The wave of a modern magic wand: genealogies of domestic décor processes in the magazine Nuevo Estilo (1977-1986)

Abstract

Regarding recent decades, certain milestones have taken centre stage in historiographic narratives of Spanish social and cultural history: the political transition to democracy, countercultural and citizen movements and socioeconomic globalization. All of them have been profusely analyzed and refracted through their crystallizations in the public sphere, overshadowing not just the deep, albeit uneven, changes that ha ve occurred in the private sphere, but also the heuristic consistency of domestic culture(s). An analysis of the evolution of domestic décor practices and discourses from the late seventies onwards, has proven to be an unexpected, yet extremely sensitive i ndicator of social and cultural changes in late modern urban dwelling imaginaries. We will focus on a first period (1977-1986) through an incursion into the archive of the home décor magazine Nuevo Estilo. Its written and visual narrativization of home making processes (McElroy, 2006) should help us decipher the emergence of the ambivalences presented by the growing metropolis, by new ecologies of objects, and by modern symbolic economies of furnishing (Potts, 2006) and housing.