The Erosion of Identity in the Rise of Corporate Decor

My grandmother passed a couple of months ago, preceded by my grandfather in 2007. Over the past decade as she’s moved in with different daughters, the family has been collectively downsizing her belongings and spreading them out to whoever would most benefit from them.
I have two bookshelves that are designed to hold mass market paperbacks specifically that my grandpa made for my granny’s Nora Roberts addiction. These shelves are two of a kind. You cannot just buy shelves exactly like this. My grandmother and her sisters and her sisters’ husbands all come from a very bold tradition of making shit. It’s probably because they were born between 1920 and 1930. They grew up in an environment where making garments and other items from scratch was built into expectations of feminine domesticity. My grandmother and all her sisters had traditional flour sack dresses, at one point.
Even my own mother, as recently as the mind-70s, made stuff for my sister. When she was working the typing pool as a young woman, they had frequent down time in which they weren’t, technically, allowed to do anything else to fill their time. She tells the story of how they convinced their manager to let them do crochet and needlepoint because it “kept their fingers nimble.”
At a big, sociological level, women tend to be stripped of their identity under the labels of wife and mother. But creative domesticity allows a person a level of self-retention within that patriachal framework. Even when you follow a pattern for a garment or a wearable, you’re making a whole lot of decisions about fabric, trim, and fit that ultimately make completely unique pieces. Once you learn the basics of crochet hat construction, you can freehand them as you go pretty easily. Of the couple dozen I’ve made like that over the years, not a single one is identical to another.
Now let’s take that boxing up of female identity, but we’re going to remove one of the few consistent ways to explore identity permitted by patriarchal structures. Namely, people don’t make things anymore, for better or worse. That’s where we’re at, and this is the time of year that it becomes most obvious.
Because imagine a woman who’s been boxed in by society to never be too much of anything. To adhere to specific guidelines of personhood. Then she doesn’t have time, isn’t expected, or isn’t empowered to engage in an acceptable domestic craft. She doesn’t know how to make her own things. At a broader scale, she doesn’t know how to design her own environment. Then social media emerges to sell her an identity she can purchase for a discount at HomeGoods. She can replace realworld community with a Ralph Lauren Christmas.
This highly gendered angle ends up being the most visible symptom of a broader issue that emerges under the blanket of modern, late-stage capitalism and consumer culture. The idea of keeping up with the Jones is an old concept. But now the Jones are everyone and it’s easier than ever to just throw money at that process.
In a consumer-first culture, we lose the ability to curate what our lives look like. And you can see symptoms of that, right now, outside.
There are a couple of houses in my neighborhood that just have inflatable blowups on their lawn, but there’s no real rhyme or reason to it. Far be it from me to tell anyone what they can’t or can’t do with their own money, but I did the math on a particular neighbor’s house. Assuming everything was purchased at close to full price, they’ve dropped $1500 on Halloween decorations, just for it to look like a Home Depot threw up on the lawn.
Is that worth it?
And that’s not to say that everyone should suddenly develop an affinity for crafting. Rather, it’s about figuring out who you are as a person and knowing how to build your environment around that. It’s about thinking in the long term over the short.
My Halloween wreath is something I appliqued five years ago. The ghosts that hang in our tree are Styrofoam balls and tea towels. The rest of our front yard display is just Target skeletons in thrifted clothing. Importantly, these are all things that are years old that I just pull out every year. This year, I still made the addition of a little cat skeleton because I found just the right one for the scene. I didn’t rush out and get something that was “good enough” because I had to have it. I waited until the perfect one became available.
Also had to remake a book prop…again…but that’s just me figuring out how to make the damn thing more durable.
You don’t have to have the perfect Christmas tree that matches a specific aesthetic, right now. You’re allowed to grow into what you want that look to be. It’s about not being afraid of who you actually are instead of who you want to look like you are.