You can’t choose your family, only your friends. In addition to their biological family, many people have one they’ve chosen for themselves: people you’re not related to, people who understand, help and love you. Who cheer you up when you’re down, run errands for you when you’re in bed with flu and who celebrate your birthday every year.
Commune
The idea of choosing your own family has become increasingly important in postmodern society. More so than in the past, we try to beat loneliness by creating our own trusted circle. Towards the end of the 1960s, hippies set up alternative communities that functioned as extended families and were based on shared possessions and solidarity. It didn’t always turn out well. Pressure to conform with the group and the lack of personal property frequently caused problems.
Football and belonging
Subcultures can also form close-knit communities that provide a sense of bonding, whether they’re a football club, drama society or group of friends. Dressing in a similar way often reinforces your sense of connection with each other. Matching outfits convey a message of belonging, togetherness and unity.
Remote families
Social media have made it possible to form families even at a distance: tightly knit groups of people who might never even meet in real life, but who nevertheless feel connected by a shared interest or emotional bond.
LGBTQI+ families
The most powerful refutation of the idea that you can choose your friends, but not your family, is offered by the ‘houses’ you find in the ballroom and drag scene: alternative families of choice that take in those who suffer exclusion. LGBTQI+ people give a new meaning there to the word ‘family’.
More
Passion – Love play
The appearance of sex toys tells us a lot about how people felt about lust and gratification at a particular time. About the taboos that might still attach to them. And about the future of sex and the ideals of designers.
Passion – The kiss
Your first kiss. You never forget it. No matter how sweet, sloppy or bad it was. After that, there’s no stopping you: on average you’ll spend 20,000 minutes of your life kissing.
Passion – Perfectible body
Not happy with your body? Then do something about it. That seems to be the credo of our age, with its obsession with perfect bodies. But is the body really so perfectible?
Passion – The body
The contents of Bouquet romantic novels might still leave something to the imagination, but not so their covers: this is the image of the ‘ideal man’. What does it say about our perceptions?
Passion – Romantic fiction
Seven Nights with the Sheikh, A Kiss in the Moonlight, An Heir for the King: the titles of romantic fiction in the world-famous Bouquet series have always appealed to the imagination. Guilty pleasures full of desire, temptation and happy endings are still extremely popular.
Falling in Love – Making it happen
Butterflies in your stomach, unable to eat a thing, constantly daydreaming and checking your phone every five minutes to see if you’ve received a new message: falling in love is magical.
Bonding – Parenthood
For centuries being a mum or dad was not a choice at all, simply how things were ‘supposed to be’. The way parenthood itself is viewed has also changed over the years.
Bonding – Marriage
Only three things are truly important in a marriage: you, your beloved and your love for each other. All the same, there are a lot more factors at play in the background.
Bonding – The Couple Look
See them whizzing across the city on their fast bikes: his a men’s model, hers a woman’s. Both wrapped in a puffer jacket and with matching trainers. The dreary ‘ANWB couple’ in trendy jackets.
Love, designed
We’ve all grown up with stories and clichés that have unconsciously influenced our image of love. Love, designed explores these stereotypes and shows how design guides the way we both seek and ‘consume’ love.
