[Review] David Bell & Joanne Hollows (Eds) (2006) Historicizing lifestyle: mediating taste, consumption and identity from the 1900s to 1970s

Bell and Hollows begin their collection with an overview of the study of lifestlye. Invaluable for undergraduates, it lays out the implications of the dominant readings of lifestyle as modern, post-modern or post-fordist, and of the cultural capital of Bourdieu's 'new middle class'. The rest of the book is divided into three overlapping sections, largely directed at the more specialist researcher. Most of the book's content pivots aroudn the emergence of the 'new middle classes' and of individual 'taste' within the formation of collective middle-class lifestyle identities.