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Everyone Is Buying Mirrors Right Now
2020 was the year our appearances mattered the least. There were no parties to go to, no fancy dinners, no 500-person weddings. Yet, ironically, wall mirror interest skyrocketed. CB2 reported that mirrors were their most-searched home product, with over 4 million inquiries. 1stDibs saw a double digit increase in mirror searches overall, and a triple digit increase for one in particular: the “Ultrafragola” designed by Ettore Sottsass for Poltronova. (Celebrity owners include Lena Dunham and Bella Hadid.) Meanwhile, New York Design Center says they, too, have “seen an uptick in mirror sales” at their brick-and-mortar outpost, The Gallery at 200 Lex.
The question is, why? Are we masochists who like to gaze upon our unkempt, sweatpant-clad reflection? Are we so vain that we needed “selfie mirrors” to keep our Instagram content flowing? Turns out, we were buying mirrors not because we wanted to look at something—we bought them because we wanted to look away.
For so many of us, life was once spent in several other locations besides our residences: the office, the car, a neighborhood restaurant, a family or friend’s place. But the pandemic shut everything down, rendering us homebound. Suddenly, we were, quite literally and constantly, staring at our walls for months on end. And their blankness began to bug us.
So how to fill them? Art, sure—but art can be intimidating to pick out, and expensive. Mirrors, however, are a simple yet effective way to fill the void. “Mirrors are an accessible and foolproof way to fill in wall space without having to put too much creative energy behind it,” CB2’s product development lead, Andrea Erman, tells Vogue.
Accordingly, it’s not the plain-framed, rectangular wall mirrors that are trending. Rather, it’s more decorative ones that double as aesthetic accents. “They’re statement pieces,” Erman explains. Emily B. Collins, the director of New York Design Center’s The Gallery at 200 Lex, agrees: “Most people that shop The Gallery at 200 Lex aren’t necessarily looking for round mirror to check their reflection or do their makeup in, but to instead act as an alternative to art.”
It’s an interesting return to the mirror’s historical purpose—to reflect the sun, rather than human faces. “Many of the mirrors we sell, from carved 18th century rococo examples to Francois Lembo’s mid-century modern mirrors with rich enamel and hammer decoration, were designed primarily to reflect light,” says Collins. “So as consumers and designers alike have focused more on the appearance of home in the past year, we’ve seen an uptick in mirror sales that reflect the trend antique mirrors were originally designed for—to brighten a space.”
But how do you pick a mirror that meets your room’s needs? Justina Blakeney, lifestyle expert and founder of Jungalow, says that first, you need to figure out its intended functionality. Room feeling too boxy or square? “A floor-length mirror with an arched top can add architectural interest to your space, as it may feel like you’ve added an arched doorway to the room.”
For the cramped apartment dwellers, here’s what she recommends: “If you’re using a mirror to make a space brighter, hang it opposite a window. If you’re using a mirror to make a room feel larger, think about a large-scale mirror that echoes the shape of the room, hang it at eye-level and watch as your room seems to double in size.”
And then there’s the problem that plagues so many of us—the too-blank wall: “If your room is lacking in personality and needs a little somethin’ something’, an ornate or highly decorative mirror can add a lot of flair without making your space feel busy,” she says.
Below, shop a curated selection of our 15 rectangle mirror.
Designed Specifically for Women
The Daily Mirror stands alone as the only major national daily newspaper in Britain ever to be designed specifically for women. Launched in that format, in November 1903, it was a resounding failure, and dissuaded others from similar experiments. Even if its experiment as a ‘high class’ journal for ‘ladies’ only lasted a few weeks from its launch, it retained a distinctly ‘feminine’ identity for many years, and it continued to attract a much higher percentage of female readers than any other paper until well into the 1930s. It finally shook off this reputation with its tabloid relaunch in the mid-1930s, but high-profile female columnists, such as Dorothy Dix, Marje Proops, Felicity Green, Anne Robinson and Miriam Stoppard have remained a key part of the paper’s appeal to its audience right up to the present day.
Targeting a New Audience
The serious morning newspapers of the Victorian era, such as The Times, had tended to assume that their readership was male, and focused almost entirely on a public sphere dominated by men. The new popular daily papers launched at the turn of the twentieth century, on the other hand, actively sought to maximise their audience, and this meant reaching out in an obvious way to women as well as men. Female readers did not just boost the overall circulation statistics, they also had a special economic importance to the newspaper business. Women were – or were perceived to be – the major spenders of the domestic budget, and hence they became the prime targets for advertisers looking to sell their products. As newspapers came to rely ever more heavily on the revenue from branded advertising, attracting female readers became a financial necessity. In a society in which men and women were still heavily segregated in both work and leisure, editors and journalists were confident that appealing to women meant providing a different sort of content from that aimed at men – the sort of content, in fact, that had fuelled the success of the burgeoning women’s magazine sector throughout the nineteenth century. From the first issue of the Mail, in May 1896, the paper’s owner, newspaper magnate Alfred Harmsworth, asked Mary Howarth, previously a weekly magazine editor, to oversee regular women’s columns providing material on fashion, housewifery and motherhood. Comparisons between the sexes also became a staple of the feature pages, and women – at that time campaigning for the vote and other rights – became more visible in the news columns too. Much, though by no means all, of this content, was ultimately based on conservative gender stereotypes.
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