DESIGN TOME | The New Bohemians book review | Justina Blakeney | Abrams Books.

The New Bohemians, 2015

I wanted to like The New Bohemians a lot more than I did.

Look, Justina Blakeney is great. Her aesthetic is great. She’s a global boho jungle maximalist. Her blog, The Jungalow, is great. Her home is great. She’s fairly body positive, and self-identifies as multi-racial, and so her politics (rarely expressed, but still fairly apparent) seem pretty good as well.

But The New Bohemians was still a disappointment.

It’s filled with lots of pretty pictures, sure, but most of the homes featured in the book (homes curated and decorated by other creative types) don’t quite live up to the awesomeness of Blakeney’s own.

Beyond that, the text is laced with new-agey, vaguely offensive weirdness. Sometimes the “global” aesthetic of the white people featured feels awkward enough, but the text also seems to appropriate indigenous cultural ideas, styles, and language.

I’m not sure it’s wise or cool of Blakeney to be urging white people to talk about their tribes.

I don’t mean to criticize her, personally, for doing this herself. According to a Q&A she gave to Raising Mothers, Blakeney has said,

“I identify as belonging to the human race. Ethnically, I identify as being multi-racial. I am black, Native American, and of Eastern European Jewish descent. The African side is from my dad’s side of the family. Both of my grandparents on his side of the family were part African American and part Native American and there’s also some French and Irish blood in there.

My mother’s family is of Eastern European Jewish descent. I was raised Jewish. My dad converted to Judaism when he and my mom got married.”

So I’m not here to say that she can’t or shouldn’t access whatever aspects of those cultures that she wants to. I’m just not comfortable with her legitimizing the very-fucked up idea that white people have any right to do so. (I mean, what I think of as Coachella-culture is out of control, for real.)

Cultures aren’t costumes, but white people keep refusing to get the memo.

When a person of colour legitimizes appropriation like this, by asking the white people in the book to identify their “spirit animals” and whatnot, it’s just not helpful.

Beyond this political critique, however, the book just wasn’t as inspiring as I expected it to be.

There were only two projects within that I really felt like trying (a cloth-faced clock and a patchwork sofa cover).

I know this sounds harsh, but if I’m going to spend more than $20 on a coffee table book, I think I need more from it than a pretty cover. I want to be able to dip in again and again and feel inspired, and The New Bohemians didn’t deliver.

Now, the saving grace is this: Blakeney herself is great (as I say).

The New Bohemians Handbook, 2017

Her web presence updates fairly frequently, so there’s plenty to enjoy on an ongoing basis. If you think of this book as a companion to everything else Blakeney offers online, and not as a stand-alone project, it’s a lot more appealing.

The New Bohemians by Justina Blakeney was published on April 14, 2015. 

ETA 2018: Sadly, I recently flipped through the companion text, The New Bohemians Handbook: Come Home to Good Vibes (2017), and found it useless and way more disappointing than its predecessor. It felt like a cash-grab to capitalize on the original book, but it didn’t add anything, and the pictures were small and much less appealing.]