"Domestic Bliss"

The eight-page fashion spread "Domestic Bliss" (pp. 158-165) in Wallpaper*, an international magazine about "interiors architecture art fashion entertaining travel" depicts a young, skinny, white, blonde woman performing (or posing with symbols of) a series of domestic chores: cleaning the toilet, ironing, doing dishes, vacuuming, scrubbing the kitchen floor, cleaning the shower, and dusting. On each page she dons a different outfit?tiny black dresses, sheer or lacy lingerie, feathery tops, a revealing silver bathing suit?each accompanied by high stiletto heels and thousands (on some pages hundreds of thousands) of dollars worth of jewelry. Typical of magazine fashion spreads, every page announces the brands and price of each product advertised. The goal, of course, is to make the reader want to buy these products. Below I will discuss what makes these ads appealing. I will demonstrate how these ads "work" for the target consumer, as well as what message they send, by placing them within the framework proposed by Christine Gray in her 2000 article "Myths of the Bourgeois Woman: Rethinking Race, Class and Gender."

In her opening line, Gray writes that "[the] image of the bourgeois woman is one of the most powerful and least recognized components of capitalist ideology" (Gray, 185). Gray argues that clean-cut categories of class obscure other crucial factors, such as gender and race. In trivializing the problems of bourgeois women, she argues, we have ignored the fact that their experiences are very different from those of their male counterparts. While the bourgeois man is recognized as an agent of work and production ("highly prized male attributes"), the bourgeois woman is portrayed primarily as an agent of consumption, a parasite (Gray, 188). These "fashion" images of a wealthy, glamorous, upper-class woman, clearly incapable of even the most basic of household chores (p. 165, for example, where she poses with the duster, bored and tired looking, though her make-up is still perfect) resonate strongly with image of the selfish and helpless "bourgeois Barbie" constructed by society as a (mistaken) symbol of the privileges of the wealthy elite (Gray, 201).

This fashion spread, however, appeared in the October 2003 issue of Wallpaper*, an international magazine obviously marketed toward the white upper-class. Included in this issue, for example, is information on where and how to buy a second home (p. 91), an article about decorative vases (p. 133), as well as instructions on how to turn your extra bedroom into a "groom room"?a man's "gym-cum-studio-cum beauty parlour" (p. 64). If we take as a given that fashion spreads are designed to sell products to the viewer, and that in order to sell something one wants to make the viewer feel good, a question arises: why would a magazine which is trying to sell expensive jewelry to the people who can afford it run a fashion spread that so blatantly ridicules the very person to whom the ads are tailored?the bourgeois woman?

I argue that these ads work because they give their bourgeois audience their own Barbie to bash. That is, the woman portrayed on each page of the Domestic Bliss spread is so ridiculous, so over-the-top, and so apparently incompetent that the bourgeois consumer, normally herself the object of such social criticisms, is able to push the blame one step further. On page 161, for example, our jewel-clad model is depicted about to vacuum up close to $100,000 worth of jewelry. A few pages later, she has hung up her $10,000 fur coat inside of the shower as she wipes down the glass door. These images, combined with the subtitle: "Domestic bliss: When it comes to the weekly round of household chores, we like to add a bit of sparkle to the task with some sexy jewel-purpose dressing" (p. 159), combine to make this spread not just funny, but completely ridiculous. These ads work not because the viewer is able to identify with the model. On the contrary, they work because the upper-class target is able to distance herself from this new ridiculous Bourgeois Barbie, to get in on the "the joke" and laugh (on her way to the jewelry store, hope the advertisers) with the rest of society.

Apart from how the Domestic Bliss ads serve their more explicit purpose of selling, they simultaneously reinforce the devalued nature of domestic labor in a capitalist system. Gray argues that "[Marxist theories of value] assume that men produce valued commodities whereas women produce little or nothing of value" (Gray, 192). The shelf full of fake cleaning products, picturing housewives from the 1950's and labeled with made-up brands such as "Floor Whore," further distance the bourgeois woman from domestic housework and degrade those who perform it?the upper-class woman, the pictures say, has been liberated and is nobody's "floor whore." The image of the model balancing precariously on one high black heel as she dips the shiny silver toilet brush into the gleaming white toilet (p. 158) further trivializes domestic labor by associating it with a little girl's game of dress-up.

Works Cited

Gray, Christine E. 2000. "Myths of the Bourgeois Woman: Rethinking Race, Class and Gender," in Lugo and Maurer, Eds. Gender Matters: Rereading Michelle Rosaldo. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.