Catalogue of woe

My mum – a natural trader - had the foresight to start collecting consumer catalogues nearly 40 years ago. She concentrated on those she believed to be “of their time”. She reasoned that their pages form a snapshot of our collective aspirations, and most people chuck them away, making them future rarities.

She’s been proved right time and again. Her stack of Habitat and Clothkits catalogues from the 60s and 70s are pored over. Copies sell themselves on eBay.

So when mum started adding the Boden catalogue to her collection I was unsettled. If images in a consumer catalogue are snapshots of collective aspirations, there are harsh implications for women within the pages of Johnny Boden’s matey quarterly.

Most of Boden’s images are faux family snapshots of vaguely nostalgic holidays, set in a version of Britain. There are wholesome camping trips, or perhaps a cavort through the deserted streets of anodyne city settings such as Notting Hill or Bath. It’s a fantasy of an effortless family life, and of course it's no more than is to be expected, because it’s doing the job of advertising. But a sinister narrative lurks behind the gurning female models acting out Boden’s “mother” role.

In the current edition, for example, the “mothers” play peek-a-boo with infants. They frolic with presents and balloons at children’s birthday parties; they balance cups and books on their heads, and they wink a lot. Sometimes they stick their tongues out. They don’t do anything difficult, or even particularly active. While the men’s clothing pages show "fathers" at work, the office clothes for women are worn by models chatting to men in bars. And there's not a child in sight on the men's pages.

The problem is not that the female models do these things. It’s that, in Johnny’s fantasy, they don't do anything else. This fantasy, and the one consumers are sold , is for women to spend their time playing, like infants. They are infantilised.

Johnny Boden is no fool. He knows his customers, and he knows they are women (he makes men’s clothes, but it’s women that buy them). He knows the reality of their lives is stress, and office work, and that they might fantasise about ditch their day jobs. His prices ensure his customers are middle-class and, in all likelihood, of the professional classes. His well-documented marketing tactics include the brilliant wheeze of inviting customers to send in photos of and details about themselves with the vague carrot that they might be able to appear as models in the catalogue (although judging by its pages there’s scant evidence that any ever do). Johnny’s staff forms these photos and details into a giant picture collage to illustrate a “type” who is likely to respond to the fantasy by spending money on “fun tank-tops" or “checky pullons”.

So do middle-aged, middle-class, educated women really harbour unfulfilled adolescent fantasies of appearing as catalogue models? And, more worryingly, do they fantasise about regressing to childhood?

Johnny seems to think so. And in 40 years time, our grown children may well believe that was the pinnacle of our aspiration.