Buy Lines

I have a friend who is a stylist in New York; it’s part of her job to read magazines, from the trashiest of titles (In Touch Weekly) to more esoteric fare like Italian Vogue and Surface. When I’d visit, she’d often load me up with back issues, which I’d browse on the way home. Sitting on the subway one evening, I pulled a copy of Lucky, “the magazine about shopping,” from the pile. Like so many others, I had derided this publication as brazenly tacky. I figured I’d flip through it in less time than it takes to get through InStyle—ten minutes, max. But something pulled me in. I spent a good half-hour with that mag. I even did something that I knew, even as I was doing it, was superficial and shameful. But I couldn’t help myself. From the magazine’s signature page of stickers, I pulled off one that read “Maybe?” and attached it to a page of shoes.

I managed to sidestep a full-blown affair with Lucky; that one encounter sated my curiosity. But now its much-anticipated spinoff, Domino, “the shopping magazine for your home,” has arrived. I impulsively grabbed it off the newsstand the other day, maybe because this publication somehow seemed a little more, well, seemly than its sister dedicated purely to shopping (for yourself). So cut me some slack—we all make rationalizations about our indulgences. Domino got tossed in the back seat of the car, where a friend who is not a stylist scoffed at it. The next day, I saw that he had plastered the magazine with its own signature stickers—“gift,” “renovate,” “entertain,” “decorate,” “garden”—mocking me, needless to say, in the process.

Why all this discomfort over a magazine? Partly it’s because Domino and its siblings (Condé Nast also publishes Cargo, for guys) are actually “magalogs.” They are the unholy spawn of catalog and magazine, the perfect synthesis of advertising and editorial. Or is it merely advertorial that’s super-light on the ’torial? Regardless, magalogs are a publisher’s dream. After launching in 2001, Lucky quickly became one of the most successful publications of any kind. Revenues rose from $23.9 million in 2001 to $127 million in 2004, and naturally, dozens of imitators were born. Even more telling is the degree to which other publications, especially fashion titles, women’s magazines, city magazines, and even newspapers, have incorporated tantalizing displays of products with virtually no copy—a magalog trademark—into their pages.

But my discomfort goes beyond the status of magalogs in the publishing industry. While Lucky is devoted to personal goods—clothing, jewelry, toiletries—Domino literally hits home, a much broader target. Consequently, it tweaks all sorts of nerves that are tied to class and taste and materialism. It provokes insecurities and, yes, snobbery. Ultimately, it throws into relief the question of how and why we develop desires for certain things, and blurs the line between wanting something and having it.

Let’s address the “C” word first. People in the very highest income brackets don’t subscribe to House Beautiful or Metropolitan Home; these are “aspirational” magazines for the rest of us to drool and dream over. But Domino is not aspirational in the same way as these other home magazines. Nor does the magalog appeal in the traditional “how-to” sense, as in how to make cool stuff for cheap, which is a mission of the spunky Readymade, a hip magazine published in San Francisco. Domino, like Lucky, is shamelessly, unapologetically, how-to-buy; it’s stuffed with “actionable” suggestions, to use a term that marketers swiped from the legal profession. In the magalog, the how-to-buy and the aspiration merge, which is to say that in many ways, Domino is devoted to showing the masses how to ape the upper classes (to un-mothball a little Marxist jargon).

For example, the premiere issue shows us regular Janes how to buy wallpapers and fabrics that are usually sold exclusively “to the trade”—i.e. to interior designers, who pass on the goods, with a healthy markup, to the people wealthy enough to hire interior designers. “Scalamandré, Brunschwig & Fils, Fortuny… What’s a girl without a decorator to do?” So reads the caption for an illustration of a young woman who, like the little match girl, looks longingly through the window of a decorator’s boutique. Assuming for a moment that these kinds of magazines actually lead to better-informed shopping sprees, Domino shows us how to beat a system set up largely to maintain a certain elitist cachet, and how to obtain some Scalamandré of our own to show off at cocktail parties. It facilitates our step up from aspiration to a quintessentially American, or at least Gatsby-esque masquerade. (Just hide the credit card bill from your husband.)

Whatever other problems we might have with the extremely rich, there’s nothing wrong with the fact that they are different from you and me, except for how resolutely we want to deny it. If Brunschwig & Fils is destined to become available to the masses, maybe by launching a lower-priced line at Sears, then dollars to doughnuts you can bet that the rich will have long since abandoned it for other exclusive goods, which no doubt will be featured in upcoming issues of Domino. In this sense, the magalog falls within that branch of consumer capitalism that manifests itself as a game of hide-and-seek between the rich and those who wish to be.

Many of the images in Domino are partially obscured with arrows and notes (“stash napkins and silverware here”) rendered in computer-generated script. It comes across as a blatant attempt to create “personality,” even though Domino is not about personality—it’s about choice.

A case in point is the “Accessorize My Kitchen” feature, with its picture of a kitchen and a computer-generated note, “has anyone seen my personality?” Presto—the eye is directed downward by an arrow—three choices are offered: “retro cheer,” “French flea market,” and “California rustic.” (This raises a question that has been popping up ever since strawberry kiwi shampoo was invented. Why do we choose California rustic—shunning California modern—even if we live in Illinois?)

It’s the job of Domino’s stylists to “source” objects and arrange them into themed displays, thereby showing us ways to bring “personality” to our homes, or to make them look less humble than they really are. They put together sleek plastic goods and a sparing use of chartreuse for “retro cheer,” and mix up ceramic, bamboo, wood, and stainless steel for “California rustic.” In magalogs like Domino, stylists are often called “editors” or “directors” (a concession to traditional magazine titles), but the fact is, stylists are shoppers, albeit professional ones. This is why they “source,” and then we, following their inspiration, shop.

Stylists, then, do fulfill a real need, other than dressing movie stars for the Oscars and making guest appearances on cable. Certainly you may choose to live your own life, but if you’re interested in cultivating a particular lifestyle—and if you’re a girl without a bona fide decorator—then a stylist will be useful in the endeavor. With so much stuff out there, someone has to show us the things that we really want. The genius of Domino is that it shows these things as various types of visual lists, dispensing with everything extraneous except for basic key-word descriptions, and, of course, shopping information. Its pages are loaded with eye candy. In fact, it’s such a pure formula that the shopping itself—the acquisition of the thing—becomes in most cases irrelevant. Looking is enough. Domino’s main job, of course, is to sell itself, and it will probably do that exceedingly well.

Last year, in a book called The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, the psychologist Barry Schwartz put forth the insight that we are shopping more than ever, but taking les
s pleasure in it. Acquiring goods has become a chore because we are overwhelmed by choices, sometimes to the point of paralysis. Shopping has been perverted into a dysfunctional practice, what with shopaholics, shoppertainment, shopping out of anger or depression, and so forth. Domino, it could be argued, offers shopping as a vicarious experience, in the same way that travel magazines and pornography provide attractive, affordable, and easy alternatives to the real thing.

With actual shopping, displays of abundance are crucial. They’re eye-catching and they make individual items look desirable. (Newsstands finally caught on to this; often they display a dozen or so copies of one magazine, arranged in a grid.) Domino translates this basic merchandising technique to displays of abundant choices. In a charticle on bed linens, for example, the objects of desire are laid out in a grid on a white background, like so many butterfly specimens. The X axis shows five fully made beds; the Y axis breaks down their components: euro square, pillowcase options 1 and 2, flat and fitted sheets, blanket/quilt, and duvet cover. (Who knew it was so involved?)

The other way to show abundant choices is to create still-lifes. Confronting Domino’s seductive spread of twelve chartreuse vases, it’s simple instinct to scan, then pick out the one that appeals most to you. It doesn’t matter if you don’t actually like chartreuse, or vases. It doesn’t really matter if you buy one, either—you have been shopping, if only in your mind.

When it comes to being overwhelmed by choices of things we don’t want or need, Domino is part of the problem—but it also wants, as so many magazines do, to be part of the solution. So its premiere issue includes an article on how to shop at art fairs. A potent example of abundant choice, art fairs have proliferated in the last five years as glamorous and profitable spectacles. Wealthy folks jet to New York for the Armory Show, or Miami for Art Basel Miami Beach, or Basel itself for the original Basel Art Fair; over a long weekend, they might drop tens of thousands of dollars on pieces for their various homes.

True to magalog style, the Domino article includes a spread of ten artworks, branded as “smart decorative” by the author, that had been on view at the AAF Contemporary Art Fair (the upscaled incarnation of what was formerly the Affordable Art Fair). Which one will be yours? Of course, they may already be sold (there’s a caveat at the bottom of the page); even though these artworks are unique (or, in the case of prints, quite limited), they are displayed no differently than the linen hand towels on page fifty-eight.

In truth, there’s something appealingly up-front about this. Art is a product, after all; otherwise we wouldn’t have terms like “art market” and “art object.” It’s the emphasis on the shopping, rather than the art, that’s bothersome. On the other hand, it would be silly to expect Domino to teach us the art of falling in love with art, or the value in cultivating one’s own taste for linen hand towels, or any other type of object. These aspirations can’t be achieved by flipping through a magazine, but that won’t keep Domino’s stylists and readers from trying.