What's Your Color? Mood Conditioning the Postwar Domestic Interior

Abstract

The postwar era in the United States saw an explosion of mass-produced colors across a range of materials and technologies, as well as increased demand for professional color consultants both within and outside the home. While this period (sometimes called the color revolution) is typically viewed as catalyzing new possibilities for self-expression, this rhetoric of consumer choice in fact served to naturalize existing social hierarchies and normative modes of vision through standardized color. This article looks to the postwar American domestic interior to dissect a historical moment when color, divided into serialized paint swatches, became grid-like, quantitative, and severed from form. It examines several key shifts in the conceptualization of standardized color in the postwar period, particularly as they played into identity formation along racial, class-based, and gendered lines. Analyzing popular archival materials such as paint catalogues and women's magazines alongside the writings of the prominent color consultant Faber Birren (1900 – 1988), the article contends that it was in the midcentury domestic interior that the cultivation and commodification of personality became synonymous with technological and social advancement. Though color consultants emphasized that the home was a space for individual consumers to assert their uniqueness through color customization, this so-called freedom of choice in fact rendered gender, race, and class subject to further standardization and classification in the name of social and technological “progress.”