As Long As It's Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste

by Penny Sparke

Why do car manufacturers use paisley interiors to sell their products to women, and does it work?
Is women's taste really different to men's? Who says so? And does it matter?
In this highly original book Penny Sparke uses familiar objects of our everyday environments - furniture, cars and domestic appliances and interiors - to look at how taste has become a gendered issue in our culture. Ever since the industrial revolution, the cluttered interior has been associated with femininity while the minimal forms of modernist architecture have acted as markers of a masculine aesthetic.
As Long as It's Pink argues that 'taste' has been a quality assigned to women while 'design' is a man-made construction which has taken aesthetic authority away from women. This in turn has succeeded in trivializing and marginalizing women's material culture. Ranging across histories of domesticity, feminine consumption and home-making, as well as modern design and broader cultural theories, Penny Sparke offers a completely new version of the history of our modern material culture.

Genres: Nonfiction, Design, Feminism, Art Design, Sociology

Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Penelope Anne Sparke is a writer and academic who specializes in the history of design. She is a Professor of Design History at Kingston University, London, where she is also Director of the Modern Interiors Research Centre.

Sparke received her B.A. in French Literature and her P.G.C.E. in Education from Sussex University, and her Ph.D. in Design History from Brighton Polytechnic.

Reviews

[Malcolm · Rating 3 out of 5]

'Taste’ has long has a problematic place in cultural analysis – not quite the rigour of design, a bit middle brow, and all very moral. Here, in an intriguing and at times unsettling book, Penny Sparke explores taste as gendered (feminine) and derided by the strictures of design (gendered masculine) and by the high priests of quality. Dealing primarily with modernity, Sparke traces the period from the early 19th century to depict a see-sawing struggle between the rules of good design, and the practices of good taste. She sees ‘taste’ as being understood to corrupt and dilute ‘design’, and suggests that there is little chance of ‘feminine taste’ winning its battle with ‘masculine design’ for the lived environment, even in the flexible, anything-goes, world of postmodern design. On balance, I’m not really sure what to make of it – she certainly has an idiosyncratic and iconoclastic view of design/material culture history which I quite like, but there is little about the analysis that seems to inspire change – it is almost as if I got to the end and wondered so what, how do we deal with this? I suspect that part of the problem is that in looking to write accessibly (a good thing) she has finished up in places seeming to accept the essentialist view of taste=woman, design=man leading to a conclusion that is must be an unresolvable, irreconcilable struggle. Still, thoroughly worth the read.

[Ellen Bridson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting read. Sparke shines light on feminine relations to modernity through the lens of consumption in 20th c. Britain. Taste as eclipsed by the rise of mass production is a unique argument and really made me think.

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish I could remember where the hell I left this book (in someone's attic in London, no doubt). Seeing the exhibition WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution at PS1 brought up all kinds of interesting memories of discussions about art and gender, and it made me really wish I had this book handy; I'd like to read it again.

[Mills College Library]

658.8342 S7363 1995