Penny Sparke. As Long as It’s Pink

As Long...” is a seminal text by design historian Penny Sparke. As a student of Reyner Banham and Charles Jenks, she takes the opposite view of the "Fathers of Pop" by focusing on women's culture. The subject of this major work raises the question of the place of women in the world of interiors, design and consumption. What seems self-evident today is not, however, self-evident. The history of design is often linked to architecture, for example, while the relationship to consumption (in which women play a role) is central and very little explored. Moreover, studies on the role of women in the world of design have been developing since the 1990s in the Anglo-Saxon world, but they have still not begun in France in any significant way. Why is this? Drawing on cultural and material studies, the book shows the place of women and gender stereotypes in an essentially male field. Published in 1995 (Pandora) under the title “As Long as It's Pink. A Sexual Politics of Tastes”, then republished in 2010 (The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design), the book was translated into French for the first time by Antoine Cazé and published in 2022 by T&P Publishing. This Problemata collection, supported by the École Nationale Supérieure d'Art et de Design de Nancy, presents five chapters from the French publication.