"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.