Welcome to the World of ‘Girl Pornography’

We are talking to a girl pornographer. Not a girl who makes pornography, but a girl who makes girl pornography. What’s the difference between boy pornography and girl pornography?

Taste. Boy pornography is about bad taste, and girl pornography is about good taste.

To be more specific, boys fantasize what boys fantasize about, and we’re not about to go there. Girls fantasize about nice clothes and beautiful homes. They also fantasize about what boys fantasize about, but that’s not what this column is about. It’s about fabulous damasks and window dressings and sleigh beds, the sort of aesthetic orgy you might find in shelter magazines like Conde Nast’s House & Garden.

“They’re like girl pornography to me,” says Dominique Browning, House & Garden’s editor in chief since the magazine’s resurrection nearly three years ago. “I read them all, every month, for 10 years [before editing one]. My escape was to fantasize my way into different houses.”

But only fabulous houses. Because our pornographess is a discriminating sort. She is stylishly dressed in a Chanel sweater set, and for her swing through L.A., she has selected the loveliest of staging areas, the Hotel Bel-Air, where we are chatting over muffins, fruit and a yolk-free omelet.

And we have news for you. If you’re a boomer, you need her help. No offense.

“We’re part of a generation of people who are making our first, second houses, who learned nothing about this when we were growing up,” Browning says. “For the most part, we stopped going to finishing schools that taught women how to fold a napkin properly and how to set the table. There was a real anti-materialistic period that we went through, and therefore none of us learned about fabrics, about slipcovers, about things that our parents’ generation in the middle and upper-middle class would have had in their world.

“So now we go to the store, and we’re shopping for teacups, and we’re confronted with a $200 price tag on a teacup. I don’t know about you, but I’m looking at this and going, ‘What? Why?’ Whoever taught us about the difference between porcelain and ceramic? We didn’t know. So a big part of what we do [at House & Garden] is teach, not in a pedantic or didactic way, but in a fun way. It’s interesting for me to find out that bone china actually has crushed-up bone in it.”

We’re still thinking about that $200 teacup. Yikes, if you don’t mind our saying so. Fortunately for us, at the populist millennium, it’s perfectly fine to serve your guests with a $10 teacup.

“When we started out, we very deliberately styled product and shopping pages using items from Baccarat and Crate & Barrel within the same story. We’d show you a pitcher that cost $25 and a pitcher that cost $250.

“This actually caused controversy in the design community. People said it wasn’t appropriate. Our response was: Wake up. This is how people are living. This is how your multimillionaire is shopping. And a lot of designers here understand that more readily.”

Here being Southern California, where we enjoy all sorts of advantages when it comes to making a tasty home. The first, says Browning, is the quality of light.

“The light here is clear and strong. It’s magical, so color looks completely different here. I was talking to Stephanie Odegaard, who did all the rugs for the Getty. She was saying that colors she would sell a lot of in New York--straw colors and sand colors--would turn completely yellow here because the sun would just pull everything out of them. So she had to completely rework her color palette.”

There are other pluses to making a gracious home here. The plethora of newer homes is built for the way we live now, Browning says. “A lot of the housing in the Northeast corridor is 50, 100 years old. So people lived on a different scale. A hundred years ago, a lot of people didn’t have second, certainly not third or fourth, bathrooms. Rooms have been changed into bathrooms over the years.”

So women must not have been spending hours in the bathroom at the turn of the century. Well, hooray for progress.

Irene Lacher’s Out & About column runs Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays on Page 2.