Jason Toon here, all up in your Inbox with a new Shoddy Goods, the newsletter from Meh about the stuff people make, buy, and sell. Join me on a voyage into the most indispensable yet secretive room in the house… The year was 1949. The post-World War II housing boom was hitting full-throttle. The Formica Corporation was booming right along with it. Not just because there were so many new houses, but because those new houses really were new. Goodbye to the sparse pre-war kitchens, with their standalone sinks and chests of drawers, which had barely changed since horse-and-buggy days. Along with new electric appliances, the new kitchen featured vast expanses of cabinet and counter space - every inch of it covered with Formica. Easy to install, easy to clean, durable, and resplendent in a kaleidoscope of colors and patterns, Formica was midcentury futurism come to life in pressed paper and resin laminate. But that wasn't enough. What about the bathroom? That's another utilitarian room that hadn't changed in a while, where there was a similar dearth of storage and workspace. But the kitchen was the heart of the house while the bathroom was, well, a less salubrious body part. Convincing homebuilders and homeowners to spend big on Formicafying their bathrooms would be a tougher sell. So Formica decided to invent a new piece of furniture.
At last, somewhere else to sit in the bathroom. Cometh the hour, cometh the Vanitory "Ever since the bathroom moved indoors, folks have been aware of the importance of color and beauty in this utilitarian room," went the hopeful copy in Formica's 1949 brochure What's New in the Bathroom? "But beauty is as beauty does… no room is more used and abused than the American bathroom." Formica's answer: the Vanitory. Basically, a sink with a countertop around it, mirrors in front of it, storage underneath, and seats. The lucky Vanitory owner could sit in splendor and put on her face amidst acres of sturdy, stain-resistant Formica.
There's no such thing as "enough Formica". Formica bet big that the second half of the twentieth century would be the Vanitory Age. "The decision to 'shoot the works' on Vanitories was not arrived at in haste," the company assured its construction customers in the Spring 1949 edition of its house organ, This Formica World. For those of you who may have misplaced your copy of that issue, here's more:
It could, but the other rooms might get jealous. Nothing packs a one-two punch in advertising like the brand-new thing that everybody knows about but you. So Formica's '50s marketing walks a fine line between hey-wow novelty and where've-you-been smugness. "People want it. Insist on it," runs a piece in another issue of This Formica World. "The Vanitory is popular - with those who have one and those who don't… The Vanitory has come to be one of the finer things for the home that everyone can afford." And the thing is, it kind of worked. Home construction and remodeling trends move slowly, so it didn't happen overnight. But creaky prewar bathrooms steadily vanished from the scene, replaced by miniature pleasure palaces with built-in bathtubs and showers, a generous counter, and lots of cabinet space. But was that sink-counter-cabinet unit always a Vanitory? The versatility of the Vanitory was also its curse: any builder could build a cabinet and drawers and top it with a counter. While Formica trademarked the name, they couldn't trademark the concept. And it was hard to even enforce their ownership of the name: "vanitory bathroom", with a lowercase v, became a genericized description in real-estate listings.
Don't settle for cheap imitations. Formica had been fighting the genericization battle over its own name for decades, a fight that would continue until 1978 when the Federal Trade Commission dropped its attempt to allow the use of the term for all laminate surfaces. Fighting all the questionable uses of "vanitory" must have been a battle too far. I couldn't find any evidence that they ever sued anyone over it, and the company's official list of trademarks doesn't mention it. Let a thousand Vanitories bloom Like I said, the Vanitory was definitely versatile. The original late-'40s designs, with their Deco echoes, mutated into a multiplicity of looks over the years. They could be exotic and futuristic, as with this jaw-dropping "space tropical" specimen that I doubt ever got built in an actual home:
A necktie with a bathrobe! I thought I was the only one! Vanitories could be rugged and masculine. Saddle up to this dark, handsome model:
I'll take a double bourbon with a Listerine chaser. Or they could be frilly and feminine, like this little pink number:
I've always depended on the plumbing of strangers. As the atomic '50s mellowed into the lusher '60s, so did the Vanitory:
Plastique d'elegance And toward the end of that decade, it started getting a little freaky, growing its hair out and staying up all night listening to Sgt. Pepper:
Join the bath-in, man. The vanishing Vanitory Like anything that gets popular, the temptation to offer half-assed cheapo versions of the Vanitory soon set in. The end of the postwar baby and housing booms spurred it on. In the '70s, the Vanitory shrank in proportion to the diminishing American dream. Vanitory came to mean basically any bathroom sink with a tiny bit of counter space and some cabinet doors hiding the pipes. The big dreams of 1949 had ended up as the generic sink units of the '70s and '80s. And forget about seating - who's got room, or time, to lounge around the bathroom?
You call yourself a vanitory? How dare you?!? Once the Vanitory itself lost its distinctiveness, the word lost its reason to exist. It still popped up in real estate listings and bathroom fixture ads for a while, but as the generation that had been exposed to the original ad campaign moved on, the word dropped out of use. Google Books Ngram Viewer shows the trend, with a steep rise around 1950 and a steep drop after 1990.
The rise and fall of the Vanitory Era. At this point, certainly more people have vanitories in their homes than know the word. Search a big hardware store's site for "vanitory" and they'll assume you mean "vanity", which is what those sink-and-cabinet units are called now. Presumably the once-intentional resemblance to "lavatory" hasn't helped encourage its use in the industry.
Good twist—the vanitories are already inside your house! Hilariously, at my first house, I spent too much time and money removing all this stuff to put in a nice stand alone sink. Have you ever been involved in a bathroom or kitchen remodel? I’d love to hear how it went, in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.
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