Historicizing Lifestyle: Mediating Taste, Consumption and Identity from the 1900s to the 1970s

Abstract

The title and subtitle of this book each points to distinct projects. The title promises a much-needed tracing of histories of lifestyle or, more accurately, lifestyles. The changing meanings and practices of lifestyles are underexplored and yet crucial to our understanding of taste and consumption, social interaction, groups and networks, subcultures and the relationship between society and the individual. For the purposes of design history, a historicized understanding of lifestyles can help us to contextualize individual objects or groups of objects into patterns of practice; the garment or table or wallpaper which may form the object of study is likely to reward focused scrutiny, but it cannot adequately be understood without recourse to its neighbours within the spaces of consumption and their respective uses. In their opening chapter, editors Bell and Hollows position themselves against many of their peers who have characterized lifestyle as a function of the recent past, associated with postmodernity (Featherstone) or late modernity (Giddens). In critiquing what they term a ‘preoccupation with the novelty of contemporary lifestyle’ (p. 2) among their fellow academics, Bell and Hollows present their historically situated understanding of lifestyle as something new (while acknowledging Don Slater, Jukka Gronow and Frank Mort as some forerunners of their position). The contributors to this anthology hail from a range of related academic fields, including sociology, cultural studies, American studies, history, literature and media studies, and Bell and Hollows are able to present their position as new because they operate on the sociology/cultural studies axis. Design history has as one of its core achievements the illumination of lifestyles of the past and indeed a few familiar works are referred to in this book. Even design history, however, lacks a targeted study of the kind Bell and Hollows propose in their introductory chapter, which is why this book promises to form a useful tool for design historians.

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