Stephen Bayley

Stephen Bayley is an honorary fellow of the RIBA, a trustee of the Royal Fine Arts Commission Trust and the co-founder of London’s design museum.

On the trail of Beauty

From our UK edition

In desolate Ventnor on the south coast of the Isle of Wight, alongside ‘antique’ shops selling yellowed and scratched plastic buckets and broken digital clocks, there is a hairdresser with a fascia board that elegiacally proclaims ‘Beauty’. The world’s largest cosmetics business runs a global campaign with the strapline ‘Defining Beauty’ in pursuit of mascara and depilatory cream sales. Meanwhile, popular culture is deeply conflicted on the matter.