As Long as It's Pink

Book excerpt: 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.