Tasteful Bunkers: Shades of Race and ‘Contamination’ in Luxury Design Sectors

Abstract

In the days following the onslaught of the COVID-19 global pandemic, it became clear that this humanitarian health crisis would be accompanied by a financial crisis. In response to these inevitabilities, the industries that make up the consumer design sector – interior design, decor, architecture, fashion and so on – quickly turned their attention to aestheticizing our new, increasingly private and isolationist realities, launching advertising campaigns and editorials to address these new realities. Work-from-home edits, new ‘home office’ collections, wardrobes for video conferencing and ‘digital gallery hopping’ campaigns all began encouraging consumers to accessorize their domestic spaces as a bulwark against the threats marking urban environments and their contaminated bodies; bodies that, through the notion of ‘contamination’, drag along a set of inescapable racial and class-based assumptions. Echoing the ways in which interior design, architecture and media enabled America’s ‘white flight’ and suburbanization in the 1950s, luxury retailers are again inviting privileged populations to retreat and design their homes as comfortable bunkers, full of the accessories of art, travel and public life, without the risk of actual encounter. In this article, I argue that these luxury industries are complicit in renewing a post-pandemic racialization of urban space. In the contemporary moment, the luxury design industry’s entreaties to (re)design our homes to accommodate a newly public life led in private amounts to a symbolic suburbanization founded in the fear of ‘contaminated’ racialized bodies.