must be shared. Everything must become content. If it is not posted online, many increasingly feel it did not happen at all.

And content, by its nature, struggles to sustain mystery.

Social media has accelerated this collapse dramatically. Algorithmic culture rewards recognisability over distinction, exposure over depth, immediacy over reflection. Everyone now consumes the same references, the same faces, the same aesthetics, the same surgeries, the same performances of luxury. Ironically, the age most obsessed with individuality has produced a remarkable visual uniformity masquerading as individuality.

At the same time, many institutions have become so terrified of exclusion in any form whatsoever that they have lost confidence in maintaining standards at all. This is not an argument for cruelty or discrimination; civilisation has always depended upon openness to new people, new ideas, and new energies. The great societies and cultural movements of the past were themselves filled with outsiders, arrivistes, ambitious newcomers, artists, foreigners, and social climbers.

But they entered worlds governed by codes.

Money alone was never enough. One was expected to contribute something beyond wealth itself: wit, taste, intelligence, style, patronage, conversation, imagination, beauty, glamour, artistry, discipline, originality, or at the very least charm. The point of a guest list was not numerical inclusion, but atmospheric and cultural coherence.

Not everyone belonged in every room.

And deep down, most people still understand this instinctively.

A culture terrified of judgment eventually loses the ability to make distinctions altogether. Emotional immediacy increasingly replaces discernment, expertise, cultivated taste, and historical literacy. Public opinion forms through repetition, social pressure, and algorithmic reinforcement rather than reflection or understanding. Increasingly, people become reluctant to express genuine aesthetic, intellectual, or cultural judgments if those judgments deviate from the approved mood of the moment.

We are endlessly encouraged to “be ourselves,” provided that self never strays too far from socially sanctioned opinion.

The result is not compassion, but conformity — and eventually the flattening of society itself.

No system survives long when its participants no longer understand the principles sustaining it.

And once a civilisation loses confidence in distinction — aesthetic, moral, intellectual, artistic, or social — everything slowly collapses into the same emotional register. Art becomes emptier and often uglier. Architecture becomes plainer. Conversation becomes shallower. Public life becomes flatter. One eventually arrives at a society materially rich yet emotionally, artistically, and culturally impoverished.

People cannot mourn what they were never taught to recognise or engage with, so the decline should not surprise us entirely.

That may be the saddest aspect of all. Many people today have inherited only a heavily diluted version of glamour or sophistication — copied from copies of copies until the original meaning has almost entirely evaporated. Their understanding of elegance or beauty comes not from lived rituals, cultural memory, architecture, literature, theatre, observation, or cultivated social experience, but from endlessly recycled images produced by people who themselves no longer possess any deep understanding of the traditions they imitate.

Like Europe after the fall of Rome, we are living through a strange form of cultural amnesia affecting almost every part of society.

The tragedy of the Dark Ages was not simply destruction, but forgetting. Entire techniques, symbolic systems, artistic languages, and forms of knowledge quietly disappeared because the structures that transmitted them collapsed. People no longer understood how certain things had once been made, organised, staged, or even imagined.

Something similar now feels underway culturally.

We remain materially rich, technologically advanced, endlessly visible, permanently connected — and yet increasingly severed from the deeper symbolic languages that once gave glamour, prestige, elegance, and civilisation their emotional and cultural texture.

Some time ago, a friend and I found ourselves discussing former lovers and partners over supper — difficult men, flawed men, occasionally impossible men — and yet we arrived at the same curious conclusion. However complicated they may have been, they still knew how to behave because they were gentlemen.

That distinction matters more than modern culture likes to admit.

They understood restraint. They understood conduct. They understood dignity in public. They understood how to contain themselves socially even when privately imperfect. In other words, they understood adulthood as a form of discipline rather than self-expression alone.

Civilisation, after all, is not perfection but a reflection of the standards, anxieties, ambitions, and emotional temperament of the age surrounding it.

It is form in constant movement.

And perhaps that is the deepest anxiety underlying modern spectacle. Not that glamour has disappeared entirely, but that the civilisation which once understood what glamour was — and indeed created and reinvented it repeatedly — is slowly fading from common memory itself.

The photographers still flash. The champagne still flows. The diamonds still glitter beneath museum ceilings.

But one increasingly suspects that modern glamour is no longer the expression of a civilisation confident in its values, merely the performance of one dimly remembering that it once had them before quietly surrendering them to something flatter, louder, and infinitely less interesting or inspiring.

Beauty, after all, survives only where there are still people who understand it deeply enough to believe it is worth protecting.

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There are cities that inherit monuments, and cities that inherit ghosts. Paris, in the years before and after the Russian Revolution, inherited something rarer: the tangible afterlife of a civilisation.

Before 1917, the relationship between Imperial Russia and Paris had already become intimate, almost ritualistic. Russian grand duchesses, princesses, society beauties, industrial fortunes, officers on leave, and grand families of every rank above the merely ordinary came to Paris as one might visit a second drawing room. They ordered gowns there, bought jewels there, furnished apartments there, dined there, spent ruinous sums there, and allowed themselves, as only the very rich and very illustrious can, to be seduced by the city’s endless promises of beauty and pleasure. Paris was where one went for Worth, for Guerlain, for objects d’art, for dinner at Maxim’s, for a portrait by Boldini, for a little indiscretion, for civilisation at its most refined.

Then history changed the terms, and with frightening speed.

They had first arrived as patrons. They returned as exiles.

One does not need to dwell heavily on politics to understand the scale of what followed. What was lost was not merely a regime, nor even only a class, but an entire cultivated ecosystem: houses and estates, certainly, but also rituals, libraries, icons, family portraits, regional crafts, table habits, language, liturgical rhythms, ways of dressing, ways of greeting, ways of living. Civilisation, after all, is not only power. It is also what happens in hallways, at dinner, in ateliers, in music rooms, in church, and in memory.

And yet, when an empire topples, its survivors do not simply disappear.

They become its last custodians.

Much has rightly been written about the revolution and the hardship of Russian exile: the poverty, the diminished circumstances, the sale of jewels and heirlooms, the furnished rooms, the boarding houses, the endless uncertainty, the ache of displacement. I do not ignore any of it. One would have to be a fool, or worse, to confuse exile with romance. But for the purposes of this essay, I am interested in something else — not in denying the suffering, but in tracing what suffering failed to extinguish. Exile was often cruel; this is an essay about the resilience of the human spirit, and about the stubborn, almost miraculous ability to begin again with whatever remains and passing it on to the next generation.

For the Russian émigrés who arrived in Paris after the Revolution, the city was not entirely foreign. That, perhaps, is one of the saddest parts of the story. They knew the streets already. They knew the couturiers, the jewellers, the cafés, the hotels, the restaurants where they had once been received with ease and pomp. But they entered them altered, and Europe itself had altered with them. The First World War had already bruised the old order across the continent. Dynastic certainty had weakened. The Belle Époque — that long, gilded afternoon — had already begun to darken. The Russian exiles entered not merely a new country, but a new century: harsher, faster, less forgiving, and far less certain of its old assumptions.

And still, they adapted.

This, to me, is the great emotional truth of Russian Paris. Not simply that these people suffered, though they did. Not simply that they remembered, though they remembered with almost liturgical devotion. But that they managed, in countless small and often heroic ways, to continue. They worked. They improvised. They reinvented themselves over and over again. They carried what could be carried. They learned the difficult art of beginning again without entirely surrendering the self that had been formed elsewhere, or the world that had been left behind almost overnight.

For me, one of the most poignant details in the whole history of exile is the suitcase kept packed beneath the bed — sometimes for years, in most cases for decades. A private glimmer of hope. A refusal to concede finality. A little portable shrine to the possibility of return. Many died with that suitcase still packed, never seeing the Russia of their childhoods ever again. Exile, in that sense, was not simply living elsewhere. It was living as though one’s real life might still resume at any moment. They built second lives while never entirely unpacking the first.

And yet it was precisely in these second lives where often so much beauty was made, albeit in a different way.

Paris, of course, received many of these Russian émigrés not merely as tragic figures, but as participants in the working life of the city. This is especially true of the women, and it is one of the details I find most moving. In the old world, a well-bred woman was often taught certain domestic accomplishments: embroidery, crochet, knitting, sewing, fine handwork — not necessarily because she was expected to earn a living from them, but because such things belonged to the performance of cultivation, patience, femininity, and genteel usefulness. They were accomplishments. They were signs. They were ornamental proofs of character.

In exile, those accomplishments acquired an altogether different gravity.

For perhaps the first time on such a scale in that social stratum, women who had once been society ladies, daughters of great houses, wives of officers — women accustomed to salons, country estates, and carefully ordered domestic worlds — found that the very skills taught to them for appearance’s sake could now help support a household, a mother, a child, or simply themselves. Fine embroidery, hand finishing, sewing, lacework, mending, delicate construction — all of it could be sold. All of it could be useful. All of it could become bread.

There is something profoundly moving in that transformation. The decorative becoming necessary. Accomplishment becoming income. Taste and skill becoming labour.

And Paris, naturally, had use for them.

Russian émigré women entered the world of couture in remarkable numbers: as seamstresses, embroiderers, fitters, saleswomen, mannequins, and living embodiments of a particular kind of beauty that Paris quickly learned to admire, mythologise, and market. They did not merely drift through fashion as picturesque relics of a vanished court. They helped construct the look of the age. They stitched it, modelled it, sold it, and gave it profile. Their skill fed the appetite for Russian-inflected luxury — for embroidery, for fur, for folklore, for Byzantine richness softened by modern line, for that curious marriage of austerity and opulence which the French found so irresistible in the Russian imagination.

It is here, too, that one begins to see the emergence of a distinct interwar fascination: not so much a crude stereotype as a visual and cultural phenomenon that Paris learned to read, amplify, and market. The pale oval face, the dark or luminous eyes, the fine bones, the reserve, the hauteur, the air of quiet loss, the impression of someone who has lost a kingdom but still knows how to make an entrance — these became part of the period’s visual language. What later hardened into clichés was, at the time, something more complex: a Parisian fascination with émigré elegance, with the bearing of displaced people whose refinement seemed to carry both lineage and sorrow. It was not merely fantasy. It was built from real women, repurposed inside another city’s imagination, who carried into Parisian fashion a kind of poise sharpened by loss.

This is why the story of Russian Paris cannot be told only in terms of salons and jewels, though heaven knows there were enough of both. It must also be told in terms of ateliers.

And what a city of ateliers it became.

The White Russian contribution to Parisian style was not simply decorative, nor was it confined to the obvious tropes of fur, embroidery, icon gold, and noble melancholy, though all of those had their place. It entered luxury more deeply than that — through technique, through handwork, through bearing, through the very atmosphere of refinement. White Russian exile brought to Paris not merely a “look,” but a sensibility: a love of rich texture, of jewel-toned depth, of spiritual drama, of ceremonial silhouette, of clothing as social theatre, of beauty that feels at once intimate and imperial. White Russian exile entered Parisian luxury not as theme, but as bloodstream and became of its undercurrents.

One cannot, in this context, ignore the Yusupovs. They have long fascinated me — not only for their jewels, which I have written about elsewhere, but because they so perfectly embody the strange alchemy of Russian exile in Paris: lost splendour, social brilliance, exquisite taste, and improvisation under pressure. Prince Felix Yusupov and Princess Irina were not merely ornamental survivors of a vanished world. They were active participants in shaping the atmosphere of Russian émigré Paris, particularly in the spheres of fashion, beauty, and cultural allure. Their couture house, Irfé, has always seemed to me emblematic for precisely this reason. It was not simply a business venture, though of course it had to be that. It was a translation: an old world converted into line, cloth, scent, and presentation. Aristocratic lineage made legible in modern Paris. Even where such ventures were not always permanent, or entirely commercially secure, they mattered. They formed part of the tone of Russian Paris. They proved that taste could be monetised without entirely becoming vulgar.

And they were far from alone. The Paris that received the Russian émigrés was also the Paris that increasingly delighted in turning them into modern icons. One thinks of Kees van Dongen’s brilliant, lacquered portraits of the interwar years — all those sharp shoulders, dark eyes, jewelled fingers, theatrical pallor, and beautifully arranged fatigue — in which Russian and Russian-adjacent glamour seems to hover somewhere between society portrait, cabaret, and fairy tale. It is impossible not to think, too, of the colours of Léon Bakst, whose work for the Ballets Russes had already taught Paris to see Russian-inflected fantasy not as something provincial or folkloric, but as something electrifyingly modern.

But to speak only of couture would still be too narrow, because Russian Paris was not merely dressed. It was also staged.

Long before the Revolution, the Ballets Russes had already detonated across Europe like a beautifully lit succès de scandale. Under Serge Diaghilev, they brought to Paris not only extraordinary dancers, but an entirely new visual and emotional language. It is almost difficult now to recover how radical they must have seemed at the time. With Stravinsky’s jagged modernity, Nijinsky’s shocking physicality, and productions that treated colour, movement, music, and design as a single total work of art, the Ballets Russes transformed ballet into something thrillingly unstable, sensual, and new. The 1913 premiere of The Rite of Spring, with Nijinsky’s choreography and Stravinsky’s score, remains the most famous example: one of the great cultural scandals of the century, half riot, half revelation.

What Diaghilev and his circle offered Paris was not simply “Russian ballet,” but a wider artistic shockwave. The Ballets Russes changed ballet, certainly, but also fashion, decorative arts, stage design, music, movement, and the modern imagination of glamour itself. Bakst’s colours alone seem to have altered the palette of the age. Before the émigré world became permanent, Russian culture had already begun remaking Paris through performance — not as nostalgia, but as revelation.

After the Revolution, ballet and performance became something even more profound: portable heritage.

A palace can be confiscated. An estate can be lost. A library can burn. A dining room can be stripped. But choreography can travel. Technique can be taught. Music can be rehearsed. Discipline can pass from body to body, teacher to student, studio to stage. In that sense, Russian ballet and the wider Russian performance tradition became among the most powerful ways in which a shattered civilisation continued showing its former splendour abroad. It did not merely preserve Russian culture; it evolved it, translated it, and carried it into modernity. The Russian tradition of composition, music, dance, and theatrical imagination did not vanish with the court. It simply changed address.

And if one traces the line forward through the twentieth century — through the great Russian and Russian-trained dancers who continued to define standards of discipline, exactitude, beauty, and artistic force — one begins to see how extraordinary that continuity really was. The empire fell. The discipline remained. The aura remained. The standard remained.

This, perhaps, is the larger pattern. Russian exile did not simply produce nostalgia. It produced export — on the highest cultural level.

Paris gained from it immensely. Not only in couture, but in restaurants, salons, music, performance, and the small luxuries by which a city learns new moods. It gained Russian waiters, Russian hostesses, Russian musicians, Russian dancers, Russian seamstresses, Russian shop girls with excellent cheekbones and perfect French, Russian countesses designing and selling hats, Russian princes driving taxis, Russian grand duchesses embroidering for houses whose names still glitter in fashion history. It gained silver samovars and melancholy glamour, caviar and candlelight, Byzantine richness and fur, icon-filled apartments, old names on visiting cards, and a social tone at once grand and wounded. Paris did not merely host Russian exile. It dined on it, dressed in it, and danced to it.

That, of course, is the seductive version.

The truer one is more difficult, and more interesting.

Because what Paris inherited was not simply glamour, but resilience made visible. The émigrés preserved their world not only in grand gestures, but in fragments: in stories, in recipes, in names, in icons, in a language retained, in music, in manners, in ritual, in memory. When the physical world is lost, ritual, atmosphere and memory become the inheritance. They rebuilt a vanished civilisation in fragments.

And perhaps that is why Russian Paris still lingers so powerfully in the imagination. Not because it was poignant, though it was. Not because it was beautiful, though it was that too. But because it showed, with extraordinary grace, that even when an old world has vanished, its manners, its artistry, its spirit, and its memory may still survive long enough to inspire another.

There are cities one visits, and cities one enters.

The distinction is not sentimental. It is architectural.

Some cities, however prosperous or celebrated, remain external to us. One sees them, perhaps even admires them, but they never quite gather around the mind. They do not alter one’s pace. They do not sharpen the senses. They do not persuade one to walk a little longer than intended, to take the long way home, to stop for coffee or an aperitif rather than hurry past it. Others seem to absorb us almost at once. One steps into them and feels, with that curious immediacy which is difficult to fake and impossible to mass-produce, that life is somehow more pleasurable there. More legible. More coherent. More dignified. More worth inhabiting.

Paris is the obvious example, though Vienna, Rome, and London understand the principle equally well. People often say such cities are beautiful because of their monuments, cafés, boulevards, balconies, squares, and atmosphere. All true, and yet not quite the whole truth. What they are really responding to is something larger and more important: the fact that these places have been composed.

A beautiful city is not simply a place that contains beautiful buildings. It is a place in which beauty has been organised.

That, I think, is the real difference.

What makes a city feel beautiful is rarely one landmark, however famous, or one palace, one church, one façade, one great avenue. It is the way the parts belong to one another. The width of the street in relation to the height of the buildings. The rhythm of façades. The line of trees. The placement of a square. The sequence of views. The way one turns a corner and the city continues speaking in the same language. The way stone, iron, water, greenery, sky, and human movement have all been considered together rather than thrown into the same place and told to get on with it.

A beautiful city is not a collection of monuments. It is a coherent atmosphere.

And coherence, in cities, is never accidental.

This is where urban planning enters the conversation, and why it matters far more than people now like to admit. We have become so accustomed to discussing cities in the dry, bureaucratic vocabulary of transport, density, zoning, mixed-use, activation, and footfall that we often forget what a city actually is. It is not merely infrastructure. It is not merely a system for moving bodies between functions. It is not simply a machine for commerce, nor a spreadsheet with pavements attached. A city is a lived composition. It is theatre. It is choreography. It is hierarchy, sequence, rhythm, arrival, pause, procession, release. It is an emotional experience as much as a practical one.

The best urban planning is often invisible precisely because it feels natural. One moves through a place and senses that it works, without always being able to explain why. But that sensation is not mystical. It is the result of thought.

Baron Haussmann is the obvious and unavoidable example.

Paris, as the world now adores it, owes an enormous amount to the severity and clarity of Haussmann’s intervention: the boulevards, the axial views, the disciplined façades, the improved circulation, the breathing space, the visual hierarchy, the parks, the squares, the sense that the city was not simply allowed to happen to itself. One may argue, and rightly, about what was erased in the process. There is always loss in the remaking of a city. But one cannot seriously deny what was gained. Haussmann did not merely make Paris more efficient. He made it more intelligible. More legible. More ceremonial. More urban in the fullest sense.

He understood that a city needs grammar.

And once Paris had that grammar, it could absorb variation without losing itself. This is one of the reasons Paris wears later styles so beautifully. The Beaux-Arts flourishes that followed, and later the superb interventions of Art Deco, did not arrive as visual riots but as natural extensions of an already coherent urban language. The city’s underlying discipline was strong enough to receive them. It had a syntax. It knew how to accept new accents without forgetting its native tongue.

That, I think, is one of the great lessons in urban beauty.

A city does not need rigid sameness. It needs strong foundations.

This is why so many modern conversations about planning feel oddly childish. They mistake coherence for monotony and novelty for vitality. They assume that because uniformity can be oppressive, disorder must be liberating. But in practice, cities that abandon visual hierarchy and coherent planning do not become thrilling. They become exhausting. The eye is forced to renegotiate scale, material, rhythm, and intention every few minutes. There is no settled baseline. No civic tone. No common language of culture or history. Only assertion.

A beautiful street view is not so different from a proper antechamber in a country house or palace. In a great interior, one understands the importance of procession: the hall leading to the staircase, the door opening into the next room, the glimpse at the end of a corridor, the rooms arranged en enfilade so that one sees not merely a wall, but a promise. Space unfolds. The eye is carried forward. The body is invited deeper. Nothing feels accidental. What gives such interiors their force is not merely decoration, but the hierarchy of the rooms that follow.

A great city works in much the same way.

A vista at the end of a boulevard can be as stirring as the view through a succession of drawing rooms. A square can have the dignity of a salon. A bridge can be a threshold. A street can operate as a corridor of civic life. A façade can be a wall of the city’s great public room. Urban beauty is not simply a matter of what stands still, but of how one is led through it — how one moves, almost without noticing, from one moment of the city to the next.

The street, at its best, is architecture in motion.

London, in this respect, is both fascinating and maddening because it contains some of the most beautiful lessons in urban composition and some of the clearest examples of what happens when a city forgets itself.

Whitehall and the surrounding streets of Westminster remain among the strongest demonstrations of why coherence matters. The scale is dignified. The architecture understands its role. The buildings are serious and impressive without becoming pompous. The stone carries authority. The streets have procession. There is rhythm, mass, order, and civic gravity. One feels, whether consciously or not, that one is in a capital. It is not merely that the buildings are historic, which is the laziest possible reading. It is that the whole composition has civic intelligence. It understands hierarchy. It understands ceremony. It understands what public architecture is for.

That part of London still knows how to hold itself.

The same is true, in a more domestic register, of many of London’s great Georgian and Regency compositions — those terraces and squares that settle the nerves merely by existing. They work because proportion is doing its quiet work in the background. Window rhythms. Cornice lines. Brick tones. Repetition without monotony. Variation without chaos. The city, at its best, knows when to be restrained and where to be grand.

John Soane understood this deeply. Even when he could be theatrically inventive, there was discipline beneath the wit. He understood mass, sequence, spatial revelation, and the civilised drama of light. He understood that architecture is not simply object-making but the shaping of experience. That is what so much contemporary building forgets: that people do not encounter buildings as isolated elevations in an architecture magazine. They encounter them in streets, in weather, in traffic, in motion, in memory, in relation to everything around them.

Which is why so much of the City of London now feels not vigorous, but visually illiterate.

One is told, ad nauseam, that the clustering of assorted glass curiosities — the Gherkin, the Cheesegrater, the Walkie-Talkie, the Shard looming elsewhere like an expensive shard of office ambition — represents dynamism, confidence, innovation, the city of the future, and all the other phrases that property developers use when they have mistaken spectacle for civilisation. What it often represents instead is a profound indifference to coherence: the desire to make a mark without first looking at the place itself. These buildings rarely behave as neighbours. They arrive as interruptions, with little regard for the scale, material language, or memory of what surrounds them.

A city is not improved merely because every architect is trying to win a staring contest.

This is not an argument against height as such, nor against new buildings, nor against the fact that London must continue to change. It is an argument against visual narcissism. Against the idea that a city becomes more exciting the more disjointed it is.

And if one wishes for a single emblem of this mentality, Lloyd’s is difficult to surpass.

Yes, there is that one great interior space, and one must always be honest enough to acknowledge when a building contains a room of real force. But the building itself remains, to my eye, one of the most grotesque examples of modern architecture’s talent for making engineering look like an air-conditioning malfunction. All ducts, tubes, exposed services, metallic innards, and that strange obsession with turning a building inside out as though technical systems were beautiful merely because they had been displayed. It looks less like a work of architecture than the inside of an overambitious vacuum cleaner.

Worse than that, it stands as a reminder of what modernity has often destroyed in order to congratulate itself. Beauty was removed, and in its place came a building that appears to have mistaken visible pipework for courage.

The real tragedy of such interventions is not only what they are, but what they replace.

Every time a city tears out something coherent, proportionate, and culturally legible in order to install an object whose primary function is to announce that it is new, the city loses more than a building. It loses continuity. It loses memory. It loses the invisible agreement by which one generation hands a place to the next in recognisable form.

Once that agreement begins to fray, the whole urban fabric feels less trustworthy.

It is only fair, however, to say that we are no longer living in the worst decades of casual demolition. The 1960s and 1970s, in particular, were catastrophic years for architectural vandalism: beautiful façades stripped, interiors gutted, coherent streets interrupted, and entire districts treated as though continuity itself were an embarrassment. For all the damage that has been done, there is now, thankfully, a far wider public sensitivity to beauty than there once was. Beyond the work of preservation societies and architectural historians, ordinary people are far more alert to what is at stake. There is greater affection for old façades, greater scrutiny of what replaces them, and far more interest in restoring buildings — sometimes only externally, sometimes more completely — to something closer to their original dignity. One may not always save the whole house, but even the instinct to save the face of it is a sign that the cultural nerve has not been entirely lost.

This is why certain fashionable planning ideas also fail when they treat cities as abstractions rather than organisms.

Take Oxford Street. The fantasy of pedestrianising it entirely is one of those ideas that sounds marvellous in a rendering and less convincing once one remembers that cities are not mood boards. Oxford Street, for all its many sins, was not conceived as a grand European promenade in the Parisian sense. It is a heavily burdened commercial artery in a city whose surrounding network is already strained, uneven, and ill-suited to absorbing limitless displaced traffic.

One can always recite the modern catechism — less traffic, more walking, reclaiming the public realm, all very noble — but unless one has a serious plan for where that traffic goes, one is simply moving the problem sideways into streets even less suited to carrying it. A street cannot be transformed by wishing it had been born differently. Pedestrianisation works best when it respects the wider anatomy of a city: its flows, pressures, service routes, surrounding streets, public transport, delivery needs, and historical purpose. Without that intelligence, one does not create urban beauty. One merely creates congestion with planters — usually ugly ones, planted with the sort of exhausted municipal grasses that seem to symbolise the whole failure.

Urban planning is not wishful thinking.

It is not enough to decide that one likes the idea of a pedestrian boulevard because one once enjoyed Paris. A city has to be read in its own terms. It has to be understood as a system of inherited routes, bottlenecks, widths, sightlines, habits, building types, and civic pressures. Good planning respects what a street is, not merely what a committee wishes it were.

This is also why adding contemporary clutter to classical buildings is so often such a vulgar failure. All too often, it is less an act of architectural intelligence than a vanity project dressed up as innovation.

One sees it everywhere now: oversized canopies, awkward glazed additions, aggressive signage, rooftop boxes, showpiece atriums, interactive installations, “statement” interventions bolted onto façades whose entire logic depends on proportion, order, and clarity. Classical architecture is not an empty stage set waiting for modern fuss to be pinned onto it. Its proportions are already complete. Its composition is already resolved. Whether Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, or some more restrained neoclassical language, the whole point is that each element belongs to a measured system. To attach random modern appendages to such buildings in the name of relevance or activation is usually not adaptation. It is vandalism.

Classical buildings do not need more “interest.” They need less interference.

That is not a call for sterile preservation, nor for cities embalmed in amber. Buildings must live, and living buildings must adapt. But adaptation must still obey the building’s own logic. One cannot improve a sonata by stapling a ringtone to the coda. One cannot meaningfully update classical order by ignoring the fact that order, in architecture, means precisely that: order.

The true divide is not between old and new, but between knowledge and indifference.

A contemporary intervention can be excellent. A classical restoration can be dreadful. A modern building can be poised, intelligent, and humane. A historic building can be mutilated by a decorator with more money than eye. The question is always the same: does it understand proportion? Does it understand context? Does it understand scale, restraint, and consequence? Does it know where it is?

Because money, as I have said before and will keep saying, cannot buy the eye.

That is one of the threads connecting this essay to Who Taught You What to Call Beautiful, because taste begins long before purchase. Wealth can buy expensive materials, large houses, and absurdly costly mistakes. It can buy marble, bronze, porphyry, chandeliers, and every aggressively luxurious surface currently being sold to people who believe “premium” is a design philosophy. What it cannot reliably buy is proportion, restraint, memory, or visual intelligence. It cannot buy the instinct that knows when enough is enough. It cannot buy the background, the philosophical wealth, the aesthetic inheritance, that allows money to become form rather than noise.

Financial wealth without aesthetic inheritance often mistakes expense for beauty.

And the built world teaches this lesson constantly.

In The Essential Gestures of a Beautiful Life, I wrote about private ritual — flowers, lighting, good linen, proper objects, the refusal to let ordinary life collapse into pure utility. This essay is, in a sense, the public counterpart. If the earlier piece was about the private room, this is about the public room. The street, the square, the boulevard, the civic façade, the planted avenue, the park, the passage, the skyline. The same instincts that make a room gracious make a city humane.

A beautifully set table and a beautiful square are not separate ideas. They belong to the same civilisation.

And because they belong to the same civilisation, they belong to the same ecosystem of beauty.

Architecture does not merely house life. It instructs the other arts. A good building is not only a building. It is a canvas, a patron, a provocation, and a standard. It creates work and aspiration for everyone who follows: cabinet makers, joiners, plasterers, decorative painters, metalworkers, lamp makers, mirror makers, textile designers, furniture makers, interior decorators, glaziers, stone masons, bronze workers, upholsterers. Good architecture invites better interiors. Better interiors call for better furniture. Better furniture calls for better lamps, better fabrics, better hardware, better habits of looking.

A good building is never only a building; it is an invitation to every other art.

And the arts have always educated one another. Architecture informs furniture. Furniture informs jewellery. Garden design informs metalwork. Textiles echo façades. Fashion borrows from architecture. Interiors borrow from landscape. There is a circulation of forms, motifs, proportions, and ideas — a shared grammar across disciplines.

Louis Cartier understood this perfectly. His designers studied the ironwork of Paris — gates, balconies, ornamental grilles, the disciplined grace of urban metalwork — and from those public forms came part of the vocabulary that would become the Cartier garland style. When a jeweller learns from a balcony to translate what he has seen in platinum, one understands that beauty is not a series of compartments. It is a conversation.

That conversation can enrich itself — or collapse.

Beauty creates a virtuous cycle. Ugliness creates a vicious one — a downward spiral of lowered standards, diminished skill, and ever weaker expectations.

When people are surrounded by beautiful, well-made things — not only grand buildings, but decent façades, proper proportions, thoughtful lamps, handsome mirrors, good shopfronts, elegant hardware, furniture made to last, interiors with texture and tactility, streets that do not insult the eye — they develop standards almost unconsciously. They may never learn the vocabulary of mouldings, joinery, or classical orders. But they learn what good feels like. They recognise finish. They recognise care. They recognise seriousness.

Children absorb this most of all. They learn beauty by osmosis before they learn the word. A beautiful city is, among other things, a silent school.

And that matters because standards sustain demand.

A culture that expects quality commissions quality. It supports better craftsmen, better workshops, better public buildings, better furniture, better rooms, better objects. Great craftsmanship requires not only gifted makers, but cultivated patrons. Beautiful cities create better clients as well as better artisans.

But once beauty disappears from ordinary life, the opposite happens.

If well-made things become rare enough, they begin to seem extravagant. If cheap materials dominate, they cease to offend. If bad scale becomes common, proportion becomes harder to recognise. If furniture becomes flatter and flimsier, if mirrors are badly framed, if lamps are ugly, if hardware is thoughtless, if façades are mutilated, if streets become a blur of signage and glare, people begin — with alarming speed — to expect less.

And once they expect less, the market supplies less.

A culture that expects less will eventually produce less.

This is not only a visual decline. It is an economic and civilisational one. Beauty supports skilled labour. It sustains cabinet makers, plasterers, lamp makers, mirror makers, metalworkers, upholsterers, glaziers, carvers, decorative painters, joiners, textile specialists, and all the countless trades that depend upon clients capable of recognising quality. When standards fall, fewer people train. Fewer people apprentice. Fewer people repair. Complexity disappears. Skills wither. What survives is speed, replacement, convenience, and the strange modern delusion that disposability is sophistication.

Beauty is not only an aesthetic preference; it is economic support for skill.

And beauty, properly understood, is almost always bound up with durability.

Beautiful things are often made to last. Not because age itself is holy, which would be sentimental nonsense, but because seriousness of design tends to travel with seriousness of construction. Better materials. Better joinery. Better finishes. Better repairability. A proper lamp can be rewired. A good chair can be reupholstered. A decent building can be restored. A well-made façade can be cleaned, repaired, and handed on. A civilisation that repairs is usually a civilisation that still remembers how to value.

This is why preservation matters so deeply, and why I resist the sentimental way it is sometimes discussed almost as much as I resist the philistine way it is dismissed. Historic buildings are not merely charming relics. They are stored intelligence. A staircase, a cornice, a hand-forged railing, a parquet floor, a carved door surround, a properly proportioned façade — these are not trivial surfaces. They are records of knowledge. They preserve decisions about scale, light, tactility, ornament, labour, and human comfort. They are memory made material.

A historic façade is not nostalgia. It is a record of intelligence in stone.

To preserve such things is not to refuse the present. It is to defend accumulated skill. It is to recognise that once the chain of transmission breaks, rebuilding it is far harder than destroying it. We do not preserve beautiful places only for ourselves, but because they were handed to us, and because they must be handed on. The most beautiful cities are collective works of art written across centuries, and their greatness lies partly in that fact: they are collaborations between planners, architects, craftsmen, patrons, decorators, and citizens — between the dead, the living, and those yet to come.

What is perhaps most sobering is that much of what now strikes people as rarefied, luxurious, or almost absurdly special was, in earlier periods, often simply the ordinary standard of a more demanding civilisation. The finesse of a railing. The proportion of a window. The dignity of a doorway. The line of a staircase. The quality of a lamp. The frame of a mirror. The fit of a coat. The finish of a chair. Such things were not always reserved for museums, collectors, or the small handful of obsessives who now seem to constitute the entire last line of defence. They were often simply what competent people made, and what even ordinary people expected.

What feels luxurious now was often once merely the baseline.

That, perhaps, is the real loss.

Not only that we see less beauty, but that we are in danger of forgetting that more was once normal — and could be again.

The gravest consequence of ugliness is not that people see less beauty, but that they cease to expect it.

And that is why beautiful cities matter.

Not because they flatter tourists, furnish photographs, or make property brochures more seductive. They matter because they preserve standards in public. They make beauty shareable. Not everyone can live in a grand apartment, commission a library, or furnish a drawing room with antiques and silk lampshades. But everyone can walk through a handsome square. Everyone can benefit from a tree-lined boulevard, a coherent street, a well-kept park, a gracious façade, a public building made with care. Public beauty is one of the few luxuries that can belong, however briefly, to everyone.

A beautiful city is the shared drawing room of a civilisation.

And the task, surely, is not to fossilise the past, nor to turn every urban question into a sentimental costume drama. It is something much more serious: to remain worthy custodians of what we inherited, and careful authors of what we add. To demand more than utility. To remember that beauty is not indulgence, but public care made visible. To refuse the lazy lie that ugliness is somehow modern, and beauty somehow naïve. To insist that harmony is not weakness, proportion not nostalgia, planning not bureaucracy, craftsmanship not elitism, and refinement not frivolity.

Because beauty, in the end, is not merely what pleases the eye.

It is one of the ways a culture teaches people how to live.

There are certain obsessions one does not so much acquire as recognise.

For as long as I can remember, I have been mesmerised — and, if we are being entirely honest, a little obsessed — by Russian imperial history. Not only by the Romanovs, though they remain endlessly fascinating, but by the wider constellation that surrounded them: the rival courts, the palaces, court life, the exiles, the jewels, the personal stories. That world has always held me in a peculiar grip, perhaps because it was so dazzling and so doomed, and because nowhere is that contradiction more visible than in the jewels that survived it — or in the ones that did not.

It has seemed to me for some time that the great jewellery stories of imperial Russia deserve something more substantial — apart, of course, from the many wonderful books already written on the subject — than the occasional caption, the familiar anecdote on Instagram, or the endlessly repeated image severed from context. Some jewels are too beautiful, too revealing, too deeply entangled with the collapse of a civilisation to be treated as decorative footnotes. It was perhaps only a matter of time, then, before I began writing more serious pieces on some of the most remarkable treasures of that vanished world: not only the better-known Romanov jewels, but also the great private collections that at times seemed almost to rival them.

And among those, none have fascinated me more consistently than the Yusupovs.

The Yusupov collection is so extensive, so storied, and so layered with both documented splendour and whispered afterlife that it could easily sustain several instalments on jewellery alone — let alone the furniture, pictures, Fabergé, palaces, costumes, interiors, and the broader social theatre of their life at court and in Moscow and St Petersburg society. One does not “cover” the Yusupovs in a single article. One discovers them layer by layer. This, then, is merely a beginning.

There is another reason I find them so compelling, and perhaps even more personally so. The Yusupovs do not end where so many imperial stories end, unfortunately, in tragedy: at a border crossing, a firing squad, an inventory. They escaped. They reached Paris. And there, rather than simply fading into the melancholy whirlwind of émigré memory, they did something I have always found profoundly glamorous and moving: they tried to remake themselves through taste and determination.

In 1924, Felix Yusupov and Princess Irina founded the couture house IRFÉ in Paris, named from the first syllables of their names. It was very much a creature of Russian émigré Paris: staffed heavily by fellow émigrés, with Irina herself appearing as a model, and quickly becoming part of that extraordinary post-revolutionary world in which dispossessed grandees, former court beauties, dancers, designers, and aristocratic improvisers helped shape the texture of interwar Parisian chic. The house lasted until 1931 — not a commercial empire, certainly, but that is almost beside the point. It existed. It was beautiful. It was resourceful. It was, in its own way, defiant. Even in exile, they remained exactly what they had always been: connoisseurs of the exquisite.

That, to me, is part of the Yusupov spell. They are not simply a story of lost imperial magnificence. They are also a story of how magnificence learns to survive in altered form — as couture, as performance, as self-invention, as memory worn beautifully.

And so it seems only right that this article should begin with one of the most striking jewels ever associated with imperial Russia: the lost Yusupov sunburst diadem.

The Yusupovs were not merely rich. Plenty of people are rich, and most of them, regrettably, have dreadful taste and manners to match. The Yusupovs belonged to a much rarer category: a family whose wealth was so immense, so old, and so intrinsically intertwined with Russia that it took on the aspect of a private court. They are often described as the second-richest family in Russia after the Romanovs, and whether one takes that literally or poetically, the underlying truth remains intact. They possessed the kind of fortune that allowed an aristocratic house to behave, at moments, almost like a sovereign one.

Palaces in St Petersburg and Moscow. Vast estates. Industrial and landed wealth. Collections of extraordinary breadth. Pictures, furnishings, Fabergé, jewels. But there was something about the Yusupovs that went beyond plain inventory. Their world was not simply expensive in the modern, vulgar sense. It was a kind of private civilisation, enlarged and enriched by each generation.

And the jewels, above all, were not merely jewels.

They were a treasury.

That distinction matters. The Yusupovs did not possess diamonds and pearls in the ordinary aristocratic sense, as one might possess silver or portraits or a serviceable country house. Their jewels had the density of legend. Great stones, historic pearls, heirloom diamonds, important pieces reset and modernised by the major Paris houses — objects whose names outlived their settings and whose settings outlived their wearers. It was less a jewellery collection than a portable court of jewels.

That, perhaps, is the essential truth of great jewels. They are never merely decorative. They are portable memory. Portable power. Portable solvency. A diadem is not simply something one wears on the head. In the right hands, it becomes architecture, heraldry, theatre, and finance, all at once.

The Yusupovs understood this perfectly.

Which brings us, finally, to the Chaumet sunburst diadem — one of the most beguiling and, to my mind, one of the most beautiful head ornaments ever associated with a private family, imperial Russia, and a fashion poised on the cusp of stylistic revolution.

Created around 1914, in the brilliant and terrible final moments before the old world broke apart, the diadem is generally associated with the Yusupov household and the marriage of Prince Felix Yusupov and Princess Irina Alexandrovna. It is usually described as a Chaumet creation, or at least a Chaumet-associated adaptation, likely made in the context of the family’s modernisation of older jewels for a new generation and a dynastic marriage of immense social significance. Some modern research suggests it may have begun as a Chaumet stock design later personalised for the family, which, if true, only makes it more interesting: a Parisian form transformed by dynastic association into something unmistakably Yusupov.

And what a thing it was.

The diadem radiates outward in diamond rays like a private sunrise — not in the clumsy, over-set manner of lesser “statement” jewels, but with that rare balance of force and discipline that distinguishes the truly great pieces from the merely expensive. It is emphatically a sunburst, yet it also carries the upright rhythm and facial flattery of a Russian kokoshnik. It has the grandeur of imperial symbolism, but filtered through Parisian line and proportion. It does not merely adorn. It frames.

Some jewels are decorative. Some are dynastic. A very few are so perfectly judged that they seem to exist outside period altogether, as though they were always waiting to be made. The Yusupov sunburst belongs to that last category. It feels ceremonial and strangely modern all at once. It is dramatic, certainly, but never vulgar. Bold, but never coarse. It is one of those rare pieces that proves elegance is not the opposite of drama. It is drama, properly disciplined.

What makes the diadem still more interesting is its extraordinary sense of stylistic foresight. Though conceived before the full arrival of the 1920s bandeau mode, and before the Revolution made such jewels into relics of another existence, the Yusupov sunburst already seems to anticipate the changing line of women’s dress and ornament. In certain photographs — particularly those showing what may be a later replica or homage — it reads almost as a radiating bandeau: lower, sleeker, more integrated with the face and hair than the heavy tiaras of the preceding decades. It does not sit awkwardly atop the head like some fortress of dynastic ballast, its diamonds encased in the older gold-on-silver construction that gave so much nineteenth-century jewellery its weight and opacity. Instead, it belongs to that newer world of Parisian refinement — the world of Cartier, Chaumet, and the grands fournisseurs — where platinum allowed settings to become finer, airier, and almost invisible; where stones were not imprisoned by metal but released by it. In that sense, the sunburst was not merely a magnificent frame for the Polar Star Diamond. It was evidence of the Yusupovs’ exceptional eye: their instinct for jewels that could remain ceremonial without becoming antiquated, dynastic without becoming ponderous, and grand without surrendering refinement.

And at its centre, or at least in its intended conception, lies one of the great key players in the whole story: the Polar Star Diamond.

The stone is widely identified as a historic Golconda diamond of approximately 41.28 carats, one of the most celebrated diamonds in the Yusupov treasury and one of those stones that became so entwined with a family that it all but took on their name. Modern jewel historians frequently note that the sunburst diadem appears to have been designed — or adapted — to hold the Polar Star at its centre, and surviving archival imagery of the diadem is often discussed in precisely those terms: a brilliant radiating composition with an empty central mount, as though the sun itself had been removed. The Yusupovs are also recorded as having taken the Polar Star into exile, while the diadem remained behind.

I find that detail almost unbearably striking, and rather poignant.

The diadem was not merely a diadem. It was, very likely, a stage for a legendary diamond. The jewel was not complete without the stone, and the stone, in turn, became the blazing logic of the design. The whole composition seems to have been built around the idea of radiance with a centre — a star enthroned inside a sunrise.

If that is not aristocratic symbolism at its most intoxicating, I do not know what is.

And yet the Yusupovs, like all the truly great collectors, did not simply preserve jewels. They reimagined them. They lived with them.

That is perhaps the most interesting thing about the Yusupov collection, and the thing that separates it from mere accumulation. They did not treat heirlooms as sacred in the modern museum sense, embalmed and untouched. They treated them as living dynastic material. Stones could be reset. Old diamonds could be translated into newer forms. Family jewels could be sent to Paris and returned sharpened, modernised, made ready for a new marriage, a new portrait, a new decade. In that sense, the Yusupovs were not only owners of splendour. They were editors of it.

If the Romanovs wore jewels as power, the Yusupovs wore them as influence.

One sees this not only in the sunburst diadem, but in the wider constellation of jewels associated with Irina Yusupova herself. Her famous rock crystal and diamond wedding tiara, worn for her 1914 marriage to Felix and frequently associated with Cartier, is one of the most arresting bridal tiaras of the period: all frost, geometry, and icy brilliance. Where the sunburst diadem feels solar, ceremonial, almost triumphant, the rock crystal tiara feels glacial and spectral — winter light made architectural. It is one of those rare bridal jewels that manages to look at once aristocratic, modern, and faintly supernatural. If the sunburst is dynastic fire, the rock crystal is imperial ice. Together, they suggest a house that possessed not merely jewels, but a complete visual language.

And then there were the other legends: great diamonds, historic pearls, pieces whose names arrived before the jewel itself. The Yusupovs are often associated in jewel literature with treasures such as the Pellegrina pearl, and while the exact provenance chains of famous stones and pearls are sometimes retold with the usual aristocratic and historical fog, the broader point remains both clear and delicious: the Yusupovs belonged to that very small category of family for whom jewels were not simply worn, but named. Their treasures had biographies. Their stones arrived trailing dynasties, bankruptcies, queens, mistresses, marriages, revolutions, and auctioneers.

This is precisely why the Yusupovs demand more than just a passing mention. With some great houses, one can list the tiaras and feel one has done one’s duty. With the Yusupovs, every jewel seems to open another door, and a dozen more stories.

But no discussion of the Yusupov sunburst can remain in 1914 for very long, because 1914 glitters only because we know what follows.

The Revolution transformed jewels into something harsher and more revealing: portable survival.

Paintings do not flee easily. Palaces are firmly planted on the banks of the Moika. Titles are infuriatingly difficult to get rid of. Diamonds, on the other hand, can be sewn into hems, tucked into pockets, hidden in walls, slipped into linings, or carried in the palm. When the world collapses, the difference between wealth and jewellery becomes suddenly, brutally clear.

After the Revolution, the Yusupov family hid a substantial collection of jewels within their palace — most famously in a concealed recess beneath a staircase, often described in later accounts as a hidden cupboard or compartment under the stairs. Felix and Irina managed to leave Russia with certain major stones, including the Polar Star Diamond, but not with the full splendour of the family tiaras. The sunburst diadem remained behind. Years later, in 1925, workmen carrying out repairs discovered the collection. Later retellings describe a staggering haul: thirteen tiaras, twenty-five necklaces, and around two hundred and fifty brooches, among other treasures. The jewels were photographed and filmed by Soviet authorities before many were dismantled, their metals melted, and their stones dispersed abroad to raise funds for the Soviet state. The sunburst diadem was among the documented pieces. Thereafter, it slips from view and is generally regarded as lost to history.

I find this almost unbearably moving.

Not because it is simply a story of destruction, though there is destruction in it. But because it is a story of survival followed by anonymity, which is somehow sadder. The diadem was not obliterated in a single dramatic gesture. It survived the first catastrophe. It was hidden in hope. It waited in darkness. It was found. It was seen. It was recorded. And then, somewhere in the machinery of confiscation, ideology, melting, resale, or clandestine dispersal, it passed out of sight.

A jewel can die twice: once when the world that made it ends, and again when no one can say where it went.

That, perhaps, is why the later photographs of Princess Irina Yusupova are so haunting. In some images from or just before exile, the narrative is gauzy, she appears wearing a jewel that strongly recalls the lost sunburst — so strongly, in fact, that one is almost compelled to read it as a deliberate visual echo of the original. Whether these photographs capture the original in earlier years, a later recreation, or a close stylistic relation is precisely the sort of ambiguity that makes jewel history so seductive. But the emotional effect is the same. The diadem returns as memory. Not necessarily as object, but as outline. Not inheritance, but recollection made wearable.

Exile, after all, is often an exercise in recreating vanished proportions.

And here the story becomes even more interesting, because the Yusupov sunburst does not simply disappear. It acquires an afterlife.

Cartier, in particular, appears to have produced at least two striking variations on the same general sunburst idea, both of which are deeply relevant to anyone who has ever stared at the Yusupov jewel for rather longer than social convention recommends. One is the better-known and closer echo: a Cartier tiara whose silhouette and rhythm are so near to the Chaumet-Yusupov original that it has effectively become, in the minds of many jewel lovers, its surviving cousin. This is the one that appears so often in Cartier exhibitions and retrospectives, and quite rightly so. It is one of the most flattering tiaras ever designed — elegant, radiant, intelligent in its proportions, and utterly convincing from almost every angle.

It is, quite frankly, one of my favourite tiaras of any period, and I make no apology for that. Some pieces deserve bias.

Then there is the rarer variation: a triple-sunburst, almost kokoshnik-leaning interpretation, seldom seen — if it still exists at all — and all the more thrilling for it. If the more familiar Cartier example reads as Parisian refinement in dialogue with Russian grandeur, this rarer version leans further into the imperial drama of the form itself. One can almost feel Cartier testing how far the sunburst motif could be pushed before it tipped from brilliance into spectacle — and discovering, with admirable confidence, that the answer was: rather far.

This, to my mind, is what makes the Yusupov sunburst so important in jewellery history. Not merely that it was beautiful. Not merely that it was lost. But that it appears to have become a design language before the world was ready for it.

Some jewels survive in vaults. Others survive in influence.

In a sense, that is the most sophisticated form of survival of all.

A diadem can be sold. It can be dismantled. Its diamonds can be reset, its platinum melted, its provenance blurred by dealers and decades. But if the design itself continues — if another great house sees in it a canon worth repeating, refining, varying, preserving — then the jewel has entered a different category. It ceases to be a single object and becomes an idea. The Yusupov sunburst, even in loss, seems to have done precisely that.

And perhaps that is what makes the Yusupovs so singular, not only as collectors but as cultural figures. They belong equally to two worlds that ought to feel irreconcilable and yet somehow do not: the final splendour of imperial Russia, and the improvisational glamour of émigré Paris.

In Russia, they were the private near-sovereigns of a vanished aristocratic civilisation — custodians of palaces, diamonds, heirlooms, treasures whose magnitude is difficult for modern eyes fully to comprehend. In Paris, they became something subtler but no less fascinating: arbiters of taste in exile, participants in the making of Russian Paris, figures who helped translate old-world grandeur into interwar chic. IRFÉ, however financially brief, was part of that translation. It was not only a business. It was a continuation of style under altered conditions. A couture house born from dispossession is not merely commerce. It is survival.

And that, perhaps, is the true Yusupov signature.

Not simply wealth.

Not simply beauty.

But the ability to turn inheritance into atmosphere, catastrophe into style, and memory into something that could be carried forward, reshaped, and worn again in another age.

Which is why the Yusupovs matter so profoundly in the history of jewels. They represent one of the last great moments when private aristocratic jewellery could rival sovereign jewellery — when a family outside the reigning dynasty could assemble, commission, reset, and wear treasures of such scale and refinement that the line between court and salon briefly blurred. They also represent the final flowering of a very particular world: one in which inherited stones could be sent to Paris, translated by Chaumet or Cartier into the newest forms, and returned not diminished but sharpened, ready to be worn in portraits, at court, in marriage, and, later, in exile.

Their jewels were not only beautiful.

They set a historical precedent.

They argued for continuity. For lineage. For cultivated excess. For the right of private taste to be as magnificent as public ceremony. And then, almost at once, history answered back.

If the Grand Duchess Vladimir represents the rival court in one register — dynastic, formidable, almost official — the Yusupovs represent something perhaps even more seductive: the rival court in private. Wealth not backed by a throne, but by inheritance, nerve, old blood, and the supreme confidence that one’s diamonds were the height of sophistication.

And perhaps that is why the lost sunburst diadem remains so strangely powerful.

It was made at the very edge of the abyss.

It was designed, very likely, to cradle one of the family’s greatest diamonds.

It was hidden beneath the stairs when the world ended.

It was found. It was photographed. It slipped into dispersal.

And yet it continues to glitter — not in a vault, but in archival photographs, in Cartier echoes, in remembered images of Irina, and in the minds of those who understand that some jewels do not need to survive intact to become immortal.

Some jewels are preserved.

A rarer few are remembered.

And a very few become legendary.

The Yusupov sunburst diadem is one of them.

There are women who wear jewels, and then there are women whose jewels sustain their legend long after their owners have gone.

Grand Duchess Vladimir belonged emphatically to the second category.

Today, the name “Grand Duchess Vladimir” summons one of the most recognisable tiaras in royal Europe: that extraordinary lattice of interlocking diamond circles, usually seen with trembling pendant pearls, and later, under Queen Mary’s brisk editorial hand, emeralds. It is now thought of as one of the great Windsor tiaras, one of the late Queen’s most beloved, and one of those rare royal jewels that has somehow become just as iconic as the people who wore it. But before it became a British institution, it belonged to a woman who understood better than most that jewels are not adornment. They are rank. They are court theatre. They are protocol. They are policy by other means.

Grand Duchess Vladimir — born Marie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, later Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna of Russia, known in family circles as Miechen — was not merely grand. She was, in every sense, the grandest of Grand Duchesses. Her palace on the Neva glittered as a rival court to that of the Emperor and Empress, Alexandra Feodorovna being widely regarded as the great spoilsport of Russian court life. Miechen, by contrast, had a taste that was acquisitive, imperial, and magnificently unapologetic. And when the old world gradually collapsed around her, her jewels did what illustrious jewels always do best: they survived, travelled, were repaired, altered, borrowed, copied, sold, and reinterpreted by entirely new dynasties.

In other words, they behaved very like history.

The famous Vladimir Tiara was made for her around the time of her marriage in 1874 by the Russian court jeweller Bolin, with its flexible frame of interlocking diamond circles and originally fifteen pear-shaped pendant pearls. After the Revolution, it was hidden in the Vladimir Palace, later smuggled out of Russia, and eventually sold by her children in exile. Queen Mary bought it in 1921, had it repaired after its damaged arrival, and then — being Queen Mary — had it improved. In 1924, Garrard altered it so that the original pearls could be removed and replaced with the Cambridge emerald drops, inherited through her mother’s side of the family — from Princess Mary Adelaide of Cambridge, known as “Fat Mary.” This gave the tiara a second life, a second personality, and one of the most successful royal jewellery edits of the twentieth century.

If one were sharp-tongued — and I am occasionally willing — one might say that Queen Mary never met a tiara she didn’t think could be made even more interesting with a little meddling. In this case, she was not entirely wrong. The Vladimir Tiara, already magnificent with its original pearls, became even more fascinating once she gave it that emerald variation. It is one of the rare tiaras that can be worn three ways without ever seeming indecisive: with pearls, with emeralds, or “widowed,” bare and architectural, like a diamond halo. Few tiaras have had so many lives without ever losing their beauty.

And yet even great tiaras have their weak moments.

One of the most striking royal jewellery stories belongs to the late Queen and the Vladimir. On the way to a gala at the Royal Opera House, the tiara famously broke during the evening’s preparations. There was no time for repairs, no time for proper imperial panic, and certainly no time to return to the vaults. Instead, in one of those marvellous episodes that make monarchy briefly resemble an especially elegant backstage flurry, the Queen ended up borrowing the Plunketts’ tiara for the occasion. Later, the Vladimir was properly repaired and more formally remounted, receiving yet another structural renewal in its long, resilient life. It is exactly the sort of incident that only enhances a great jewel’s legend. A tiara that survives revolution, exile, sale, reinvention, and then still snaps on the way to the opera is no mere ornament. It has temperament — rather like Miechen herself.

If the pearl-and-emerald Vladimir is the extrovert — instantly recognisable, always photogenic — the Vladimir Sapphire Kokoshnik is, to my mind, even more mesmerising. It is less universally famous, which makes it more interesting. This was not some vague sapphire beauty, but a major Cartier creation, reset in 1909 around a colossal 137.20-carat central sapphire and six additional cabochon sapphires associated with Empress Alexandra Feodorovna. It was exactly the sort of jewel that proves Miechen was not a woman of one legendary piece, but a woman of a system. A woman of scale, influence, position.

The Sapphire Kokoshnik was one of the grand statements in her collection, and after the Revolution it, too, emerged from the Romanov wreckage. It did not disappear into obscurity. In one of those gloriously interconnected dynastic transfers that make European jewellery history so satisfying — and sometimes so foggy — it was later acquired by Queen Marie of Romania on 12 November 1920, when Marie was rebuilding her own collection after the devastations and losses of war and revolution. She first wore it for portraits and grand occasions in February 1921, calling attention, with admirable honesty, to both its splendour and its weight. It then became one of the most striking jewels in the Romanian treasury of memory before later exile and dispersal carried it onward yet again.

That, really, is the more revealing point. Grand Duchess Vladimir did not collect jewellery the way people nowadays collect handbags or decorative whims. She collected as dynastic women once did: competitively, ceremonially, strategically. Her St Petersburg life was one of receptions, rivalries, marriages, imperial appearances, private theatre, and considerable influence. Her palace on the Neva glittered as a rival court, filled with that particular Romanov mixture of comfort, magnificence, and imperial grandeur. There are irresistible stories about its extravagant porphyry bath on the piano nobile — the sort of Roman-imperial flourish that tells you at once these people did not merely wish to rival the court, but to live on an imperial scale of their own.

And if St Petersburg gave her the stage, Paris gave her the finishing school.

Before the Revolution, Grand Duchess Vladimir was known for serious shopping in Paris — not the nervous ‘retail therapy’ of the modern age, but the full-blooded acquisitiveness of a woman who understood that Paris was where power could be translated into form and influence. Couture, jewels, objects d’art, commissions, refinements: these were not trifles, but objects of status. A jewel bought in Paris by a Romanov was rarely just a jewel. It was often a message, and one others eagerly learned to read and copy.

Which brings us, inevitably, to Cartier.

The Vladimir Tiara was so admired that when it came into Cartier’s orbit, the house did what great jewellers have always done when faced with genius: they behaved, for a brief and discreet moment, perhaps rather badly. Cartier is said to have taken a cast, or otherwise carefully recorded the design, and there are surviving photographs of at least two closely related Cartier copies or adaptations of the Vladimir tiara made for other longstanding clients. That is no longer merely a discreet whisper; it is documented daring. Frankly, one understands entirely. The design is so brilliant, so wearable, so unmistakably imperial, that naturally someone in Paris looked at it and thought: we really ought to offer this to other illustrious customers. It was “theft” only in the highest, most glittering sense — plagiarism in diamonds.

The other great drama, naturally, is not aesthetic but historical.

Grand Duchess Vladimir has long been remembered as the last major Romanov to leave Imperial Russia, and the image is almost too perfect and poignant to improve: the empire collapsing around her, the court broken, the old order already shattered, and yet she departs in her own railway carriage — worn, battered, perhaps, but still unmistakably hers. It is the kind of detail that passes at once from history into mythology. One can think of no more fitting exit for the grandest of Grand Duchesses. She died shortly afterwards in exile, and with her death the great private court of jewels that had once glittered at the Vladimir Palace began, piece by piece, to scatter. Her children sold, as exiled royals so often did: magnificent names, reduced liquidity.

And so the jewels entered their afterlives.

The Vladimir Tiara went to Queen Mary and became a British legend, acquired under circumstances that were, let us say, distinctly favourable to the buyer. The Vladimir Sapphire Kokoshnik passed through Queen Marie of Romania and into the more melancholy, glamorous, exilic currents of twentieth-century royal dispersal. And the Vladimir emeralds — another deeply compelling fragment of the collection — took on their own later existence, passing into new hands and new settings. They were eventually transformed into a dramatic fringe tiara for Barbara Hutton in 1947, the original “poor little rich girl,” famously photographed wearing it at her Tangier villa. Later associated with collector Bob Ralston, they remind us that great jewels do not merely travel between thrones and duchesses. Once released from dynasty, they become wonderfully adventurous: from Romanov splendour to heiresses, from queens to collectors, from palaces to auction rooms, and somehow remain entirely themselves.

That, perhaps, is what makes Grand Duchess Vladimir the perfect first subject in a series on great jewellery collectors. She was not simply a Romanov with excellent diamonds. She was a woman who understood that jewels are part of a biography in hard form, part of the identity she created at her rival court on the Neva. They survive politics. They survive marriages, revolutions, exile, remounting, dealers, dynastic upheavals, and the occasional opera-house emergency. They are bought, borrowed, copied, repaired, re-strung, and reinterpreted. They move from palace safes to London workrooms, from St Petersburg to Paris, from Romanov portraiture to Windsor legend.

Most jewels remain ornaments. A very few become relics. The Vladimir jewels have long since crossed that threshold into legend.

Once upon a time, a person had a scent in the singular.

One. Not a battalion of bottles arranged on one’s dressing table like over-dressed debutantes, each waiting to be chosen according to weather, mood, outfit, perhaps astrological alignment, or mild emotional instability. One scent. It accompanied them from breakfast to dinner, from weekdays to weekends, from city to seaside. It clung to gloves, to scarves, to letters, to the inside of a taxi after midnight, and to a husband’s shirt collar. If one was lucky, it became part of one’s legend. People did not simply recognise your face; they recognised your atmosphere.

I have always found that idea rather romantic. A signature scent suggests a kind of coherence modern life no longer particularly encourages. It implies that one is more or less the same person at eleven in the morning as one is at half past eleven at night, which is obviously charming nonsense. Most of us are not one person all day long. We are one person in the morning, another by candlelight, another on holiday, another in evening dress, and occasionally another entirely when life requires us to be more dazzling, more composed, or quite simply when we go in for the kill.

So somewhere along the way, many of us moved from scent as uniform to scent as wardrobe.

And I rather like that too.

The old idea of the signature scent still has undeniable glamour — the notion of being recognisable by nothing more than the air around you is impossibly chic — but I suspect most of us now choose a scent the way we choose music, ties, lipstick, lighting, or the mood of a dinner table. A scent can confirm a mood, correct a mood, or create one out of thin air. It can steady the nerves, sharpen the mind, soften the edges, or lend one a little extra authority when one feels, for whatever reason, less than entirely upholstered. Some scents make one feel more elegant. Some more dangerous. Some more tender. Some more mysterious. And some are less about seduction than morale — a private act of self-command in a bottle.

That, to me, is where scent becomes truly interesting. Not as beauty product, but as emotional architecture.

A proper scent does not simply smell pleasant. It can magnify what you already are or lend shape to what you are trying to become. There are scents for rainy afternoons that wrap around one like smoke and cashmere. There are scents for crisp mornings that feel powdered, polished, upright. There are scents one wears because they suit the weather, and others because they improve upon it. And then there are the scents one reaches for not because they suit the moment at all, but because they summon another one entirely. Sometimes one wants to smell not of today, but of memory.

And sometimes, if one is being honest, one wears scent for no audience at all.

I wear scent even when I am entirely alone at home, in pyjamas, in bed, with no intention of seeing another soul. Not because anyone else will notice, but because I will. It gives the day an extra layer. A little more mood, a little more atmosphere, a little more ceremony. A little more mystery, even if the grand setting is merely a duvet and an overcommitted bedside table. Too few people wear scent now, I think, and it is a pity. Life is flatter without it.

Because scent is not merely decorative. It is character.

It tells you something about a person in much the same way that their favourite wine does, or what kind of books they like, or what they order at dinner when no one is looking. It is one of those small but surprisingly revealing clues to temperament. A person’s scent can tell you whether they are romantic or disciplined, nostalgic or theatrical, sensual or severe, discreet or attention-seeking, quietly elegant or trying terribly hard. And beyond revealing character, scent can add to it. It can sharpen a silhouette, soften an impression, lend intrigue, or give a person an extra, invisible layer of themselves. In that sense, scent is not just an accessory to personality. It is part of the making of it.

And this, I think, is where scent meets taste.

If taste is really about coherence, proportion, discernment, and the quiet eloquence of one’s choices, then scent is simply taste made invisible. Just as a room, a coat, a table, a flower arrangement, or a choice of book reveals something of a person’s sensibility, so does scent — often more intimately, because it cannot rely on display alone. Unlike visible luxury, scent demands discernment rather than exhibition. It cannot be properly photographed, flaunted from across a room, or admired at a safe distance. It is discovered only in proximity, and usually only by those who truly know you, or are close enough to want to. That makes it one of the quietest signifiers of ‘good taste’: private, subtle, and all the more revealing for being so easily missed by the wrong people.

Indeed, bad taste in scent is often exactly the same as bad taste elsewhere. Too loud. Too eager. Too obvious. Too determined to announce itself before it has earned the right. Refinement in scent, as in interiors or dress, lies not in volume but in atmosphere; not in insistence, but in proportion; not in trying terribly hard, but in seeming to have arrived there naturally, as an extension of the self. A truly stylish person is often legible across many registers at once. Their rooms, their clothes, their flowers, their luggage, their cigarettes, their glassware, their books, and their scent all seem to belong to the same civilisation. Or, at the very least, to the same person.

This is why a wardrobe of scents need not suggest inconsistency at all. Quite the opposite. It can suggest nuance.

Modern life asks us to inhabit different versions of ourselves — public, private, solitary, romantic, ceremonial, travelling, winter, summer, city, sea — so naturally one scent no longer always suffices. But the point is not random variety. The point is continuity. A scent wardrobe, at its best, is not a cabinet of unrelated personalities decanted in glass. It is a collection of different facets of the same self. A family resemblance. A thread. The same soul, seen under different lights.

Because we remember far more by scent than we admit.

People speak as though memory were chiefly visual, as though life returns to us in photographs. But a photograph merely reminds; scent restores. A single breath can return an entire room, an entire season, an entire vanished version of oneself faster than any image ever could. Jasmine in a courtyard can bring back Sicily at once — holidays with my parents, almond granitas, shutters, late light, the feeling that evening had not yet begun and therefore still held all possible promise. Wood smoke and a trace of incense can summon winter, old houses, Alpine hotel lobbies, Christmases long gone. We remember places not only by how they looked, but by what the air was doing around them, and those memories are often even stronger than the visual ones.

And, perhaps more tenderly still, we remember people this way too.

My grandmother, in my mind, still smells of Madame Rochas or Gardenia, sherry, and Sobranie cigarettes. There is an entire portrait in those three notes. Not merely a scent, but a woman, a room, a glass, a certain sort of glamorous negligence. The scent my mother wore, now sadly discontinued, is equally bound to my childhood. I can still smell it in memory with absurd precision, and with it comes not simply the fragrance itself but a whole emotional climate: certain winters, certain rooms, certain coats, certain years of one’s life when the world still felt held together by other people. A discontinued scent is never just a missing bottle. It can feel, rather alarmingly, like the demolition of a private landmark — or the loss of a small, scented piece of oneself.

Which is perhaps why scent remains the most intimate form of expression and style.

It cannot be photographed. It cannot be entirely captured, only suggested. One may admire a coat, a room, a piece of jewellery, a dress, but scent belongs to another register altogether. It lingers in a jumper, in scarf drawers, in the silk lining of an evening coat, in old books, in hotel corridors, in handbags, in the air after someone has gone home. The most lasting scents are not always the ones in bottles, but the ones that cling to people, places, and memories.

And yet, for all that intimacy, scent is also one of the great public instruments of fantasy.

Perfume has always been one of luxury’s cleverest inventions: the smallest and often cheapest way into the house. One may never buy the couture, never be invited to the fitting, never so much as stand under the right awning in Paris, but one can buy the scent. Chanel understood this perfectly. To wear No. 5 was never merely to smell of aldehydes; it was to borrow, however briefly, a little of Chanel’s mythology. A bottle of scent offered not simply fragrance, but affiliation. A tiny vial of belonging. A way for the dream to trickle down without entirely losing its accent.

That kind of exclusivity used to feel rather different, too.

When I was a teenager, one of my signature scents was — and, in its way, still is — one of the original Chanel Les Exclusifs, at a time when they were genuinely, quietly difficult to come by. The only boutique carrying it near me, as I remember, was in Brussels, which meant one actually had to go to Brussels for that particular scent — a sentence that now sounds either wonderfully glamorous or faintly absurd, depending on your mood. It was part of the charm. Not because scarcity automatically made it better, and not because the past must always be worshipped like some over-upholstered duchess, but because rarity gave such things a particular texture. There was discovery in it. Intention. A sense that one had sought something out rather than merely picked it up between shampoo and moisturiser.

Now, of course, these once-exclusive scents are far more widely available, and while that is no doubt sensible, democratic, and very good for turnover, one cannot help noticing that luxury, like society, has become rather more eager to be accessible. And with accessibility often comes another modern compromise: reformulation.

This is, admittedly, often a pity.

Many legendary scents have been softened, brightened, sweetened, cleaned up, or otherwise gently persuaded to behave themselves for contemporary noses. In some cases, this means they no longer entirely reflect the era in which they were created — which is a loss, because part of the magic of a great scent is that it carries the mood, daring, and strange glamour of its own time. A truly great perfume is not only a composition; it is a cultural artefact. It smells, in part, of the age that imagined it.

And yet reformulation, however undesirable, is not always vandalism. Sometimes it is simply survival.

If a scent is adjusted while keeping its essence alive, it remains in the world. It continues to be worn, remembered, discovered, and loved. Better, perhaps, that a masterpiece should live in altered dress than vanish entirely. One may mourn what has been trimmed away, while still being grateful the ghost remains.

There is, I think, a simpler and more useful distinction to make: the difference between true perfumery and a product merely dressed up as scent.

Proper perfumery has composition, structure, mystery, and development. It reveals itself in stages, like a room at dusk. It has restraint. It has shadow. It does not shout its entire thesis from the doorway. The more commercial end of the market — and yes, the celebrity, airport, “it girl in a bottle” end of things — is often built for immediate applause. Sweeter, louder, simpler, more eager to be liked. One is composed; the other is focus-grouped. This is not to say that everything accessible is vulgar, nor that every expensive bottle contains genius. Heaven knows the niche world is now full of costly nonsense, often smelling suspiciously like the same category of scent one tactfully declines to name for fear of injuring modern sensibilities. But the distinction remains: the great scents create atmosphere. The merely successful ones create sales.

And every era, I think, has its own olfactory fantasy.

Some scents smell not merely of flowers or woods or powder, but of a civilisation’s idea of itself. The great aldehydic florals smell of polished modernity and individuality — fitting, perhaps, for what was once such a startlingly modern invention. The great mossy chypres smell of cultivated adulthood, tailored severity, and proper ashtrays. The leathered beauties and powdery marvels of the past smell of fur linings, suede gloves, adventures, the interior of a Rolls-Royce Phantom II, and people who understood the usefulness of making an impression. Our own age, by contrast, seems enchanted by “clean” scents, skin scents, expensive whispers of almost nothing — intimate, blurred, polite, carefully underplayed in a way that still, somehow, costs a fortune. Even our tastes in scent betray what we long to project: mystery, innocence, wealth, sensuality, discipline, softness, good breeding, or at the very least a very expensive bathroom.

And then there are those scents that remind one that perfume is not merely decorative, but almost meteorological — bound to light, season, atmosphere, temperature, even the colour of the sky.

Vol de Nuit by Guerlain is one of those for me, and one of my true signature scents. But it can only be worn at certain times of year, on certain days, in certain moods. It belongs to overcast skies, to autumn or wet, chilly summer evenings in the country, to wet leaves, to mossy earth, to that peculiar hour when night has not quite fallen and the sky turns a deep, living blue. It is a scent for melancholic weather and beautiful introspection, for those afternoons when the world seems quieter and perhaps more cinematic than usual. To wear it in bright, cheerful weather would feel almost unsuitable.

Shalimar, by contrast, comes fully alive for me in heat. Real heat. Sweltering, almost indolent summer heat. It is then that its voluptuousness unfurls properly — the warmth, the softness, the richness, the almost indecent opulence of it. In hot weather, it seems to bloom from the skin in a way it simply does not in the cold, or perhaps simply differently. It becomes fuller, rounder, more suggestive, more languid. That, too, is part of scent’s magic: it is never static. It changes with the body, with the season, with proximity, with the courage of the wearer, and with the willingness of another person to come closer.

Which, really, is the whole point.

There is something deeply attractive — and, I would say, deeply romantic — about catching a little waft of someone’s scent as they pass. It is one of the most intimate forms of allure because it requires nearness. One does not admire scent from across a ballroom. One discovers it in the tilt of a neck, in the collar of a coat, in the silk of a scarf, in the air just after an embrace. To smell someone’s scent on your own sheets later is, in my view, one of the most quietly romantic things in the world. It is the afterimage of presence. The proof that they were there. Scent, at its best, is not merely attractive. It is the very essence of sensuality because it is so intimately tied to memory, skin, longing, and absence.

So yes, the one signature scent may be in decline. We are no longer, perhaps, one person all day long. Modern life has made editors, curators, performers, shapeshifters of us all. And there is genuine pleasure in choosing one’s scent as one chooses one’s music, one’s tie, one’s lipstick, one’s lighting, one’s flowers. But I still think the old romance survives, if only in altered form. One need not wear the same scent every day to be recognisable. The point is not singularity, but continuity. Not one bottle forever, but a thread. A family resemblance. A soul running through the wardrobe, reflecting the many facets of one’s personality — if one is lucky enough to possess one.

In the end, that may be the true art of scent: not finding the one that defines you for life, but choosing those that still, in all their variety, belong unmistakably to you.

And as for where one should apply it — well, I still prefer Chanel’s answer: wherever one wants to be kissed.

Taste has always interested me, perhaps because it is one of those subjects people speak about constantly and understand only in fragments. It is not a new preoccupation of mine. Years ago, I wrote my dissertation on the subject, and over time — through conversations with friends, through questions people have asked me, and through the peculiar experience of getting older and, one hopes, at least marginally wiser — I have found myself returning to it again and again. What is taste, really? Who decides what is beautiful? And can it, in any meaningful sense, be taught?

Sometimes the question arrives more directly than that. How does one live like you? How does one come to care about these things, as I wrote about in an earlier piece? How does one learn to make life look, feel, and mean a little more? It is usually framed through visible details — rooms, clothes, books, rituals, the table, the small choreography of everyday life — but the question underneath is always more interesting. It is not really about clothes and cushion covers and candelabras. It is about perception. About instinct. About why one person looks at something and finds it moving, and another sees nothing there at all.

I think the first mistake is to imagine that taste is a shopping list. That it is luxury, or trend, or the correct references, or the right brands. That if one acquires the proper objects in the proper quantities, one will somehow arrive at a beautiful life. But taste is not aesthetic consumption. It is not a moodboard. It is not a vision board. It is not a performance of correctness, nor merely the acquisition of certain social codes. Taste is a way of perceiving.

That is why it goes much deeper than style, although style is one of its expressions. Taste reveals itself in what one notices, what one dismisses, what one cannot bear, what one returns to, what one edits out, what one protects. It lives in proportion, in restraint, in atmosphere, in judgment. It is there in how one arranges a room, yes, but also in how one speaks, how one hosts, how one writes a note, how one apologises, how one chooses what deserves one’s attention and what does not. It is not simply visual. It is moral, cultural, emotional. It is a way of ordering life.

And that is precisely why I do not think taste is democratic.

Not because some people are superior to others, certainly not. Not because certain families or certain classes are morally better, or more deserving of beauty, or somehow naturally refined. That would be absurd — and, quite simply, rather narrow-minded. But taste is not democratic because none of us begins from nowhere. We do not arrive at beauty as blank, neutral creatures, floating in a vacuum and choosing freely from an infinite shelf of options. What we love, what repels us, what feels natural, what feels excessive, what feels dignified, what feels vulgar — all of this is shaped long before we have the language, or even the faculties, to explain it.

We do not simply choose beauty; very often, beauty is first chosen for us.

What feels instinctive is often training so early we mistake it for nature. The things we call “just my taste” are very often the result of rooms we grew up in, habits we watched repeated, standards that were spoken aloud or silently enforced, things that were admired around us, and things that were dismissed. Family shapes it. Education shapes it. Geography shapes it. Class — or whatever term one prefers — shapes it. Memory shapes it. The emotional atmosphere in which we are raised shapes it. Even rebellion confirms the existence of the thing being rebelled against. We inherit the first language of taste long before we know we are speaking it.

My own taste was shaped long before I had the language to defend it.

It began not in theory, but in atmosphere. In family. In the emotional and visual climate of the world I grew up in. The older I get, the more I understand how profoundly that formed me — not only what I find beautiful, but how I think, how I arrange life, how I move through the world, what I consider nourishing, what I find empty, what I can tolerate, and what — and indeed who — I simply cannot.

I grew up in a close, rather old-fashioned family — very tight-knit, very strongly formed, full of strong characters and strong opinions. Sometimes beautifully balanced opinions, sometimes rather less so, but opinions all the same and equally important, and that too is part of the education. As the youngest, I was lucky enough to be surrounded by people who had lived, observed, read, thought, and developed views about the world — not always because they had been formally instructed to do so, but because they had paid attention. Some views were profound, some more everyday, even mundane, but both are important. One learns a great deal from being around people who have learned to look properly, and who have applied that way of seeing, even if only subconsciously.

In a sense, I grew up in a sort of ivory tower — not in the silly or frivolous sense in which that phrase is often used, but in the sense of being raised inside a world with strong cultural texture, inherited standards, rituals, references, and assumptions. That does not always make life easier, particularly when one is young and the world around one seems to be operating on an entirely different frequency. But in hindsight, I am deeply grateful for it. It gave me a different point of view. Not a superior one — simply a different one. One that made life, perhaps, more difficult in certain moments, but also richer, more interesting, and, in the end, more beautiful.

I was educated, from very early on, by music, conversation, ritual, books, and by being shown that certain things were worth noticing at all. Importance was attached to them. My father, for example, adored music — classical music, jazz, the crooners — and those things were not abstract cultural references but part of the air one breathed; not enforced but simply part of daily life. There were books and magazines left open to things considered beautiful or interesting. There were museums visited, houses and collections seen, rooms remembered, conversations about what was worth looking at and why. There was an effort, conscious or not, to expose us to forms, objects, atmospheres, and ways of living that carried character. There were evenings with drinks and canapés on a weekly basis. There were conversations that were interesting, sometimes amusing, sometimes ridiculous, sometimes serious, but never flat. There was always some sense that life could be arranged, observed, edited, and lived with a certain degree of intention, and that these subtle things mattered.

And then there was my own instinct, which I think is equally important. Because alongside what I inherited, there was something in me that was unusually receptive to it. I was already a child who cared about these sort of things. I was the sort of child who wanted to live in the library and among beautiful things, who noticed the shape of a chair in someone’s house, the cut of a sleeve on one of my mother’s jackets that was perhaps different from others, the tone of a room, the sound of a record my father played, the glint of a jewel, the feeling of an old book, the difference between atmosphere and mere decoration. So yes, I was shaped — but I was also especially sensitive to what was shaping me in return.

That is an important distinction, because taste is never only imposed from outside. It is also recognised from within.

And that process does not stop in childhood. Even now, as adults, I still see how my parents, my sisters, and I continue to shape one another. We teach one another things. We refine one another. We exchange references, opinions, enthusiasms, irritations, judgments. We still influence how each other sees. Family gives us the first draft of our taste; the rest of life is revision. We never stop editing. We never stop deciding what to keep, what to refine, what to reject, what still feels true, and what no longer does.

That, to me, is why taste can never be reduced to trend. And certainly not to the algorithmic nonsense that now passes for taste online.

I have a particular horror of what social media has done to certain aesthetic codes — “quiet luxury,” “old money,” and all the rest of those absurd little labels that flatten an entire history of living into a content category. What social media calls “old money” is very often only a costume stitched together from fragments of a life it does not truly understand. A beige jumper, a pair of loafers, some linen curtains, a copy of The Talented Mr Ripley, a tennis bracelet, perhaps a vaguely expensive candle — and suddenly one is meant to believe that an entire culture has been conjured into existence, culminating in a sort of ‘Dicky Greenleaf summer holiday’. It is ridiculous and superficial, of course. But more than that, it is revealing.

Because what is being imitated is not taste at all, but the surface residue of taste. The shell without the creature. The silhouette without the civilisation behind it.

One can copy a silhouette, but not the civilisation behind it.

And in our current age, that problem has become more acute because we no longer live only among objects, but among signs of objects. Increasingly, people do not want the thing itself — the life, the cultivation, the discernment, the lived coherence of it — but the sign of the thing. The symbol. The signal. The recognisable shorthand that says I belong here or I understand this. Much of what now passes for taste is merely fluency in signs.

That is why so much contemporary “taste” feels strangely empty. It is not lived; it is displayed. It is not an interior world made visible, but a surface assembled for recognition. People are less interested in developing a sensibility than in consuming the symbol of sensibility. They do not want taste so much as they want to look tasteful. They do not want a world that is genuinely their own, whether conventionally beautiful or not, but a convincing performance of one that might be approved of by the right audience.

Of course, none of this is entirely new. People have always imitated the codes of the worlds they wished to enter. They have always dressed for acceptance, furnished for approval, spoken in borrowed phrases, arranged themselves according to the standards of the company they hoped to keep. But the scale and speed of it now are unprecedented. Social media and the internet have made everyone visible to everyone else, all the time, and with that visibility has come an extraordinary overexposure of symbols, surfaces, and signals. The performance has become relentless and the same time just a façade.

One can imitate the lamp, the jacket, the curtains, the table setting, the palette, the posture. What is much harder to imitate is the long formation behind it: the codes, the repetitions, the private standards, the inherited sense of what is excessive and what is enough, what is for show and what is simply how one lives. That is why so much of this sort of thing looks faintly comic. There is a kind of aesthetic zealotry peculiar to the newly converted: the tendency to become not refined, but theatrical, like it’s a performance — more Catholic than the Pope, and often far less convincing. People discover some image of “taste” or “elegance” and proceed to perform it at 450 per cent, with all the fervour of revelation of the newly converted and none of the ease of familiarity. It is not wicked. In some ways it is almost endearing. But it is often a parody of the thing itself.

And this, I think, is where over-literacy in codes becomes its own kind of vulgarity. Knowing every reference, buying the most expensive version, acquiring the most obviously “correct” object, collecting all the approved signals — none of this makes a person tasteful. In fact, it can make them less so. Taste is not proven by how perfectly one obeys a system, but by how personally one interprets it, that is the real ‘signifier’ of taste.

The most interesting interiors, wardrobes, collections, libraries, tables, and lives are rarely the ones that are most doctrinally correct. They are the ones that bear the mark of a person. A museum-perfect eighteenth-century French interior may be magnificent in one sense, but it can also be deadening if it is merely complete in someone’s drawing room. An eclectic room, assembled with thought, instinct, contradiction, memory, and affection, is far more alive. It is what one refuses to include that makes it personal. It is selection, not compliance, that gives something character and makes it tasteful.

This is also why money alone proves so little. One can hang a genuine masterpiece on the wall — a Picasso, a Monet, a Jackson Pollock, whatever one likes — and still make it look vulgar in the wrong environment. And one can hang a print, or even a reproduction, in a room with real atmosphere and make it look entirely right. Taste is not guaranteed by possession. It is revealed by placement. Money can purchase the object; it cannot purchase the eye.

Which is perhaps why I have always felt more affinity with a style that endures than with fashion.

Fashion asks what is current. Style reveals what has formed you.

I have always found fashion, in the trend sense, faintly tedious and superficial. Style interests me because it is autobiographical. It tells you something. What you wear, what you listen to, how you decorate your house, what you eat, how you host, what books are on your shelves, what periods in history you return to, which artists or composers or writers seem to follow you through life — these things say something about who you are, what has shaped you, what you admire, what you reject, where you come from, what you hope to become. The things I wear, the rooms I love, the objects I keep near me, the forms I am drawn to, are not random. They are informed by books I read, periods of history I find compelling, people I admire, places that moved me, alongside the deeper and older imprint of family and upbringing. A beautiful life is not assembled by imitation, but by selection.

And this is where education enters the picture — real education, and formal education, which are not always the same thing.

I believe very strongly in education. But I have always thought that the most important education begins before institutions. It begins when one first learns to look properly. To listen properly. To read. To compare. To notice. To discriminate between what is merely fashionable and what is enduring, between what is noisy and what is resonant, between what is provocative and what is actually profound. In my case, that process began very early. Which is a gift, certainly — but also, if I am honest, a complication.

By the time I arrived at formal education, much of my eye had already been educated elsewhere and, for the most part, was already formed.

That made later institutions difficult for me, particularly in the creative world, especially when they assumed they were receiving a blank slate with only moderate instinct or ability, to be shaped into whatever their system required. A strongly formed eye is a gift, but it can make institutional life profoundly uncomfortable. I arrived already carrying a very definite sense of beauty, proportion, atmosphere, coherence, and form. Not because I was right about everything — far from it — but because I had already been shaped, and shaped quite deeply, at a young age. So when I entered fashion education, and later the Royal Academy of Art, I found myself in almost immediate tension with environments that seemed less interested in cultivating singularity than in producing a recognisable type that fitted their mould.

I had no objection to ideas. I objected to the way ideas were being used to flatten taste into a single approved language — one that was expected to be almost uniform for all, which is a rather mind-boggling ambition for a creative institution.

Of course one must be able to think conceptually. Of course one must be able to articulate one’s intentions, to structure creative thought, to give shape to inspiration. But there is a difference between teaching people how to think and teaching them what they must aesthetically become in order to be taken seriously. Too often, I found myself in institutions that seemed to reward a very narrow kind of approved ugliness — work that was meant to signal intelligence precisely by refusing beauty, as though grace itself were suspect, as though coherence were naïve, as though elegance were somehow intellectually unserious, simplistic, or incurious.

My difficulty was never with modernity, but with the idea that ugliness becomes profound — and acceptable in art and society — merely by opposing beauty.

That remains, I think, one of the great confusions of certain parts of contemporary culture. I am not against change. I am not some unthinking traditionalist, clinging to the past because I am frightened of the present and imagine everything was better “back in the day.” That is a very lazy caricature. I am not conservative for the sake of being conservative. I am against change for the sake of change. Vulgar change. Thoughtless change. The kind of change that dulls the senses, flattens discernment, lowers standards, and then congratulates itself for being new. Novelty is not the same as intelligence. Disruption is not the same as refinement. And anti-beauty is rarely depth, still less artistic or intellectual superiority.

There are forms of art I can respect intellectually and still find spiritually unintelligible.

That, I think, is the honest way to say it. There are artists and works and movements I understand in theory, or can admire as ideas or techniques, and yet they remain entirely outside the language in which my own sensibility was formed. That is not necessarily a failure on the artist’s part, nor even always a virtue on mine. It is simply where my framework or expertise ends. I was not raised in the visual or philosophical grammar that makes certain forms of deliberate ugliness, abstraction, or conceptual severity feel emotionally persuasive to me. So yes, there are moments — more often than not — in modern and contemporary art, installation art, or certain institutional displays that leave me cold, bewildered, or quite frankly exasperated. That is not because I think myself cleverer than the work, nor because the work has necessarily failed. It is because all observation happens from somewhere. Taste has a biography. Perception has a history.

And if one works in the arts long enough, one also becomes aware of another rather comic fact: the arts are among the few professions in which the stakes are relatively low and the rhetoric almost absurdly high. We were not performing open-heart surgery, yet one would never have guessed it from the solemnity, the pressure, and the often unrelenting self-importance of art institutions. There is, in some corners of the creative industries, a strange inflation of seriousness — an overcompensation, perhaps, a need to imbue every gesture with theoretical and cultural weight, every ugly object with moral urgency, every half-formed idea with the aura of revelation. It is not always insincere. But it is often exhausting, and often pretentious.

Institutions, too, are shaped not only by ideas, but by the unresolved ambitions of those appointed to transmit them. That is another uncomfortable truth. Not all teachers, of course, and not all tutors. But enough of them. There are people who teach because they are gifted at teaching, and there are people who teach because they have not made peace with what did not happen elsewhere. The two are not the same, and students feel the difference immediately.

My one true ally in that period was a drawing tutor who looked like a little Edwardian witch and possessed the unmistakable authority of someone who could actually see. She was a real artist, with a real talent for drawing and for seeing line and form, which is perhaps why we understood one another. She recognised something in me that the institutional machinery did not know what to do with, and I recognised in her the relief of encountering someone for whom looking was still a serious act, rather than merely a conceptual posture. Later educational experiences were much better, largely because I was given more freedom — more room to follow my own instincts, more permission to shape my own language, less pressure to be turned into something I simply was not.

And perhaps that is the point.

Education can sharpen a mind, and it can channel thought, but it can also try to standardise an eye.

That is why I remain wary whenever people ask if taste can simply be taught, as though it were a recipe one could hand over on a neat little card. In one sense, yes — of course. One can teach history. One can teach proportion. One can teach the difference between quality and expense, between elegance and display, between coherence and clutter. One can teach someone to notice. One can teach discernment, editing, restraint, context, atmosphere. One can say: here are the ingredients, here is the method, here is how one might begin.

But one can hand over the recipe, not the hand.

That is the part no one likes to hear, because it is less convenient. You may be given the recipe, the ingredients, even the silver platter — but the hand that makes it beautiful is still your own. That hand is made of memory, temperament, repetition, standards, sensitivity, biography, instinct, discipline, and experience. It is made of what you were given, what you observed, what you rejected, what you refined, what you returned to, what you learned to love with increasing accuracy. That is why taste can be cultivated, but not transferred intact. It cannot be downloaded from someone else’s life, no matter how many shopping links, moodboards, or “quiet luxury essentials” one accumulates.

And this is perhaps the uncomfortable truth at the heart of it: one may teach the grammar, but not always the ear. One may teach the codes, but not always the instinct. One may learn the signals of taste, even perform them brilliantly, and still never quite acquire its ease. At a certain point, one reaches the limit of instruction. Taste may be sharpened, refined, disciplined, even enlarged — but it cannot be fully manufactured where no sensibility for it exists. Some people learn the language of taste and never quite become fluent. That is not cruelty but reality; it is simply the limit of what can be taught.

The real education in taste is not learning what to buy or how to behave. It is learning what formed your eye, and deciding, carefully, what deserves to remain there.

That, to me, is where taste becomes interesting. Not when it is performed, but when it becomes conscious. Not when it is used as a badge of superiority or self-validation, but when it becomes a form of self-knowledge. When one begins to ask: what in my taste is inheritance, what is pressure, what is imitation, what is longing, what is memory, what is genuine conviction? What have I absorbed without thinking? What have I chosen after thinking? What still feels true? What no longer does?

We are all shaped. None of us begins from nowhere. The question is whether we remain passive inside that shaping, or whether we become conscious of it — whether we learn to look at the inheritance of our eye and refine it into something personal, tangible, and lived.

Taste, at its best, is not a performance of superiority. It is not a smug little signal that one knows better. It is not the correct cashmere jumper, the approved painting or opinion that fits in with the current social climate, the proper plate used, the season’s authorised shade of beige or blue. It is a form of attention. A discipline of selection. A way of understanding what has formed you, what enlarges you, what deadens you, what feels nourishing, what feels false, and what kind of beauty — or way of behaving — can genuinely sustain a life and the world you create around yourself.

And perhaps that is the real answer when people ask whether it can be taught. Not entirely. Not like a trick. Not like an aesthetic code. Not like a social media category. But it can be awakened, sharpened, disciplined, and deepened. One can learn to see more clearly. One can learn to live more consciously. One can learn that beauty is not merely something one consumes, but something one practices every single day, regardless of the fact if you’re aware of it.

And from there, perhaps, one can begin.

There was a time, not so very long ago, when travel was not merely a way of getting somewhere, but an event in itself — a social ritual, a technological marvel, a performance, and almost a form of psychological preparation. One did not simply arrive in Southampton, Le Havre, or New York. One departed, crossed, anticipated, changed. Distance had texture then. It had weather, rhythm, ceremony; in short, it was an adventure. It had, perhaps most unfashionably of all, time.

We speak often now of the golden age of travel in a kind of lazy shorthand: the Orient Express, polished silver, lacquered trunks, silk scarves tied under the chin, a transatlantic deck chair angled just so beneath a checked rug. All true, of course, and all just wonderful. But the real distinction of the interwar years was not simply that travel was more glamorous. It was that travel was still allowed to possess interval.

That interval mattered, and still does, as I touched on in a previous article. A great journey once had gestation built into it. It gave one time to leave one life before entering another. On a train, or aboard a liner, one had the peculiar luxury of becoming ready for where one was going. There was time to write letters, to read novels one had been meaning to begin for months, to watch weather gather over the horizon, to notice fellow passengers and speak to them, to change for dinner, to imagine one’s arrival, and to wonder what life might yet have in store once one finally reached one’s destination. A crossing was not a blank inconvenience wedged between two obligations. It was a chapter. A threshold. A useful delay.

This, I think, is what we miss when we claim to miss the glamour of travelling. Not merely the white gloves, the steamer trunks, and the bellboy, though heaven knows they helped. We miss the idea that a journey might alter us slightly before we even arrived.

If the great trains of Europe — the Orient Express chief among them — offered this in miniature, then the great ocean liners offered it on a grand, almost operatic scale. They were not just ships. They were floating microcosms. And in the interwar years especially, they became something more than that again: symbols of national ambition, travelling exhibitions of design, technology, and prestige. In some cases, they were very much ships of state.

No two embodied this more magnificently than the SS Normandie and the RMS Queen Mary. But to understand why the Normandie felt so astonishing, one must first understand the revolution that made her possible.

For decades, the great liners of the Atlantic had largely borrowed the language of land. Their interiors were often designed to reassure rather than astonish: they echoed country houses, hôtels particuliers, and grand European palaces, or else the sort of imposing metropolitan hotels one might find in London, Paris, or Vienna. They were meant to civilise the crossing by making it feel, as far as possible, like not being at sea at all.

Then came the Île de France.

When she entered service in 1927, she marked a decisive break with that older tradition. Instead of reproducing the atmosphere of a château afloat, she embraced the modern. She was among the first great liners to present the crossing not as an imitation of life ashore, but as its own glamorous, distinctly contemporary experience. Her interiors were stylish, urbane, and unmistakably of their moment: not nostalgic, not faux-historical, but chic, clean, and forward-looking. She made the Atlantic feel modern. That change proved irresistible. It was immensely successful, and it helped set the stage for the far grander, more radical triumph that would follow with the Normandie. In that sense, the Île de France was not merely a beautiful ship. She was a harbinger.

The Normandie, launched by France in 1935, remains one of the most impressive and awe-inspiring moving objects of the twentieth century: not simply a ship, but a statement. She seemed to propose that modernity need not be cold; that engineering could be theatrical; that speed, luxury, and decorative brilliance might all belong to the same civilisation. She was astonishingly advanced, not only in her machinery but in her very silhouette — sleek, disciplined, aerodynamic, with a confidence that still feels almost eerie when one looks at her now. Where earlier liners often appeared merely to sit upon the sea, the Normandie seemed to cut through it with a kind of intelligence and daring none of her competitors possessed. She looked less like a vessel than like the future, already arrived and very well dressed.

The Queen Mary, by contrast, was British power made visible. If the Normandie inspired, the Queen Mary declared. She was vast, commanding, and possessed of a kind of monumental certainty that feels almost imperial in retrospect — which, of course, it was. Her great hull, her towering presence, even the relative traditionalism of her profile suggested not avant-garde experimentation but authority, scale, and command. She did not seem designed to outwit the Atlantic so much as to master it, embodying the British Empire at sea in all its disciplined, iron certainty, with turbine power to match. Where the Normandie represented the best of French modernism at its most refined and audacious, the Queen Mary embodied Britain’s industrial discipline and imperial assurance in steel.

It is tempting to flatten these ships into a single mood called glamour, but that misses the point. They were glamorous, certainly. They were also deeply revealing. They were national self-portraits.

The Normandie was France saying to the world: we still lead in taste, in decorative arts, in elegance, in culinary excellence, in the civilised arrangement of beauty. Her interiors were not merely luxurious but culturally strategic — a floating showcase of French craftsmanship, artistry, and Art Deco magnificence. She was, in essence, a travelling exhibition of national style.

The Queen Mary, meanwhile, announced something different: endurance, seriousness, engineering force, imperial scale. She was less a jewel box than a fortress in evening dress.

This idea of the liner as a national emblem continued beyond the interwar years, and in some cases became even more poignant in retrospect. The Nieuw Amsterdam and, later, the SS Rotterdam — which I have had the pleasure of visiting in Rotterdam — belong to that later afterglow, when nations still built ships not merely to transport passengers, but to represent themselves. The Rotterdam in particular was one of the last true Dutch ships of state: not simply a vessel, but a national object, a floating expression of Dutch maritime intelligence, post-war confidence, and the restrained modern elegance of the 1950s and 1960s. One senses aboard such ships that they were built not merely to carry bodies across water, but to project a country’s self-image outward into the world.

That, too, is largely gone now. The world was different then; we do not really build in this spirit any longer. We build for efficiency, for markets, for demographics, for categories of leisure. But the great liners were conceived in a more extravagant register. They were meant to impress. To persuade. To seduce. To embody. They were, in the truest sense, national theatre.

And what theatre it was.

If the Île de France helped make modernity fashionable at sea, the Normandie made it magnificent. If the Queen Mary announced British power in steel, the Normandie attempted something even more audacious: she made the Atlantic itself submit to French taste. Her first-class cabins and suites were not merely luxurious but almost absurdly, gloriously persuasive — furnished and conceived by some of the most distinguished decorators and makers of the day, with entire suites by Ruhlmann, Leleu, and the leading French decorative houses, so that one did not feel simply accommodated, but installed inside a floating manifesto of modern French decorative arts. This was not hospitality in the ordinary sense. It was cultural diplomacy upholstered in lacquer and polished wood — the sort of thing that now feels almost unthinkable even in the grandest hotels.

Nowhere was that more apparent than in the ship’s legendary first-class public rooms. The great dining room, spanning three decks and famously longer than the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, was less a restaurant than a banqueting hall: an immense, gleaming cathedral of light, gold-toned coffering, mirrored brilliance, and ceremony, in which French cuisine was served as if it were itself a matter of state. Even the ship’s air-conditioning, among the earliest and most advanced of its kind, was reputedly kept a little cooler than strictly necessary, so that women might wear their furs to dinner and look all the more magnificent, their diamonds scintillating in the softened light of Lalique’s pots de feu. One can only admire a civilisation that understood the distinction between comfort and effect — and chose effect. And what an effect it was: a splendour scarcely seen before and unlikely ever to be seen again.

The same was true of the great foyer and staircase leading to it, down which one could descend into view like a duchess, a film star, or at the very least a person who had correctly understood the purpose of a crossing. The Normandie was not merely designed to move passengers elegantly; it was designed to stage them, in surroundings most of them would never witness again.

The Queen Mary, by contrast, was more restrained, more cautious, and in some respects more comfortable. Her interiors were handsome, serious, and assured, but safer — less intoxicating, less extreme, and certainly less overwhelming. They lacked the almost hallucinatory excellence of the Normandie, whose spaces could at times border on the gloriously oppressive. And yet the fascinating thing, seen now in retrospect, is that the very daring of the Normandie has allowed much of her design to remain startlingly fresh. However lavish, however imposing, her best interiors still read as modern: disciplined, intelligent, and somehow current to those with an eye for such things. The Queen Mary’s interiors, by contrast — preserved today in Long Beach — feel more firmly of their moment: elegant, refined, and luxurious, certainly, but unmistakably period. Which is, perhaps, the neatest proof of all that truly good design does not merely flatter its own era. It transcends it.

Part of these ships’ hold on the imagination lies, naturally, in the social world they carried. These were not only means of transport but moving stages. The transatlantic crossing was a social season in miniature: aristocrats, heiresses, diplomats, industrialists, honeymooners, journalists, artists, and, crucially, stars. Marlene Dietrich. Cary Grant. Douglas Fairbanks. Noël Coward. One can go on. Their presence was not incidental. Celebrity did not merely decorate the liner era; it amplified it. To be seen boarding — and dining — was part of the performance. A gangway could function rather like a red carpet, only with more sea air, better tailoring, and a great many deck-length fur coats.

And yet the great liners were not only elegant. They were adventurous, occasionally heroic, and at times positively legendary. Few ships embodied that better than the Île de France. Before the war, she acquired a particular fame among thirsty Americans returning home during Prohibition. Because she was French, and because once clear of American waters the rules changed rather marvellously, she became a floating reprieve from puritanism — complete with what was said to be the longest bar of any ocean liner afloat. One can imagine how beloved she became. In that sense, she was not merely stylish, but liberating.

Her legend only deepened after the war. Refitted and given a new lease of life in a more streamlined, modern guise, the Île de France seemed almost to embody the resilience of the liner age itself: elegant, adaptable, and impossible to quite retire. And then, in 1956, she entered maritime history of the most dramatic kind. When the distress call came from the stricken Andrea Doria, after her fatal collision with the Stockholm, her captain made the sort of decision upon which reputations — and lives — are built. Adhering to one of the oldest and noblest customs at sea — that one always goes to the aid of a fellow sailor or passenger in peril — he broke course and turned back, knowingly sacrificing schedule, certainty, and a timely arrival at Le Havre in order to answer the call. Then, with engines driving at maximum speed through the early hours of the morning, the Île de France raced to the scene.

She approached in darkness, with extraordinary caution. Many aboard the Andrea Doria were still asleep, not yet aware that the ship had been struck and was sinking. And so the Île de France, closing in through the night like something out of myth, crept toward her with the utmost care. Then came one of the most moving gestures in all liner history: before lowering her lifeboats, she illuminated herself completely. Every available light onboard was switched on. Her great illuminated name — ÎLE DE FRANCE — blazed across the darkness from her boat deck, announcing to those trapped aboard the Andrea Doria that rescue had arrived. It was not merely practical. It was noble in the truest sense: a floating reassurance, a declaration in light that they had been found, that they would not be abandoned, that help had come for them across the black Atlantic night.

Only then did she begin the work in earnest, sending out her lifeboats and playing a decisive role in the rescue of more than seven hundred passengers. When she returned to New York with the survivors, her captain and crew were rightly received as heroes. It is difficult to imagine a finer proof that the lustre of these ships was never only about silk lapels, silver service, champagne and deck games. Their glamour was heightened by danger, by courage, by the sea’s indifference, and by the knowledge that these great floating worlds were also serious vessels, capable not merely of carrying people beautifully, but of saving them in times of war and peace. In that moment, the Île de France ceased to be merely beloved by many. She became immortal.

Sometimes, the ships were not merely glamorous but life-altering. Hedy Lamarr — whose later inventions would help lay the foundations for modern wireless technology, and who was still on the brink of Hollywood — famously booked a one-way passage on the Normandie in pursuit of Louis B. Mayer after he had refused to see her in Europe, using the crossing itself as an opportunity to force proximity, create intrigue, and place herself within the drama by slipping into the first-class public rooms while travelling second. It was, in every sense, a gamble. It worked. One could scarcely invent a better example of the age’s understanding that travel was not just movement, but theatre — and that a crossing might change one’s life before one had even reached land.

This mattered more than it may seem. The great liners helped create the modern idea of travel as aspiration. They were not just glamorous because glamorous people used them. Glamorous people used them because they were already understood as the places where modern glamour happened. They shaped fashion as much as they reflected it: deck coats, sunglasses, travel suits, monogrammed luggage, resort wear, dinner jackets, bias-cut evening dresses — the whole transatlantic silhouette of leisure under discipline. The liner was not merely a backdrop for style. It was one of the engines that produced it.

And then, astonishingly, all of this happened within living memory of another revolution entirely.

There were people born in the first decades of the twentieth century who first travelled from New York to London or Paris by liner — over several days, by boat-train and by ship, with all the interval and ritual that implied — and who later, in the same lifetime, boarded Concorde and crossed the Atlantic in roughly three and a half hours. It is almost impossible to grasp what such a compression of distance must have felt like, not only technologically but emotionally. Within a single human life, the Atlantic went from ceremony to acceleration. From the old prestige of the legendary Blue Riband to supersonic transfer.

And yet Concorde, too, retained something of the older dream. That is what makes her so haunting in retrospect. She was not merely fast. Plenty of things are fast. She was glamorous. Sleek, improbable, silver, exclusive — supersonic travel rendered as a luxury object. If the great liners were palaces in motion, Concorde was a dart of polished modernity, the airborne heir to the same ideal: that travel, at its highest expression, might still be theatrical, beautiful, and a little absurd in the best possible way. She was perhaps the last machine to suggest that speed itself could be elegant and aspirational.

What aviation gained, of course, was extraordinary. What it lost is harder to quantify, which is why people so often resort to nostalgia. But nostalgia, when lazy, reduces everything to sepia and sighing. The truth is more interesting than that. We do not miss slowness for its own sake. No one truly longs to be cold, seasick, delayed by fog, or — heavens forbid — icebergs. Nor, for that matter, to be trapped for four days with an unbearably loud couple. What we miss is meaningful duration. We miss journeys that possessed shape and sequence, journeys that allowed for anticipation, reinvention, observation, and even boredom of the civilised variety.

We miss, in other words, travel that still understood itself as a form.

I thought of this very keenly when I crossed on the Queen Mary 2 — not the Atlantic, not yet, but merely the Channel — which is, for all practical purposes, the last true ocean liner. Not a cruise ship pretending to be one, but a vessel built for crossing in almost any condition, whatever the weather, according to that old Atlantic logic of departure, passage, and arrival. To sail on her is to understand, however imperfectly and however comfortably modernised, what made the great liners so potent and so awe-inspiring. There is a difference between a holiday at sea and a crossing. A crossing has direction. It has purpose. It has narrative. One feels not simply entertained but conveyed.

I remember very vividly the first night: a storm in the Channel, black water, a darkness so complete it seemed almost like a filmset, and the ship itself the only source of light in the pitch-black world of sea and sky, pressing on at full steam ahead. We had to reach Bruges, and the Queen Mary 2 went at it with a speed and determination that was both exhilarating and faintly unnerving. Standing there on deck, watching the vast wake unspool behind her into the blackness, feeling the sheer power of that enormous hull driving onward through the weather, one was reminded very quickly that an ocean liner is not a cruise ship in costume. She is a force to be reckoned with, built for distance, all weather conditions, purpose, and resilience. It was inspiring. It was a little frightening. It was, in other words, thrilling.

And with that comes something quite extraordinary: the sense that one is participating in an old world drama. The sea reasserts scale. Time stretches. The horizon begins to matter again. Meals resume their rightful dignity. One makes an effort to dress a little better — though never on the first night at sea. One notices the weather. One reads. One thinks. One looks outward over the vast stretches of water. One remembers, almost with surprise, that the journey itself can still be the point.

That is why the great liners continue to fascinate. Not because they were bigger, shinier, or peopled by better-looking aristocrats — though some undoubtedly were. They endure because they belonged to a moment when travel was asked to do more than move us. It was asked to represent nations, to display craftsmanship, to seduce the imagination, to embody modernity, and to add refinement to time itself.

The great ships of the Atlantic were not merely vessels. They were floating manifestos. The Normandie and the Île de France, with their French brilliance and noble modernity. The Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth, with their vast imperial authority. The later Rotterdam, carrying Dutch maritime pride into the post-war age. Each, in its own way, one of the last — or among the last — of a species now largely extinct: the ships of state, the national self-portrait at sea.

And perhaps that is why they still inspire us. They remind us of an era in which progress had not yet fully severed itself from beauty; in which technology could still aspire to elegance; in which the modern world, for a brief and glittering moment, believed that efficiency alone was not enough.

One did not simply go to America then.

It was the only way to cross.

People often ask me, with a mixture of curiosity and mild disbelief, how one “lives like this.”

By which they usually mean the silver tray at breakfast, the proper china, the scents I use, the countless books by the bed and in the bookcase, the drinks served in beautiful glasses, the phone calls from a 1935 Bakelite telephone — in perfect working order, in case you were wondering — and the faintly unreasonable insistence that a Tuesday evening should not be allowed to feel like a waiting room.

It is always flattering, of course. Slightly exposing, perhaps, in that curious way one becomes aware of how much people see and how much one is willing to show them, but flattering all the same.

And yet the question is always revealing, because it assumes that such things are either extravagances, affectations, or some species of private theatre. In reality, they are none of those things. Or rather, not entirely. They are simply the result of habit, instinct, repetition, attention, and a rather stubborn belief that life ought to be treated with more care than modern life is usually accustomed to.

I do not really see “the everyday” as something separate from life’s better moments. There are, of course, grand occasions, and I shall do everything in my power to make those feel special too. But if anything, I think one ought to make more of ordinary days, not less. I have never understood the logic of saving everything lovely for some vague future occasion, as though life begins only once the right guest list has assembled or the calendar finally approves.

I do not wait for special occasions. I make them.

As my father used to say, if you wait long enough to wear that suit or dress, or to open the champagne, you will eventually be dead. And how right he was. He, together with my mother, taught my sisters and me many of the things we now do almost instinctively, though life has since taught me that a great many people find such things unusual, or far too much fuss for an ordinary day. In my opinion, they could not be more wrong.

Use the beautiful things now.

That, I suspect, is the beginning of the whole philosophy.

A friend of mine once said to me, half-teasingly and half in earnest, that I had the sort of old-fashioned upbringing in which one knows how to sew, cook, host, speak several languages, manage a crisis, and generally manage the small civilities of life. “Those are your only skills,” he said, with perfect wickedness.

I laughed, naturally. But the remark stayed with me, and I suppose he was right in more ways than one.

Because what sounds decorative to modern ears was once understood as a complete education of a certain kind. Not merely in accomplishment, but in atmosphere. In self-presentation. In domestic intelligence. In social tact. In the subtle, demanding, often invisible business of making life feel more beautiful than it strictly needs to be.

And that is, perhaps, the point.

Many people no longer do these things, not because they have weighed them thoughtfully and decided against them, but because nobody has shown them how. No one teaches them anymore, and no one expects them anymore either, which is perhaps worse. No one explains why a linen napkin matters, or why a cocktail napkin with an aperitif is not quite the same thing, or why a proper bread-and-butter note after staying in someone’s house still has the power to charm and is, in my view, quite frankly essential. No one tells you that the right glass can make a perfectly ordinary wine taste better, or that flowers should be arranged where they alter the mood of a room rather than merely fill a corner. No one teaches you that there is, in fact, a difference between inviting people over and hosting them.

These things are often dismissed now as quaint, old-fashioned, or the domain of mothers and grandmothers. Which is a pity, because they are not relics. They are skills. Better still, they are useful skills. They change how a room feels, how an evening unfolds, how a guest remembers you, and how one inhabits one’s own life after a long and demanding day of dealing with the ordinary world.

The little things are not little.

A folded napkin, a well-laid tray, the correct glass, a lamp switched on before dusk, a drink served with something crisp and salty rather than torn open from a packet at the last minute: these are not grand gestures. They are signals. Of care. Of tone. Of attention. Of the rather radical idea that the everyday deserves more dignity than a violent overhead light and a half-hearted sense of survival. Because at a certain age, my dear, this quite simply will not do.

And no, before anyone becomes anxious, this is not a theatre production.

It is not a pantomime. It is not a show. It is not something one does to impress other people, nor should it ever be. If you are lighting candles, polishing silver, or opening good champagne purely in the hope that somebody might think you enviably “curated,” you have already missed the point. That is not pleasure. That is admin in evening dress.

The right reason to do these things is because they make life feel better.

That is all.

Not for applause. Not for performance. Not because the internet might one day approve. Not because someone might call you stylish; I quite simply could not give a fig. But because a simple fried egg tastes nicer on a proper plate. Because a tray makes breakfast feel like breakfast. Because a scent worn at home, even when nobody is coming and one is in pyjamas at two in the afternoon, can still make one feel more like oneself.

And yes, I do have pyjama days. Plenty of them. But I still wear scent at home. I still like a proper glass. I still prefer the nice cutlery, even if the meal is something absurdly simple. Not because anyone is watching. Quite the opposite. Because who you are when you are alone is, I think, who you really are.

That is where taste is tested.

That is where one discovers what truly matters, what one reaches for instinctively, and what makes one feel quietly restored. It is easy enough to perform elegance in public. It is much harder, and much more truthful, to practise little acts of care when nobody sees you at all. That is where true style resides, yes, but also integrity in the wider sense of how one lives.

One sees, now and then, in certain houses, that these arts are not entirely lost. A drink arrives on a tray. The olives are in a little silver dish. There are proper napkins. The candles have been lit before you arrive, not apologetically halfway through the first course. Someone has thought not merely about what is being served, but about how the evening ought to feel. And one notices at once how different everything becomes. Conversation relaxes. People sit differently. Time itself seems to acquire better manners.

Which brings me, inevitably, to the men and women of the 1920s and 1930s who seemed to understand instinctively that everything around them ought to be made beautiful. Not in the vulgar sense of excess, nor in the modern sense of “aesthetic” as a sort of online identity category, but in the deeper and much more demanding sense of arrangement. They understood rooms, flowers, light, timing, proportion, ritual. They knew that a terrace at dusk on a summer evening required one sort of drink, and a drawing room after dinner quite another. They understood, perhaps rather better than we do now, that clothes were not merely garments, but social instruments. They knew that the right lighting could improve a face, a conversation, and, at a certain age, perhaps even an entire marriage.

Most importantly, they understood that beauty was not an accessory to life. It was one of its governing principles.

This is where people often become nervous, because beauty is now so frequently mistaken for display or perfection. As though a beautiful life were simply a matter of spending more money, buying more expensive things, or serving a bottle with a sufficiently intimidating label.

But money, as we know, is no guarantee of charm or atmosphere.

A very expensive bottle of champagne does not automatically make a party successful, any more than opening Château Mouton Rothschild can rescue bad lighting, dreadful music, or guests who behave as though they are auditioning for a panel discussion. One can spend a small fortune and still produce an evening of almost heroic lifelessness. Conversely, a modest bottle served properly, in the right room, with the right food and the right people, can feel positively sublime.

Luxury is not the same as discernment.

Expense can buy rarity, access, labels, and perhaps a certain amount of confidence. It cannot, however, buy taste. It cannot buy timing. It cannot buy that certain charm. And it certainly cannot buy that marvellous, elusive quality by which a room begins to hum.

That is why the art of living has never been about money alone, and certainly not about money first. It is about standards. It is about care. It is about noticing. It is about understanding that beauty is often created not by the grand gesture, but by the small decision made consistently and well.

This is also why one must be honest and say that not everything can be taught.

As with personal style, some people simply have the instinct. They know, almost without trying, when a room is too bright, when a table is overdone, when a menu is too ambitious, when a conversation needs changing, when a guest ought to be seated beside someone else, when a drink should appear, when the candles should be lit, when the music should be lowered, and when everyone should be moved outdoors — or perhaps only a few people, preferably the right few. They possess that rarest of social gifts: they can make six people feel like twelve, or twelve feel like six.

Others may learn the mechanics and improve enormously — and should — but they may never have quite the same natural ease.

That is not cruelty. It is simply true.

The finest forms of elegance, like the finest forms of style, are always a marriage of instinct and discipline. One may be born with an eye, but one must still train it. One may have taste, but one must still edit. One may host beautifully by instinct, but one must still learn through error, repetition, over-salting, under-lighting, inviting the wrong person once, and never doing it again.

A seating plan — or a well-thought-through guest list, for that matter — is not some fussy relic of diplomatic Europe. It is one of the quiet engines of a successful evening. My mother always insisted that couples ought not to sit together: what on earth would they talk about? Put the wrong two people together and you have indigestion before the first course. Place the right ones side by side and the whole room lifts. That is not snobbery. That is choreography.

What appears effortless is very often subtle practice in evening dress.

Modern life, of course, complicates all of this further. It is not merely that people no longer know how to do certain things. It is also that many now do them for reasons that are faintly exhausting. They choose the flowers, the menu, the music, the books left artfully on the table to appear intellectual, not because they genuinely love them, but because they imagine a certain sort of person will approve of those books, flowers, or wines. Or they host in a way designed to attract a particular tribe, signal a particular politics, or advertise a set of cultivated “values” that somehow evaporate the moment the pudding is served — or sometimes even the moment they open their mouths.

This is not entirely new, naturally. People have always arranged themselves for effect. But now the performance is more anxious, more scrutinised, and often less graceful, not least because so many simply do not know how it is done: no one ever taught them. Everything is expected to mean something. Every object is read as a thesis. Every feeling is dissected until everyone is bored to sobs. Every table setting is a declaration. Every dinner threatens to become a referendum.

And then, as if that were not tiring enough, one also encounters the opposite problem: the person who mistakes disruption for wit.

There is always, at some point, the guest who says something provocative purely to create a little shockwave in the soup, imagining this to be evidence of sparkle. It rarely is. More often it is insecurity dressed as daring. Equally tedious is the host — or guest — who tries to halt any lively conversation the moment it edges towards the faintly controversial, as though the dinner table were less a place of pleasure than a small and highly supervised tribunal. A room does not need social grenades. Nor does it need ideological customs officers, or a telling-off from the fun police.

What it requires is tone.

That elusive thing. That difficult thing. That essential thing.

A succesful evening depends on more than silver, flowers, or what is in your glass. It depends on tact. On rhythm. On generosity. On wit without cruelty. On intelligence without performance. On knowing what to say, what not to say, when to let a remark land, and when to move the thing on before it curdles. In other words, it depends on social intelligence, which is now rather less fashionable than “authenticity,” but infinitely more useful.

People sometimes tell me I ought to write a book about how to live beautifully, or stylishly, or some variation of that premise. Which is deeply flattering, because it suggests that they see in the silver trays, the cooking, the dressing, the scent, the books, the little rituals and private absurdities, not simply a collection of preferences, but a coherent world.

And I am always touched by that, truly. It is deeply flattering when people respond to what they glimpse, and to the small fragments I choose to show.

But that is precisely what they are: fragments.

A tiny fraction of how I actually live. Of how I love, and whom I love. Of how I choose a guest list, or arrange a table, or think about a room, or decide who should sit beside whom. Of what I keep private. Of what I protect. Of what I do not photograph, and would not dream of photographing. Of the quieter, stranger, more intimate layers that make a life a life.

I am, in many ways, a very private person.

Not a different person from the one people see, exactly, but certainly a more layered one. Social media and all of these things can only ever offer little apertures. They may be sincere, but they are still glimpses. They are not the whole house.

And perhaps that is why I am not entirely sure one can write the sort of book people imagine.

One can offer principles, perhaps. One can point toward greater attention. One can suggest that life improves immeasurably when one uses the good china on an ordinary day, learns to cook two or three things very well, buys beautiful writing paper or correspondence cards, or finds a scent that feels like one’s own private universe. One can encourage better habits, more ceremony, more standards, more confidence in what genuinely delights.

But one cannot transplant a personality or an instinct.

One cannot teach someone to live your life, because that life is made not merely of rituals, but of temperament. Of instinct. Of memory. Of private fascinations. Of what one noticed as a child. Of what one’s family did or did not do. Of the rooms one admired, the books one returned to, the meals one remembers, the scents one associates with winter, the fabrics one always is inclined towards, the things one cannot resist, the things one finds silly, and the things one finds sacred.

A beautiful life is not a template.

It is not a shopping list.

It is not a downloadable mood or vision board.

It cannot be copied or forced. It can only be composed over time.

That, I think, is the real answer to the question of how one “lives like this.”

Not by pretending to be in a film. Not by spending a fortune. Not by buying a case of grand cru claret and serving it under a strip light with supermarket hummus and emotional chaos. Not by reproducing someone else’s rituals exactly, nor by mistaking expense for elegance, nor by arranging one’s life to be legible to strangers.

But by paying attention.

By deciding that breakfast should feel like breakfast, with or without a book beside it.

By learning that there is a difference between a drink and an aperitif.

By lighting the candles properly on a Tuesday evening.

By buying flowers because they alter your mood.

By understanding that grooming is not vanity but courtesy, first to oneself and then, perhaps, to others.

By wearing scent at home, if that is your sort of thing.

By writing the note.

By using the tray.

By choosing what is genuinely yours, and doing it well, and doing it again.

This is not a dress rehearsal.

It is not a performance.

It is not a pantomime.

It is your life.

And if you do not wish to do any of this, that is perfectly all right too. One need not live among silver trays and cocktail napkins like a minor attaché in a 1934 comedy. But the little acts of beauty, of ritual, of care — these do make life more pleasurable. More textured. More memorable. More fully inhabited.

And only you have the power to do that for yourself.

No one else can grant you permission.

No one else can make the ordinary feel beautiful on your behalf.

No one else can decide what is worth elevating in your own life.

That is yours.

The marvellous irony, of course, is that we now have more conveniences than ever. Better appliances, better access, better storage, better sourcing, better tools, better shortcuts, good things available with a click rather than an exhausting hunt through three counties. In many ways, it is easier now than it once was to live beautifully at home. Which means we have, if anything, even less excuse not to make a little more effort.

Not theatrical effort.

Not performative effort.

Just care.

And perhaps that is what those older, more composed worlds still have to teach us. Not that everything was better — it plainly was not, for many reasons — but that more was expected. More effort. More care. More form. More charm. More distinction between an afternoon and an evening, between a meal and an occasion, between simply existing and actually living.

We may not recover the whole thing. Nor should we try to become historical re-enactments of our own fantasies. That would be abhorrent.

But we can recover some of the old ways.

We can make more of things.

We can stop waiting for the right moment, whenever that may be.

We can use the suit, open the champagne, write the note, light the candles, and choose beauty not as display, but as a way of honouring our own lives while we are still here to live and enjoy them, with others or quite simply on our own.

And in an age that insists on flattening every experience into convenience, speed, and casualness, that may be one of the last truly elegant acts left to us.

I have been in a wildly 1930s mood of late — by which I mean, of course, even more than usual.

I could not tell you precisely why. Perhaps it is the books I have been reading, the films I have been watching, or the clothes I have been wearing — and, occasionally, making. Or perhaps it is simply that the 1930s, once they have properly taken hold of one’s imagination, become less a period than a climate of mind.

For the last few years my friends and I have developed a habit which I recommend most warmly: whenever we go somewhere for supper — preferably somewhere with a little polish, and preferably somewhere Art Deco — we pretend we are not merely going out, but travelling. We are, depending on mood and destination, perpetually embarking aboard the SS Normandie or the Queen Mary, or else setting off by train on the Orient Express to some glittering and improbable destination. It is an excellent way to improve an ordinary evening.

And the 1920s and 1930s were, undeniably, decades of great style: elegant, modern, theatrical, and thrillingly self-aware. They produced some of the most beautiful interiors, clothes, objects and photographs of the last century — a world so completely of its moment that it still feels startlingly alive.

Quite recently, a friend and I went to see Eltham Palace, which was for him a first. I had not visited in some time myself, and walking through it again — with fresh wide eyes beside me — I found I was quite as overwhelmed as ever by the astonishing beauty of the interiors. All that lacquer, light, line, and restraint — the sheer assurance of it. It felt not merely decorative, but aspirational in the grandest sense: a way of living made visible.

And it was there, curiously enough, that my mind returned to Paris, and to an exhibition I had seen just before the first lockdown, during one of those last wonderfully untroubled weeks of travel. I had been fortunate enough, in quick succession, to visit the Netherlands, northern Italy, and Paris; and it was in Paris, at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, that I saw an exhibition devoted to the extraordinary style of the Maharaja of Indore.

I remember leaving it in a state of complete enchantment.

The exhibition was dedicated to Yeshwant Rao Holkar II, Maharaja of Indore — one of the most fascinating and stylish figures of the interbellum period, and a man whose taste was not merely exquisite, but daring. Born in 1908, he belonged to a princely Indian dynasty and inherited both immense wealth and an already rarefied world of privilege. Yet what makes him so compelling is not simply his position, but the fact that he was so utterly modern in spirit.

As a young man, he came to England to study at Christ Church, Oxford, where his private tutor, Dr Marcel Hardy, introduced him to the cultural life of European modernism. Through Hardy, he encountered two figures who would prove instrumental in shaping his aesthetic world: the German architect Eckart Muthesius, and the French writer and artistic adviser Henri-Pierre Roché. Both were deeply connected to the avant-garde currents of the period, and through them the Maharaja found not merely influences, but collaborators.

He ascended to the throne of Indore in 1926, after his father’s abdication, and during the years that followed he began to form the vision that would define his legacy. In Paris in 1929, after visiting the studio and celebrated collection of Jacques Doucet — pieces from which I was delighted to recognise again in the recent Art Deco exhibition in Paris — he decided to create something extraordinary in India: a palace that would unite style, vision, and radical modernity.

The result was the Manik Bagh palace in Indore, designed by Muthesius: a startlingly modern residence built upon the foundations of an earlier structure, conceived as a private world for the Maharaja and his wife, the Maharani Sanyogita Devi. It was not simply a palace, but a manifesto — one of the most remarkable experiments in modernist domestic design of the period.

He was not merely a collector of modernism, but one of its most prolific participants: photographed by Man Ray, painted by Boutet de Monvel, and dressed with the kind of assurance that makes clothes, interiors, and image seem part of one seamless new idea.

And what a world it was.

The exhibition itself was a small whirlwind of beauty. It featured, among many marvels, my beloved portraits of the Maharaja and Maharani by Bernard Boutet de Monvel — two of the most elegant portraits I have ever seen, and among the most inspiring. In one, the Maharaja appears in a sweeping evening cape, leaning with impossible ease against a mantelpiece, every inch the modern prince. In the other, the Maharani is all fluid grace in a bias-cut gown, wearing the illustrious Indore pear diamonds, later set into a sautoir by Mauboussin. Together, they look less like sitters than like the embodiment of an era.

Around them, the rooms of the exhibition unfolded like a dream of interbellum sophistication: exquisitely proportioned furniture by Ruhlmann; astonishing synthetic leather chairs by Muthesius, some with integrated lighting; photographs by Man Ray; a rug by Da Silva Bruhns; the leopard-skin chaise longue by Le Corbusier on which I based my own chaise and a cocktail set so ravishing that one could scarcely look at it without immediately wishing for a suite of martinis before dinner.

What struck me most was not simply the quality of the objects, but the coherence of the vision behind them. This was not decoration for decoration’s sake. It was a way of understanding modern life as something that could be made elegant — streamlined, cultivated, radical, and yet deeply personal. It was luxury without heaviness. Grandeur without clutter. Modernism, but with glamour.

Like any truly successful exhibition — or indeed any great film, or any great book — it did what the best things always do: it left me altered. I came away dreaming even more of black tie and evening capes, of polished cocktail trays and streamlined interiors. I thought, too, of my own friends: that sparkling little circle of inspiring people with whom one can transform even a modest supper into an occasion.

I can still remember stepping back out into Paris afterwards with that strange sensation only the best exhibitions produce: as though the city itself had subtly rearranged its lines. The pavements seemed smarter, the windows displays more in tune, the passing coats more considered. One leaves such things wanting not merely to admire beauty, but to collaborate with it.

I remember wandering through the streets feeling strangely buoyant, as though the whole day had lifted me several inches above the pavement. I walked through Paris counting my blessings, inventing scenarios, imagining rooms, conversations, clothes, tables, journeys. I thought of London, of what might be made of one’s own life with enough imagination and a little discipline of taste.

And that, in the end, is what I took from it all.

One needn’t possess a palace in Indore, nor a leopard chaise longue, well, I sort of do... nor the Indore pear diamonds, to understand the lesson. The true luxury lies elsewhere: in the ability to make life feel intentional. To arrange a room beautifully. To dress for dinner, especially if dinner is only with friends. To mix a proper cocktail. To choose one’s surroundings with care. To create, whenever possible, a little theatre around the everyday.

High time, I think, to book passage aboard the Île de France — or at the very least, to go out for supper and dream a little...

If one cannot have Manik Bagh, one can at least have candlelight, a well cut coat, a polished tray at breakfast, and the dazzling fiction of being expected somewhere marvellous.

There was a time when personal style seemed to develop almost by accident — though, from experience and from observing it closely, I do not quite believe that to be true.

Not because people cared less about clothes — quite the opposite — but because style was once allowed to form more slowly, through habit, affinity, repetition, and instinct. A favourite coat was worn because one loved it. Shoes were resoled because they had become part of one’s life. A certain cut, a certain colour, a certain way of knotting a scarf, tying a tie, choosing a shirt collar — all of it slowly became recognisable, not because it had been consciously built for an audience, but because it had simply become one’s own.

That, to me, is the essential difference.

Style was once something one possessed. Now it is more often something one performs.

And there is, if one is honest, a very obvious distinction between the two. Those who truly have style understand it instinctively. Those who do not, often work the hardest to imitate the appearance of it.

Of course, influence itself is not new. People have always looked to those they admired. The young copied film stars, aristocrats, singers, socialites, elegant men in magazines, women in society pages, photographs from parties and restaurants, race meetings, Riviera holidays. There is nothing remotely wrong with that. In fact, some of the most beautiful style in history was born precisely from that sort of admiration, inspiration, and yes, often blatant copying. To be influenced by beauty is one of life’s more charming privileges.

But influence used to be filtered through personality.

Someone might admire the Duke of Windsor, or Babe Paley, Lynn Wyat or a screen actress in Balenciaga, and yet what emerged was not a costume, nor a cheap copy, but a translation. Something was borrowed — a mood, an idea — but it was absorbed into a life already being lived, and shaped by the needs, habits, proportions, and temperament of the person wearing it. The result was individual.

Now, by contrast, we live in a world of immediate legibility. There is very little mystery left, either in people or in their wardrobes.

Social media is not solely to blame, but it has undoubtedly changed the atmosphere around clothes entirely. Dressing has become less private, less intuitive, less rooted in memory and attachment. Outfits are no longer merely worn; they are presented. They are assembled to be seen, read, categorised, approved, reposted. They must signal quickly. They must belong to a recognisable language. They must make sense at once.

And because of that, repetition has become oddly unfashionable.

A beloved coat can no longer simply be your coat. A pair of shoes can no longer become a signature. A familiar silhouette is no longer evidence of taste and consistency, but risks being interpreted as a lack of novelty. The cherished rhythm of dressing — wearing something again and again until it becomes inseparable from you — has been replaced by refresh, replacement, and relentless rotation. Everything must be newer, shinier, more immediately “current”, and above all, more visible.

What is lost in that process is not fashion, but intimacy.

And, with it, often the ability to think for oneself.

Because true style has very little to do with novelty — or, for that matter, with money. Money can buy clothes. It can buy labels, tailoring, handbags, shoes, access, and all the expensive little illusions in the world. What it cannot buy is discernment. It cannot buy instinct. It cannot buy taste. It cannot buy that elusive, deeply personal understanding of what actually suits you, what feels simply good on you, what becomes part of your silhouette, your memory, and ultimately your life.

That comes from somewhere else entirely.

True style has far more to do with recognition — not the recognition of strangers online, but the quieter, more rewarding recognition of self. The marvellous thing about personal style is that it becomes a kind of visual autobiography. Certain fabrics return. Certain colours recur. Certain proportions are discovered. Certain absurd little preferences reveal themselves. One becomes attached. One develops loyalties. One repeats oneself, and in doing so becomes more distinct, more individual, more memorable.

A signature is only a signature because it has been seen before.

And that, perhaps, is what we are losing most of all.

Because in a culture obsessed with novelty, one no longer hears those lovely old remarks. I’ve always loved that coat on you. That is your most beautiful dress. Those shoes are so you. You always look marvellous in that. Clothes are no longer kept long enough, worn often enough, or loved deeply enough to become part of the person wearing them. They are rotated out before they have the chance to acquire meaning.

The culture of constant newness has robbed us of one of style’s sweetest pleasures: the pleasure of being recognised by what we faithfully love.

Today, however, we are increasingly encouraged to do the opposite.

We are offered pre-fabricated identities rather than personality. Categories rather than character. The internet is full of beautifully curated tribes: the polished minimalist, the Sloane, the clean-girl devotee, the East End hipster, the quiet luxury disciple, the archival obsessive, the horsey one, the one who dresses like an heiress in Tuscany despite living in a new-build in Croydon. All of it is amusing, occasionally inspiring, sometimes even rather lovely — but it often produces the same strange result: people who look as though they have been excellently briefed, but not deeply known.

It is easier now to look fashionable than it is to look like oneself.

And that, perhaps, is where the real tragedy lies.

Because individuality does require effort — and imagination, and a sense of identity. Not the effort of buying more, but the effort of noticing more. Of paying attention to what one actually returns to. What one feels best in. What one reaches for when no one is watching. Which colours make one come alive. Which references genuinely stir something in the heart, and which are merely circulating because they are currently legible to other people.

In short: listening to oneself.

Not to what some influencer has been sent for free.

Personal style cannot be downloaded whole, nor can it be achieved by carbon-copying a runway look from head to toe. It cannot be built by collecting signifiers of taste, nor by dressing in the approved codes of a niche. It has to be lived with. It must survive weather, boredom, changing moods, repeated wear, memory, travel, accidents, affection, and sometimes heartbreak. It must be edited by life itself.

And perhaps that is why the people of the past often appear so much more individual to us now.

Not because everyone was more stylish — heaven knows that is not true — but because people were less managed by consensus. They borrowed, certainly. They admired, absolutely. But they were not being endlessly nudged towards the same handful of references, the same approved silhouettes, the same “correct” versions of elegance, coolness, luxury, or nonchalance. There was more room for idiosyncrasy. More room for taste to ripen in private.

One sees it in old photographs all the time. Not perfection, but personality. Someone’s absurd devotion to a particular look. A woman who wears the same extraordinary brooch in every season. A man whose coat is unmistakably his because he has worn it for years. A hairstyle that might not flatter according to contemporary standards, but suits the wearer so completely that it becomes irresistible and quite frankly irreplaceble. The charm lies in the persistence.

I suspect that is what many people are truly hungry for now, even if they do not quite know it.

Not more inspiration. Not more aesthetics. Not more things to buy.

But permission.

Or rather — the real permission, which is rarer and far more important: one’s own.

Because the truth is that no one can grant you style from the outside. No one can hand you individuality, or taste, or the courage to repeat yourself. The only permission that matters is your own permission to trust what you instinctively know feels right for your life, your character, your proportions, your habits, your eye. To wear what feels inevitable to you, even if it is not immediately legible to everyone else.

That is the permission most people are still waiting for.

And it is the only one they ever really needed.

And I say that not as someone who believes style drops from the heavens fully formed, but as someone who knows how profoundly one’s eye is shaped by one’s surroundings. I was fortunate. I grew up around stylish parents, stylish sisters, stylish friends — and I do not mean merely fashionable people, but people with real personal style, character and opinions. I was exposed early to beautiful people, beautiful rooms, beautiful books, beautiful art, beautiful furniture, beautiful music. That matters, it shaped me to who I am today. Of course it does. Taste is formed by what one lives among, what one notices, and what one is taught to notice and what one choses. It becomes part of one’s subconscious.

But even that is only the beginning.

Being surrounded by people with true style does not magically make one stylish, if only. It may sharpen the eye, yes. It may teach discernment. It may awaken instinct. But one still has to do the work privately, and continuously. One still has to edit. One still has to apply what one has absorbed to one’s own proportions, one’s own life, one’s own habits, one’s own needs. One still has to discard what is merely admired and keep only what is truly relevant.

That is where style becomes real.

And that is precisely why it is hard work.

Not grim work, but exacting work. One must constantly edit oneself and one’s life in order to keep it relevant to oneself. One edits a wardrobe, yes — but also a room, a routine, a scent, a table, a way of living. The truly stylish person is not simply well dressed; he is coherent. Things belong to him because they belong together. They are selected, discarded, refined, and re-selected until they become unmistakably his.

That sort of style cannot be bought, however much money one has.

It cannot be ordered wholesale. It cannot be assembled from spreadsheets, trend reports, or whatever tedious little consensus is circulating online this week. It requires instinct. It requires courage. It requires a willingness to experiment, to get it wrong, to change one’s mind, to persist, and to refine. Particularly when one is young, that experimentation is not frivolous at all — it is how one discovers what matters, what suits, what feels authentic. And that applies not only to clothes, but to scent, interiors, art, music, and all the other things that make up a life.

Once you know, you know.

And once you have found your own voice, no silly art-school tyrant, no fashionable snob, no algorithm in the world can really convince you otherwise.

That is the beauty of it.

Of course, there is risk in all of this. One must risk seeming too much, or too old-fashioned, or too formal, or too strange, or not sufficiently trend-aware. One has to risk attachment. One has to risk consistency. One has to choose the beloved coat again, and again, and again, until it becomes less an item than a signature. One has to be willing to invest — not only financially, but emotionally — in the things one truly loves.

But really, at the end of the day we are talking about choosing a polka dot, not performing open-heart surgery.

A little perspective is always helpful.

And perhaps that is the quiet rebellion now.

Not to reject influence entirely — that would be joyless, and untrue — but to treat influence as a starting point, not a substitute for selfhood. To admire beautifully. To borrow selectively. To edit ruthlessly, in life as in dress. And then, eventually, to wear only what begins to feel inevitable.

Because fashion can always be copied. History has proven that repeatedly, despite the occasional absurd little tyrant at fashion or art school who behaves as though he has personally invented the wheel.

But personal style — the real sort, the kind that comes from within — can only be accumulated, and lived.

Slowly. Repeatedly. In public, perhaps, but formed in private, in one’s own little world.

And that is why it remains, still, one of the few elegant ways of telling the world exactly who has walked into a room without saying a word.

As our train pulled into Victoria one Sunday afternoon, returning from a country house, my companion suddenly grabbed my arm and said, “Look!” As we rolled slowly towards the platform, we noticed the glamorous British Pullman waiting at the next one, poised no doubt for another exciting journey through the countryside. Still inspired to the brim after visiting a rather fabulous 1930s house, we could think of nothing more wonderful than continuing our day in precisely that fashion.

“I think we should just sneak on and have an aperitif onboard,” he joked.

I looked at him and agreed wholeheartedly. “That’s an excellent idea. They wouldn’t even notice,” I replied.

“We’d just be part of the interior,” he said, “part of the atmosphere.”

Again, I agreed.

Instead, we found another excellent Deco haunt in which to continue our day. But the sight of it stayed with me, and it brought to mind my recent trip to Paris, a city to which I travel very regularly: sometimes for business, though far more often for pleasure.

I have always found train journeys fascinating. There is something about them that broadens the mind, stimulates the senses, and, admittedly, occasionally drives one half mad with annoyance, given the present state of the rail network. “Go anywhere by train” is, sadly, rather an outdated notion now, but the romance of it remains irresistible.

One of my earliest memories of train travel was a journey to Italy with my mother. We travelled from the Netherlands, through Germany and the Alps, all the way to our final summer destination in northern Italy. I still remember the movement of the carriage at night, the dining car, the repetitive rhythm of the tracks, and the feverish excitement of going on holiday. It must be one of the reasons I remain such an avid Eurostar traveller, taking the train to as many places as I possibly can. For me, the journey has always mattered nearly as much as the destination — a truth that both travellers and travel companies seem to have forgotten, though there are, I think, glimmers of hope on the horizon. Certain night routes have returned by popular demand, and the quality of international train travel does at least seem to be improving.

So when I boarded a terribly early train to Paris — 6.15 a.m. had seemed a fine idea at the time of booking — I was, as always, filled to the brim with excitement for the day ahead and, let’s face it, in dire need of a coffee. My destination was the 100 Years of Art Deco exhibition, where so many of the things I love were gathered under one roof, including, thrillingly, a carriage and interiors from the illustrious Simplon-Orient-Express.

As trains go, the Eurostar is not half bad — especially in first class — but of course nothing quite compares to the great Pullman trains. The 1920s and 1930s did not merely make travel faster; they transformed its entire psychology. Movement itself became glamorous. Speed became modernity. The train, the ocean liner, the motor car, the aeroplane — all became symbols not just of progress, but of style, aspiration, and a new way of imagining oneself in the world. It was the same age, after all, that gave us the record-breaking Atlantic crossings of the SS Normandie and the Queen Mary — though that is a subject for another day.

After my in-seat breakfast — which I still find, in its modest modern way, an unexpectedly elegant thing — I closed my eyes and drifted off. In that brief space of dormiveglia, that half-sleep between waking and dreaming, I found myself imagining an arrival at the Gare du Nord not on the Eurostar at all, but in a glossy Pullman car like the one we had admired at Victoria.

The exhibition itself did not disappoint. It was a dazzling array of furniture, clothes, prints, paintings, jewellery, and countless other objects, many of them displayed in rooms glowing softly with Bakelite and lacquer, one after another, floor after floor, at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. And when I reached the Orient Express carriage, my heart leapt.

There it was: not merely a train, but an entire ideal of travel, crystallised in polished wood, tiny convertible compartments, dining cars reimagined according to the sleek proportions of the Paris Moderne movement, and that seemingly endless corridor stretching carriage after carriage from cabin to restaurant. What has always struck me about these older ways of travelling is that everything was considered. The lid of the washbasin closes with a gentle click. Seats fold cleverly into beds. Every mechanism is designed not only to function, but to charm. One is reminded of the magnetic vases once devised for ocean liners, designed to stay gracefully in place in a swell at sea — or, perhaps, on some dramatic Alpine curve. Even the smallest details were, once upon a time, imbued with thought, wit, and beauty.

Around the carriage were displayed various dazzling pieces of Orient Express furniture, silver, cutlery, and other accoutrements, all helping to conjure a picture of travel during that golden age when departure itself seemed a ceremony, and even waiting felt somehow more elegant than most arrivals do now.

Perhaps that is what I have always loved most about time in transit, whether aboard a train, a plane, or — in one’s most romantic fantasies, and once very much in reality — a great ocean liner. It is not dead time, as modern life would have us believe, but fertile time: a small and necessary interval in which the mind is allowed to follow the body at its own pace. The slower forms of travel are especially generous in this regard. They offer perspective, which is so often lacking in a world that now moves at lightning, if not instant, speed. One has time to think, to review, to anticipate, to let one’s thoughts gather themselves before arriving. Feelings settle. Expectations refine themselves. One reaches not only a destination, but a clearer state of mind. We now arrive everywhere faster, certainly, but not always better. There is a great deal to be said for those older journeys which understood that before one comes to a final conclusion — or indeed a final platform — there ought to be a little time for gestation.

Continuing in that same spirit of gestation, I did what I so often find myself doing in Paris after a morning or afternoon spent witnessing such beauty: I went to my favourite brasserie in Montparnasse. Over my usual lunch, my usual pudding, and a glass of Chablis, I found myself reflecting not only on the exhibition I had just seen, but on the room itself. It struck me, as it often does, that a good brasserie can serve a purpose not unlike a train carriage, a ship’s saloon, or even an old hotel bar: it offers a place in which one may arrive gradually. The exhibition had filled my mind with lacquer, chrome, speed, and all the gleaming certainties of Art Deco modernity; the brasserie, by contrast, gave me something quieter and perhaps more valuable still — somewhere for all of it to settle. The mind, unlike the timetable, does not always care for haste.

There was something especially apt about sitting there in Montparnasse, in a room that has watched generations come and go, thinking about travel, movement, modernity, and memory. How many people had passed through that brasserie over the decades? How many lunches, affairs, arguments, departures, plans, and little triumphs had unfolded at those tables? And how vivid it must all have been in the 1920s, when Montparnasse stood so firmly at the centre of the Paris Moderne imagination — all those painters, writers, decorators, editors, flâneurs, hostesses, émigrés, and hopeful young men with portfolios under their arms, all moving through the district with their cigarettes, their hats, their grand ambitions, and their complicated hearts.

What I always find so moving in such places is the sensation — difficult to explain, but unmistakable when one feels it — that the people of the past have not entirely left them. Not literally, of course, but atmospherically, emotionally, almost spiritually. In old brasseries, in hotel bars, in station restaurants, in public rooms of a certain age, I often have the curious impression that the lives once lived there continue to exist in some suspended form, held in the very fabric of the place. And in this particular brasserie, where the mirrors reflect one another and the room seems to multiply itself into a seemingly endless succession of light, shadow, brass, and glass, that feeling becomes almost impossible to resist. One sees the room repeated again and again into a kind of shimmering infinity, and it is hard not to imagine that somewhere in those receding reflections live all the other versions of the room that came before: the laughter, the scent, the cigarette smoke, the clink of glasses, the flirtations, the relief, the appetite, the boredom, the joy. It is as though the room has not forgotten a single thing.

I thought, sitting there, that perhaps this too is part of the usefulness of travel, and especially of slower travel. One does not simply move through space, but through strata of feeling. One notices not only where one is, but who has been there before, and what that place may have meant to them. The journey is not merely from London to Paris, or from station to museum to brasserie, but from one layer of time into another. And sometimes the most useful part of the day is not the train itself, nor even the exhibition that justified the early start, but the quiet hour afterwards in a familiar room, when one allows the beauty one has seen — and the emotions held by the room itself — to arrange themselves into something intelligible before going home.

Before returning home, I made one last small pilgrimage of the sort Paris encourages me to make almost every single time, and stopped at one of my favourite bookshops on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, where I unsurprisingly left with a book on 1930s ocean liner style and its influence on art and fashion tucked under my arm — as though the day had not yet quite finished with me. It seemed somehow right that a journey begun with the sight of a Pullman at Victoria should end with an ocean liner in book form: another floating world, another vision of travel not merely as movement, but as atmosphere, ritual, and longing. Perhaps that is what I value most in these older, slower ways of crossing the world, and in the rooms that gather around them — the station platforms, the brasseries, the hotel bars, the little pauses between departures and arrivals. They allow one to travel not only through space, but through mood, memory, and imagination; they give the mind time to arrive where the body is already going. We did not, of course, this time, step onto the Pullman. But for a moment at Victoria, between that country house, the hotel bar, and home, we had already travelled together rather farther than that.

A little while ago, sitting in the bar of a prominent hotel in Mayfair, it struck me once again that grand hotels are among the very few public places that become intensely private in memory. The thought was prompted, rather wonderfully, by something my companion said as we sat there. The sort of private recollection that would mean very little to anyone else, but which suddenly alters a room entirely for the person who carries it. It made me think, all over again, about the emotional life of public spaces: how certain rooms quietly accumulate private meanings, how they become repositories not merely of glamour or history, but of feeling. One goes to a hotel for a drink, a lunch, a nightcap, a birthday, a rendezvous, and imagines oneself merely passing through. But of course, one never entirely does. Certain rooms take hold. They attach themselves to the people we were with, to the version of ourselves we briefly became there, and to the lives unfolding, often unnoticed, at the surrounding tables. We are taught to think of hotels as historical or glamorous places, full of anecdotes about princes, actresses, politicians and scandals. Yet what interests me more, increasingly, is the quieter archive they keep: the unseen proposals, the family rituals, the first meetings, the reconciliations, or the emotions politely contained behind good silver and flattering lighting. A grand hotel, at its best, is not merely luxurious. It is a discreet witness to the passing of time.

As we walked through the door and across the lobby, I had that familiar sensation I sometimes get in certain places: a sudden awareness of what a room may have seen, and what feelings it might still contain. The feeling is not exclusive to hotels, of course — it happens in houses, shops and restaurants too — but hotels seem to distil it most completely. That afternoon, I had finally brought someone dear to one of my favourite Art Deco haunts in London for what was meant to be a small aperitif. As so often happens when we meet, we talked endlessly and very nearly forgot that we had reservations elsewhere afterwards. This time was no different. After a day of serious Deco sightseeing around town, we had certainly earned our drink, and once we sat down in a quiet corner, the room began to work its familiar spell. This particular place has not been a hotel for all that long, but I have been going there for years: for a quick pot of tea, or for oysters and several martinis before a supper that never quite materialised. Its 1930s panelling, dim lighting and finely veiled windows all conspire to create the illusion of being aboard an ocean liner. The fashion illustrations by Boutet de Monvel, always among my favourite details, only deepen the sensation.

I suspect my attachment to such places began in childhood. For as long as I can remember, my family and I used to go — and still do — to the small but illustrious Hotel Des Indes in The Hague. Even after its much-needed renovation, it retained enough of its charm and character to feel recognisably itself. We used to go weekly: for Sunday lunch, for tea, or for dinner after shopping. It became, and in many ways remains, our drawing room away from home. One forgets, sometimes, how many memories one builds and leaves in such places, and how many people have done so before us. I lose count of the memorable lunches, birthday dinners, family occasions, even a New Year’s party or two. These establishments, if we are lucky enough to return to them often, become part of our private lives almost by stealth. In time, they become part of our collective memory too.

In the case of Hotel Des Indes, the building itself carried a certain grandeur long before it became a hotel. It began life as the city palace of Baron Van Brienen, an adviser to King William III. After his death, his son sold the house, and Hotel Des Indes opened its doors on the first of May, 1881. It soon became one of the principal centres of society life in The Hague, where le monde slept, dined and danced and occasionally died. The hotel made particular furore in 1899, when Tsar Nicholas II stayed there while attending the first Peace Conference in The Hague. Another illustrious guest was Anna Pavlova, who, in a rather poignant twist of fate, never checked out. The great ballerina died there in 1931 after suffering from pneumonia. Her last words, according to legend, were: “Get my swan costume ready.” The room itself no longer exists — it is now part of the reception area — but a ground-floor salon was later named in her honour. Hotels are often thought of by me, as repositories of public history. Yet what makes them truly moving is not only the grand anecdote, the lavish suppers, or the illustrious guests. It is the way those famous stories coexist with thousands of smaller, private ones that are never written down and are gradually absorbed into the life of the place itself, like one of those quaint little portraits on the staircase or a New Year’s menu from 1932 tucked away in an archive.

For me, Des Indes is inseparable from family life. It is where I went, very often, with my parents; where, as a child, I was given a plate piled with sandwiches, and where my love of mushroom soup probably began, despite the fact that neither was anywhere to be seen on the menu. The ground-floor rotunda remained much the same for years, save perhaps the occasional lick of paint. It was the drawing room of The Hague: dark, a little worn, deeply cosy, and possessed of that particular kind of low-key grandeur that only slightly faded luxury can achieve. Everyone seemed to know everyone. One rubbed shoulders with diplomats, Austrian countesses, writers, politicians, and anyone else who happened to be taking tea in what felt less like a hotel lounge than one’s extended drawing room. We almost always had the same tables. If I was there alone with my mother, we sat at a small round table on the left-hand side of the rotunda, in two large, slightly worn beige fauteuils. On the table stood an enormous lamp, shaped rather like a Chinese vase. My tray of sandwiches would be placed on a little side table beside me so that I could reach them easily. Otherwise, we sat at a larger table nearer the middle of the rotunda, laid with a crisp white cloth and with an excellent view of the room — and, crucially, of who was ascending or descending the grand staircase. As a child, however, I always preferred the smaller table in the corner, half-concealed behind the brass cake trolley, but with a perfect view of the rotunda. There were endless places to play: on the stairs, on the first floor beneath the dome, in the small ballroom. Looking back, it was magical. I confess I still wander through the corridors and peek into the ballroom whenever I visit, although these days I do so with rather more self-control and rather less scrambling about beside the cake trolley.

The hotel closed for major refurbishment in 2006. All the old, cosy, slightly worn rooms and furniture were removed. It was sad, really, though I suppose more than a lick of paint was required if it was to remain both fashionable and functional. The new interiors were designed by a particular favourite of mine, Jacques Garcia, in a sumptuous Second Empire style that consciously echoed the hotel’s nineteenth-century heyday. It remains a wonderful place. The staff still know their regular guests, remember what one likes, and often recall where one usually prefers to sit. They will, happily, still make something for us that is not on the menu — a small courtesy, perhaps, but one that feels increasingly precious in an age of standardised hospitality and the dreaded “concept” dining. Such gestures are, to my mind, the difference between mere service and civilisation. They are also a reminder that the true luxury of a great hotel has never been spectacle, but discretion.

And what, then, of the grand hotel giants — the Ritz, the Crillon, and others of their kind? These institutions, and many more like them, have been regilded within an inch of their venerable lives in order to attract a modern clientele. Quite understandably so: to remain relevant is essential, and for grand old establishments, relevance is often the price of survival. Yet one does occasionally wonder where those of us fit in who have come to such places for years, even decades, and not simply for the photograph. Increasingly, one finds entire rooms dedicated to rituals that seem designed less for enjoyment than for documentation: tea rooms full of people in ties worn, one suspects, for the first time in their lives, queueing obediently for their turn to be photographed for social media. There is, of course, nothing wrong with that. Grand hotels and restaurants have always been places to see and be seen; spectacle has always formed part of their charm. But there is a difference between being seen and performing visibility. The old glamour of a grand hotel depended upon discretion, ease, and the feeling that almost anything might quietly be arranged. Modern glamour, by contrast — or what remains of it — too often arrives with allocated time slots, minimum spends, rigid reservations booked months ahead, and a faint sense that one is participating in a heritage attraction rather than inhabiting a living institution. Some hotels still resist this, of course. But one now has to look a little harder beneath the choreography.

This was brought home to us rather neatly on that very same day in Mayfair. Two, if I may say so, very well-dressed men in search of an aperitif wandered into a newly fashionable hotel bar, only to be informed — politely, I grant them, and already a marked improvement on the frankly ghastly new hotel at Hyde Park Corner — that we were most welcome, provided we were prepared to meet a minimum spend. We declined just as politely and retreated instead to a favourite old haunt. As my companion remarked, with the air of someone stating a self-evident truth, “We should have gone there in the first place.” I told him — though not always, for one must keep a loved one slightly on his toes — that I agreed entirely.

And yet, for all that has changed, hotels and restaurants remain among the most quietly permanent fixtures in our lives. They are where, in my case at least, one often goes to feel most oneself: to lift the spirits, to step briefly outside the daily grind, to celebrate something special, or nothing at all. We revolve around them; we evolve within them. The people change, the menus change, the upholstery changes, and sometimes, regrettably, the spirit changes too. But certain rooms remain waiting for us — or seem to. They remind us, more forcefully than photographs sometimes can, of who we were the last time we sat there, and of who sat beside us then — or, occasionally, who no longer does. That, perhaps, is why they move us so deeply. A grand hotel is not merely a place of luxury, nor even simply of history. It is one of the few public spaces in which private life accumulates with almost architectural force. Behind the flowers, the silver, the immaculate table linen and the flattering lamplight lies a dense and invisible archive of ordinary human feeling: birthdays, reconciliations, flirtations, grief, relief, boredom, longing, habit, love. We arrive thinking we are only passing through — in restaurants, in hotels, in life itself. But in truth, we leave a version of ourselves behind each time we visit. And if we are fortunate, when we return months or years later, the room is still there to hand it back to us.

This is A Private Correspondence — a small, carefully kept publication of stories, letters, and observations on love, rooms, travels, and the small gestures that make a life beautiful.

Some pieces will be fiction. Some will be drawn from life and memories. Most, I suspect, will sit somewhere between the two.

There will be romantic stories and private notes; thoughts on places, seasons, hotels, interiors, travel, clothes, and the curious emotional weight carried by certain objects, certain rooms, certain moments of a day and in life. A particular book at breakfast. A beautifully laid table. A memory one thought had long since passed, only to find it waiting intact in the scent of a drawing room or the turn of a familiar street.

I have always believed that style is not merely what one wears, but how one lives: how one arranges a room, receives a guest, remembers a journey, writes a note, chooses a drink, or falls in love. In short, how one embodies it and looks at the world. Because the world today, for all its noise, still offers small and exquisite pleasures if one knows where to look and to those willing to notice them.

This is a place for those things.

For romance, atmosphere, a certain feeling one can't quite place, and the quiet theatre of daily life. For beauty, certainly — but also for tenderness, humour, memory, and the little rituals that lend ordinary days their particular glamour.

Written from London, and occasionally elsewhere.

I’m very glad you’re here.

XF