White Fantasies, Colorful Interiors
The problem with cultural appropriation in home design
In an age of picture-ready and Instagrammable spaces, home tours — documentary photographs of a person’s private quarters — lie at the crux of the internet design world. The explosion of design platforms, along with HGTV and Pinterest, reveals a deep interest in curating picturesque homes that indicate sophisticated taste through their aesthetic. For the past several years, leading websites in design, such as Architectural Digest, New York Times Style Magazine, Apartment Therapy, and Design*Sponge, have published home tours that profile residences belonging to designers, art gallery owners, antique dealers, art critics, and other high-brow tastemakers. The largest of these sites, Architectural Digest, was founded as a print magazine nearly a century ago, in 1920. Today, it boasts more than 2 million followers on Instagram, where it shares teasers from articles and home tours featured on its website.
More recently, the growing trend of eclectic style, which involves the layering of varied pieces and textiles, has heightened the focus on these design professions, given their access to interesting pieces. But the subjects of these home tours are united in more than just their careers. They are overwhelmingly white. Their whiteness, coupled with the eclectic’s movement’s…
