Gender, Modern Design, and Home Consumption

Beset by a range of internal inconsistencies and contradictions, modernism never has been able to expunge completely that which has been constructed as its ‘Other’. Often coded as feminine, notions of ornamentation, decoration, craft, and ephemerality have long been defined in opposition to the modernist project. In this paper we chart a return to the aesthetics of modernism in the retailing, marketing, and consumption of household furniture during the 1990s as a means of extending existing assessments of modernist discourses. Given past associations between modernism and masculinity, we critically evaluate contemporary shifts in home consumption in the context of the gendering of the modern.