Of course the Count de Buffon would not have had such a strange subject in mind when he wrote that “style is the man himself.” But the statement could well apply to Peter Marino, the New York designer who, a graduate of Cornell University, worked in serious architectural firms like I. M. Pei’s and SOM, then was discovered by the artist who was the quintessence of postmodern frivolity, Andy Warhol, who commissioned him to design his Manhattan apartment, the same one which in the late 1970s would become a hangout of the cream of the American avant-garde. It was there that Marino met the couturiers Pierre Bergé and Yves Saint Laurent, who dared hire this rookie of an architect to design and decorate their retail stores round half the globe. Since then Peter Marino, incidentally a great collector of art, has not stopped building the most exclusive and the most luxurious shops in the whole wide world, as well as the most pompous, most opulent residences for quite a broad range of clients: from Bernard Arnault, owner of the Louis Vuitton emporium, to the sheikhs of the Gulf countries. It is said that not one of these projects has had a budget of under 6 million euros.

There is no question that Peter Marino owes his success to talent – incidentally, Art Basel has just devoted a major retrospective to him in Miami – but it is difficult not to simultaneously associate him with his unmistakable and supposedly glamorous trademark image: the police cap on a Mohawk crest, the burly figure wrapped in a gay-biker leather outfit. Is style the man?