The photo on the left is from the June 06 Martha Stewart Living, on the right is the Baldizzi kitchen as recreated to c.1935 in the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.
The Martha aesthetic rarefies the commonplace and defamiliarizes it. It takes the everyday and makes it exclusive.
This is a poignant example of the capacity of capitalism to subsume anything and everything. As the whirlwind of style continues to accelerate (in part due to manufactured obsolescence and the need to keep fueling consumption in order to stay solvent, let alone turn a profit) everything and anything may be appropriated for unlikely ends. What is surprising is that a brand (like Polo/RL) based so solidly on marketing the fictive lifestyle of landed gentry circa 1920 to suburban cul-de-sacs and double-wides throughout the land would be brash enough to sell the dwindling middle class and the working poor an image of themselves... or rather their forebears. I suppose the convenience imagery of the electric iron and egyptian cotton towels are more than enough to succeed but I really hope this is the over the top result of someone's deliberate sense of irony here. (It seems the design equivalent of a stunt Mr. Cameron Giles might pull.)
I'm resolved to the fact some photo layout designer was low on ideas and dropped by the tenement museum though... oh what a world we live in!
(what is this?): aesthetic laundry: notes
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