The ‘transformation’ or ‘makeover’ of people
and places has long been a standard feature of popular women’s magazines
and is now a dominant form of television. The television design programme offers an
uneasy interface between the private world of the domestic and the public world of
television, a tension apparent in the conventions that surround the encounter
between ‘ordinary’ people and television personalities in
interior decoration programmes such asHome Front andChanging
Rooms. The magic of television promises that the old fashioned, the dowdy, the
‘tasteless’ can be transformed through the expertise of
‘designers’ and experts. This article will address the
transformation of designers into television personalities and argue that the
‘experts’ on the television makeover show act as
‘tastemakers’. The article will argue that the growth of the
transformation programme on television is bound up with the privatization of
property and with the rising cost of housing and that knowledge of interior design
is explicitly understood in the language of these programmes as a capital
investment. Using Bourdieu, this article suggests that while claiming a
democratization of taste, such programmes serve to confirm the superior knowledge
and cultural capital of the designated expert. The subjects of the makeover are
required by the programme’s conventions to accept the dictates of the
‘tastemaker’ and, in that acceptance, to erase the traces of
their own ‘habitus’ in favour of a commodification of taste and style.
