STEPHEN BAyLEy The Aesthete

One of the characteristics of our historical moment is inflation. For a long time, everything seemed to be getting simpler. Now everything is getting grander. In 1959 the smartest appliance you could own was a Sony television with an 8in screen. Now you are not even in the game unless you are staring contentedly at an idiot’s lantern six feet across.

It is the same with job titles. Once there were ‘commercial artists’. There were Abram Games and Saul Bass and Cedric Morris. The last set up The East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing and taught Lucien Freud, but was not too proud to do magnificent posters for BP. Then professional inflation forced commercial artists to evolve into ‘graphic designers’, who in turn ceded to ‘branding consultants’. Did this mean anything different or better? Was it signal or noise?

So when I read that the excellent Marek Reichman of Aston Martin has declared ‘We are not car stylists, we are design engineers’, I paused for thought. Reichman is one of the very best of the current bunch, but I don’t see what is wrong with ‘styling’. Why be ashamed of giving emotional expression to dumb materials? Styling is the dress of thought. And in these brutal days, we need more of it.

God might roar with thighslapping hysteria when shown leaked motor industry forecasts, but the car will be with us in a recognisable form for as along as anyone dares imagine. That form needs huge steaming dollops of style if it is to have any meaning to users, or acquire anything like the cultural status of a ’57 Thunderbird.

Yet when I look around at the motor industry, I see a pantomime lock-step gavotte of futility, searching for meaning outside the day job. Instead of encouraging commercial artists to dream in good proportions, they have sent for the branding consultants. Thus, Marek the Excellent has teamed up with Satan to do some Aston Martin brand extension. Satan never laughs at anybody’s plans, but he has occasionally made the point that it is always best to stick-to-the-knitting.

I don’t want Gordon Ramsay to design my suit. To be truthful, I wouldn’t want Gordon Ramsay to cook my dinner, unless he was wearing one of the Met’s spit masks. Nor am I really certain that I want an Aston Martinbranded apartment. I dare say there is a dwindling group of gas-entrepreneur kleptomaniac oligarchs in Vladivostok who would, but snuggling up to them is not how culture advances in my view. What next for Aston? A limited-edition colour-coded Bond-era Walther PPK in a Bottega Veneta holster, tucked in the glovebox of your DB11 along with the spare bulbs?

Unsurprisingly, Rolls-Royce, presently on a vulgarity jag to shame Heliogabalus, has hit a rich seam of kitsch in this mysterious voodoo of annexing meaning by making connections beyond the motor-trade. Rolls-Royce customers were recently invited to admire a Fabergé egg in purple enamel on a base of white gold. Within, the Spirit of Ecstasy is hand-sculpted in frosted rock crystal and revealed by a lever-operated mechanism that parts the halves of the egg much as the Topless Miss World used to burst out of a glassfibre swan bobbing on a hotel lake. I am only surprised that Rolls-Roycebranded sickbags in faux unicorn hide are not included in this hideous ‘bespoke personalisation’ experience. The original Russian Fabergé eggs were commissioned by the Romanov family. And just look what happened to them.

Attachment to the past might be comforting in a precarious world. Indeed, Aston Martin has revived Superleggera, even if the cars now have no connection with Carrozzeria Touring’s lightweight construction. But attachment to the future is surely more compelling, and Aston has interesting plans here. Cue Divine laughter.

But look at Maserati. People old enough to remember the 250F and Birdcage no longer have their own teeth and Maserati has wisely resisted any temptation towards a period costume drama to tempt the dentally deficient. But the reason Maserati is not doing well commercially is simple: the cars are not beautiful enough. You could say that of Alfa Romeo, too. And, alas, of Jaguar, whose poor commercial performance can surely be attributed not to technical deficiencies but to lacklustre ‘styling’.

Beauty is the job of the stylist. Ferrari’s Flavio Manzoni taught me the expression ‘Tentare non nuoce’: it doesn’t hurt to try. When all the agonies of electrification, pollution, congestion and allocation of scarce resources have been managed, the car will remain primarily an aesthetic object. And I think it will need stylists as much as it needs design engineers or branding consultants.

‘wHAT NExT fOr ASTON? A LImITEdEdITION, cOLOurcOdEd wALTHEr PPK IN THE GLOvEBOx Of yOur dB11?’

Stephen bayley SB is the individual for whom the term ‘design guru’ could have been coined. He was the founding director of London’s Design Museum and his best-selling books include Sex, Drink and FastCars and Taste: the Secret Meaning of Things.