Historicizing Lifestyle : Mediating Taste, Consumption and Identity from the 1900s to 1970s (review)

The title and subtitle of this book each points to distinct projects. The title promises a much-needed tracing of histories of lifestyle or, more accurately, lifestyles. The changing meanings and practices of lifestyles are underexplored and yet crucial to our understanding of taste and consumption, social interaction, groups and networks, subcultures and the relationship between society and the individual. For the purposes of design history, a historicized understanding of lifestyles can help us to contextualize individual objects or groups of objects into patterns of practice; the garment or table or wallpaper which may form the object of study is likely to reward focused scrutiny, but it cannot adequately be understood without recourse to its neighbours within the spaces of consumption and their respective uses.