Stephen bayley

STEPHEN BAYLEY The individual for whom the term ‘design guru’ could have been coined, Bayley was the founding director of London’s Design Museum and his best-selling books include Sex, Drink and Fast Cars and Taste: the Secret Meaning of Things.

Anthropologists – with their interest in tribal behaviour, totems and taboos – should be studying the car. On Octane’s 20th birthday, as a ritual celebration of our shared value system, I suggest that ‘what we do with a Porsche’ is at least as significant an anthropological study as the mountain gorillas of Rwanda, the symbolism of raw versus cooked, or the sexual conventions in Western society.

Inspiration here is a picture sent me by a friend, a well-meaning gesture but one that has tormented me for days because it so begs for explication. The year is about 1959. A Stuttgart-registered Porsche 356 in period-perfect dusty yellow is parked on a sunny hillside in what I guess is Markgraeferland, Baden’s wine country where the Spätburgunder grape produces some of Germany’s best red wines. Several people are involved. All are wearing Tracht, or vernacular costume: lederhosen and, on the woman, a dirndl. She is cheerfully emerging from the Porsche’s sunroof with her partner, who wears Herrschinger Hosenträger (braces). They are addressing a jolly-looking fellow with pipe and hat who carries a conical basket Hotte (hod) on his back. This hod is full of grapes, some of which he offers the couple as if in an act of oblation (which, if this were church, would mean a solemn offering to God).

Tracht is an indicator of social class. To wear your knee-length leather trousers or loden coat in the city would make a very strong statement about status: you are a peasant and proud of it. But while everyone in my picture wears the same style of clothes, the couple emerging through the Porsche’s sunroof are clearly of a higher status than the man with the grape-filled hod.

I asked my friend Jonathan Meades, the best architectural writer of our generation, to help interpret. He said the couple are locals who have won the pools and are bigging it up with their new Porsche, and the chap with the grapes is acknowledging their new status with a gift that suggests the divine significance of wine in European culture. Well, maybe, but I like this picture because it hints so richly of a lost past, a planet where the sun shines and a happy couple go for a spirited drive on pretty, quiet roads in their Porsche, where they meet a charming old boy who, stepping out of a benign fairytale, gives them a delicious present, not a speeding ticket.

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