The purpose of life is shopping. Theres a thought that reveals more inclusive human warmth than it betrays an imaginative lapse. Rodney Fitch, who has died aged 76, became famous and rich in the design decade of the 1980s, but was only a loose fit with the popular idea of what a designer might be. In a period when red spectacle frames were not rare (I know, I had some), he often wore a tweed jacket and a jumper. Although a youthful and incarcerated CND supporter, he became a cricket-playing Thatcherite with a beautiful country house in Wiltshire and a taste for what his friend the interior designer Peter Glynn-Smith called Dickensian Christmases.
While some designers were inclined to posture, preen and develop absurd affectations (I know, I had some), Fitch was robustly populist, insisting that he preferred the high streets M&S to the Tokyo fashion designer Issey Miyake. His shopping remark will go down in history as a marker of the zeitgeist, as surely as Margaret Thatchers no such thing as society.
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