Politics & Power Quote by Cecil Beaton

San Francisco gets praised here the way Americans often want to be praised: by being mistaken, at least spiritually, for Europe. Coming from Cecil Beaton - a photographer with an aristocratic eye for style, surfaces, and social codes - the line reads less like a travel brochure and more like an aesthetic verdict. Beaton isn’t measuring GDP or transit systems. He’s clocking light, architecture, manners, and the way a city frames the people inside it.

The “perhaps” matters. It’s a genteel hedge that doubles as a flex: the speaker is worldly enough to compare, and discerning enough not to sound overeager. “European” functions as shorthand for density, walkability, old-world charm, cafe culture, and a certain cultivated looseness - but also for class signaling. In Beaton’s era, Europe still carried the perfume of legacy: history you could pose against. San Francisco, with its hills, fog, and patched-together Victorian elegance, offers readymade atmosphere. It photographs well because it already looks like it has a past.

There’s subtext, too, about American restlessness. Most U.S. cities were built to move fast and forget yesterday; San Francisco, by accident and by geography, resists that. Calling it “European” is a way of granting it permission to be impractical, romantic, even a little decadent. It’s admiration with a side of critique: the city stands out because so much of America feels engineered rather than lived-in.