Abstract

The publishing and display of celebrity homes and their lifestyles have been objects of fascination for many readers and viewers alike since the late nineteenth century. Often suggesting a narrative rather than a documentary approach, these displays tend to represent a dual depiction of self-expression as a form of material autobiography and an ideal stage set to perform private lives commensurate with their public persona. By featuring her interiors primarily created in collaboration with the legendary interior decorators Sister Parish and Albert Hadley through the pages of Architectural Digest, House & Garden, Vogue, and other magazines as backgrounds to her hectic public life, the legendary philanthropist, socialite, and author Brooke Astor used this media tradition to reflect her identity, taste, and biography but also her public activities as director of the Vincent Astor Foundation, a charity built on her late husband’s immense fortune with the prospect of alleviating human misery in New York City. As the foundation’s director, she centered its activities around causes close to her heart and the city’s wellbeing on cultural, social, educational, economic, and environmental grounds, rendering her interiors, private self, and public self as deeply interlinked entities.
Following a social and gender performativity, biography and literary criticism, and design and cultural history informed framework, this research argues that her interiors were a form of public relation that importantly linked her personal interests and life story to her public activities as a philanthropist, and represented spaces for the creation, control, and staging of her public persona and narratives as material autobiographies. By focusing on the case study of this singular woman commissioner and celebrity, this thesis grapples with issues of agency, domesticity, performativity, biography, gender, and authorship within interior design and their complex interplays in celebrities’ homes.