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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.
The Daily Mail’s success in reaching out to this relatively untapped female market
encouraged Harmsworth to think that there was room for a whole newspaper dedicated to
women. Accordingly, he launched the Daily Mirror in November 1903 with an all-female staff
under the editorship of Mary Howarth. The Mirror’s first issue declared that the paper
would not be ‘a mere bulletin of fashion, but a reflection of women’s interests, women’s
thought, women’s work’, covering ‘the daily news of the world’ and ‘literature and art
’ as well as the ‘sane and healthy occupations of domestic life’.1 Gendering sections
within a newspaper was one thing: gendering the whole paper was another. The mainstream
market was not yet ready for a women’s daily newspaper, at least not in this form. The
Mirror struggled to find a consistent tone and identity, and seemed caught between being a
magazine and a newspaper. As its circulation plummeted, the
oval mirror was rescued only
when Harmsworth removed the female staff, handed over the editorship to the experienced
journalist Hamilton Fyfe, and turned it into an illustrated paper – as which it was a
major success, becoming the first daily to rival the readership levels of the Mail. The
illustrated Mirror was keen to display the female body: the front page of the first
relaunched issue was dominated by a sketch of the Parisian actress Madeleine Carlier, who,
tantalisingly, had just won a court case after breaching her contract by refusing to wear
an ‘immodest dress’.2 In 1908, the paper claimed that 15,000 women had submitted pictures
for its competition to find ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’; each received a
certificate of merit.3
The Mirror experiment encapsulated the different aspects of Harmsworth’s attitudes to
women. His faith in the potential of the women’s market led him to take extraordinary
risks: he lost around ￡100,000 supporting the failing Mirror in its early months. At a
time when women had barely gained a foothold in the world of journalism, he demonstrated
his willingness to place a great deal of responsibility onto an inexperienced female
editorial team, while simply by launching a ‘women’s newspaper’ he continued to
challenge assumptions about gender and popular publishing. Nor did the failure of the
Mirror seem to alter his perceptions about the female audience. ‘While we learnt there was
no room in London for a women’s daily paper,’ recalled Kennedy Jones, Harmsworth’s
right-hand-man, ‘we also discovered there was room in a daily paper for more letter press
that directly appealed to women.’4 Tom Clarke, another experienced colleague, noted that
the setback to the Mirror did not undermine Harmsworth’s ‘faith that the future for
popular newspapers and magazines depended on a big woman readership’.5
Gender Stereotypes
On the other hand, Harmsworth shared many of the conventional gender prejudices and
stereotypes of his time. He continued to view women as being largely defined by their roles
as wives and mothers, and the ‘women’s material’ for his papers was produced on these
terms. When he told staff to find ‘feminine matter’, he assumed that his meaning was
self-evident: he wanted domestic articles, fashion tips, and recipes. His forward-thinking
with regard to the female market was tempered by what the new Mirror editor Hamilton Fyfe
described as ‘an old-fashioned doubt’ as to whether women were ‘really the equals of men
’.6 Until the First World War, Harmsworth was sceptical about the need for female
suffrage. ‘Sorry to see the outburst of Suffragette pictures again’ he complained to
Alexander Kenealy, the editor of the Mirror, in 1912. ‘I thought you had finished with
them. Except in an extreme case, print no more of them.’7 It was only when women
demonstrated their ability to serve the nation during the war that he changed his mind and
became a proponent of women’s suffrage. Women were also thought to be particularly
interested in gossip and celebrity news, and Harmsworth was convinced that most were
fundamentally aspirational: ‘Nine women out of ten would rather read about an evening
dress costing a great deal of money – the sort of dress they will never in their lives
have a chance of wearing – than about a simple frock such as they could afford’.8 Editors
and journalists firmly believed that women were particularly keen on the vicarious
enjoyment that could be obtained by reading about wealthy lifestyles and luxurious goods,
and the steady rise of celebrity culture across the century was partly driven by the desire
to cater for the female audience.
These traditional gender stereotypes were even more evident under the proprietorship of
Alfred Harmsworth’s brother Harold, Lord Rothermere, between 1914 and 1936. Although the
Mirror enthusiastically accepted the enfranchisement of (most) women over 30 in 1918, ten
years later Rothermere became preoccupied that the proposed equalisation of the franchise
at age 21 would lead to lots of young women voting for the Labour Party, considerably
weakening the forces of conservatism. ‘Stop The Flapper Votes Folly - This is Not The Time
For Rash Constitutional Innovations’ declared the paper in April 1927, and, like
Rothermere’s other paper, the Mail, resisted the proposal until it sailed through the
House of Commons the following year.9 Rothermere also became sympathetic to the
hyper-masculine fascist dictators, Mussolini and Hitler, and in 1934 swung the
arched mirror (and the
Mail) behind Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. For all the press attention on the
achievements and freedoms of the ‘modern young women’ of the 1920s and 1930s, underlying
attitudes to gender remained resilient.
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.
The Daily Mail’s success in reaching out to this relatively untapped female market
encouraged Harmsworth to think that there was room for a whole newspaper dedicated to
women. Accordingly, he launched the Daily Mirror in November 1903 with an all-female staff
under the editorship of Mary Howarth. The Mirror’s first issue declared that the paper
would not be ‘a mere bulletin of fashion, but a reflection of women’s interests, women’s
thought, women’s work’, covering ‘the daily news of the world’ and ‘literature and art
’ as well as the ‘sane and healthy occupations of domestic life’.1 Gendering sections
within a newspaper was one thing: gendering the whole paper was another. The mainstream
market was not yet ready for a women’s daily newspaper, at least not in this form. The
Mirror struggled to find a consistent tone and identity, and seemed caught between being a
magazine and a newspaper. As its circulation plummeted, the
oval mirror was rescued only
when Harmsworth removed the female staff, handed over the editorship to the experienced
journalist Hamilton Fyfe, and turned it into an illustrated paper – as which it was a
major success, becoming the first daily to rival the readership levels of the Mail. The
illustrated Mirror was keen to display the female body: the front page of the first
relaunched issue was dominated by a sketch of the Parisian actress Madeleine Carlier, who,
tantalisingly, had just won a court case after breaching her contract by refusing to wear
an ‘immodest dress’.2 In 1908, the paper claimed that 15,000 women had submitted pictures
for its competition to find ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’; each received a
certificate of merit.3
The Mirror experiment encapsulated the different aspects of Harmsworth’s attitudes to
women. His faith in the potential of the women’s market led him to take extraordinary
risks: he lost around ￡100,000 supporting the failing Mirror in its early months. At a
time when women had barely gained a foothold in the world of journalism, he demonstrated
his willingness to place a great deal of responsibility onto an inexperienced female
editorial team, while simply by launching a ‘women’s newspaper’ he continued to
challenge assumptions about gender and popular publishing. Nor did the failure of the
Mirror seem to alter his perceptions about the female audience. ‘While we learnt there was
no room in London for a women’s daily paper,’ recalled Kennedy Jones, Harmsworth’s
right-hand-man, ‘we also discovered there was room in a daily paper for more letter press
that directly appealed to women.’4 Tom Clarke, another experienced colleague, noted that
the setback to the Mirror did not undermine Harmsworth’s ‘faith that the future for
popular newspapers and magazines depended on a big woman readership’.5
Gender Stereotypes
On the other hand, Harmsworth shared many of the conventional gender prejudices and
stereotypes of his time. He continued to view women as being largely defined by their roles
as wives and mothers, and the ‘women’s material’ for his papers was produced on these
terms. When he told staff to find ‘feminine matter’, he assumed that his meaning was
self-evident: he wanted domestic articles, fashion tips, and recipes. His forward-thinking
with regard to the female market was tempered by what the new Mirror editor Hamilton Fyfe
described as ‘an old-fashioned doubt’ as to whether women were ‘really the equals of men
’.6 Until the First World War, Harmsworth was sceptical about the need for female
suffrage. ‘Sorry to see the outburst of Suffragette pictures again’ he complained to
Alexander Kenealy, the editor of the Mirror, in 1912. ‘I thought you had finished with
them. Except in an extreme case, print no more of them.’7 It was only when women
demonstrated their ability to serve the nation during the war that he changed his mind and
became a proponent of women’s suffrage. Women were also thought to be particularly
interested in gossip and celebrity news, and Harmsworth was convinced that most were
fundamentally aspirational: ‘Nine women out of ten would rather read about an evening
dress costing a great deal of money – the sort of dress they will never in their lives
have a chance of wearing – than about a simple frock such as they could afford’.8 Editors
and journalists firmly believed that women were particularly keen on the vicarious
enjoyment that could be obtained by reading about wealthy lifestyles and luxurious goods,
and the steady rise of celebrity culture across the century was partly driven by the desire
to cater for the female audience.
These traditional gender stereotypes were even more evident under the proprietorship of
Alfred Harmsworth’s brother Harold, Lord Rothermere, between 1914 and 1936. Although the
Mirror enthusiastically accepted the enfranchisement of (most) women over 30 in 1918, ten
years later Rothermere became preoccupied that the proposed equalisation of the franchise
at age 21 would lead to lots of young women voting for the Labour Party, considerably
weakening the forces of conservatism. ‘Stop The Flapper Votes Folly - This is Not The Time
For Rash Constitutional Innovations’ declared the paper in April 1927, and, like
Rothermere’s other paper, the Mail, resisted the proposal until it sailed through the
House of Commons the following year.9 Rothermere also became sympathetic to the
hyper-masculine fascist dictators, Mussolini and Hitler, and in 1934 swung the
arched mirror (and the
Mail) behind Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. For all the press attention on the
achievements and freedoms of the ‘modern young women’ of the 1920s and 1930s, underlying
attitudes to gender remained resilient.