Tasteful Bunkers: Shades of Race and ‘Contamination’ in Luxury Design Sectors

<p class="first" id="d3310698e106">In the days following the onslaught of the COVID-19 global pandemic, it became clear that this humanitarian health crisis would be accompanied by a financial crisis. In response to these inevitabilities, the industr...

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Main Authors: Inna Arzumanova, Maciej Stasiowski
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: UCL Press 2021-03-01
Series:Architecture_MPS
Online Access:https://uclpress.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14324/111.444.amps.2021v19i1.004
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author Inna Arzumanova
Maciej Stasiowski
author_facet Inna Arzumanova
Maciej Stasiowski
author_sort Inna Arzumanova
collection DOAJ
description <p class="first" id="d3310698e106">In the days following the onslaught of the COVID-19 global pandemic, it became clear that this humanitarian health crisis would be accompanied by a financial crisis. In response to these inevitabilities, the industries that make up the consumer design sector – interior design, decor, architecture, fashion and so on – quickly turned their attention to aestheticizing our new, increasingly private and isolationist realities, launching advertising campaigns and editorials to address these new realities. Work-from-home edits, new ‘home office’ collections, wardrobes for video conferencing and ‘digital gallery hopping’ campaigns all began encouraging consumers to accessorize their domestic spaces as a bulwark against the threats marking urban environments and their contaminated bodies; bodies that, through the notion of ‘contamination’, drag along a set of inescapable racial and class-based assumptions. Echoing the ways in which interior design, architecture and media enabled America’s ‘white flight’ and suburbanization in the 1950s, luxury retailers are again inviting privileged populations to retreat and design their homes as comfortable bunkers, full of the accessories of art, travel and public life, without the risk of actual encounter. In this article, I argue that these luxury industries are complicit in renewing a post-pandemic racialization of urban space. In the contemporary moment, the luxury design industry’s entreaties to (re)design our homes to accommodate a newly public life led in private amounts to a symbolic suburbanization founded in the fear of ‘contaminated’ racialized bodies. </p>
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spelling doaj.art-d61fb1001444433c89cf079142ddc60a2023-02-23T12:09:02ZengUCL PressArchitecture_MPS2050-90062021-03-011910.14324/111.444.amps.2021v19i1.004Tasteful Bunkers: Shades of Race and ‘Contamination’ in Luxury Design SectorsInna ArzumanovaMaciej Stasiowski<p class="first" id="d3310698e106">In the days following the onslaught of the COVID-19 global pandemic, it became clear that this humanitarian health crisis would be accompanied by a financial crisis. In response to these inevitabilities, the industries that make up the consumer design sector – interior design, decor, architecture, fashion and so on – quickly turned their attention to aestheticizing our new, increasingly private and isolationist realities, launching advertising campaigns and editorials to address these new realities. Work-from-home edits, new ‘home office’ collections, wardrobes for video conferencing and ‘digital gallery hopping’ campaigns all began encouraging consumers to accessorize their domestic spaces as a bulwark against the threats marking urban environments and their contaminated bodies; bodies that, through the notion of ‘contamination’, drag along a set of inescapable racial and class-based assumptions. Echoing the ways in which interior design, architecture and media enabled America’s ‘white flight’ and suburbanization in the 1950s, luxury retailers are again inviting privileged populations to retreat and design their homes as comfortable bunkers, full of the accessories of art, travel and public life, without the risk of actual encounter. In this article, I argue that these luxury industries are complicit in renewing a post-pandemic racialization of urban space. In the contemporary moment, the luxury design industry’s entreaties to (re)design our homes to accommodate a newly public life led in private amounts to a symbolic suburbanization founded in the fear of ‘contaminated’ racialized bodies. </p>https://uclpress.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14324/111.444.amps.2021v19i1.004
spellingShingle Inna Arzumanova
Maciej Stasiowski
Tasteful Bunkers: Shades of Race and ‘Contamination’ in Luxury Design Sectors
Architecture_MPS
title Tasteful Bunkers: Shades of Race and ‘Contamination’ in Luxury Design Sectors
title_full Tasteful Bunkers: Shades of Race and ‘Contamination’ in Luxury Design Sectors
title_fullStr Tasteful Bunkers: Shades of Race and ‘Contamination’ in Luxury Design Sectors
title_full_unstemmed Tasteful Bunkers: Shades of Race and ‘Contamination’ in Luxury Design Sectors
title_short Tasteful Bunkers: Shades of Race and ‘Contamination’ in Luxury Design Sectors
title_sort tasteful bunkers shades of race and contamination in luxury design sectors
url https://uclpress.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14324/111.444.amps.2021v19i1.004
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