My Bedroom Mirror (published on Polyester Dollhouse)
Bedroom culture, forming the ego and why we are obsessed with our own reflection.
In the 1970s essay Girls and Subcultures, Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber highlighted the bedroom as a domestic site of cultural engagement for young people. ‘Bedroom Culture’ was a concept developed in reaction to the predominant absence of teenage girls from the analysis of subcultures at the time. The essay proposed that young girls were indeed participating in subcultural lives but in different domains to that of their male peers - their own bedrooms.
The bedroom has frequently been explored as a site of significance within the wider context of youth culture, with Siân Lincoln having noted that bedrooms are “often regarded by young people as one of the first spaces over which they are able to exert a level of control, ownership and regulation.” For teenage girls in particular, bedrooms have been identified as an intrinsic site for identity construction, providing a space for privacy, intimacy, and experimentation. Today, as the prospect of homeownership decreases in likelihood, and the commonality of house sharing increases, bedrooms offer a significant space beyond that of teenage experimentation. These days, bedrooms are offices, living rooms, and dining rooms. In turn, they span private, public, personal, and professional domains.
During my teenage years, the majority of surfaces in my bedroom were treated as mood boards, with pieces of furniture collaged and customised in order to reflect my evolving tastes. While the walls were tacked with pop stars, film posters, and Post-it notes scribbled with inspirational quotes, my mirror was plastered with editorial spreads torn from the pages of magazines, acting as aspirational blueprints for the woman I hoped to be. By age 13, I had listed the Seven Deadly Sins in permanent marker on my bedroom mirror, and in the years that were to follow, those handwritten words became entangled in the complexities of my evolving reflection.