Just in case you think this is one of those diatribes against our consumer culture, written by a person whose possessions total two pairs of shoes, a grass mat and a yogurt-making machine, I need to come clean right now: I love shopping, and I love stuff. I have way more stuff than most New Yorkers I know. New stuff, other people's old stuff: It doesn't really matter. If I see beauty in it, if it thrills or amuses me to look at it, then I want to have it around me. If it's also made with care and attention to detail, showing some evidence of the human touch (or at least human thought), then I'm definitely a goner. Department store, flea market, specialty boutique, eBay -- when I have the money (and sometimes when I don't), I'm out there buying.

I was an early Lucky fan, partly because in the early days, it was a very different magazine: Looking at Lucky today, I find it nearly impossible to imagine that it once featured an article about collecting LP covers (the piece was written by Peter Zaremba of the much-beloved '70s and '80s band the Fleshtones, who is also a writer). Offbeat little fillips like that article -- or another one I recall, on collecting vintage Vera scarves -- disappeared early on, for obvious reasons: The only advertiser you could possibly attract with features like those is eBay. Before long, Lucky was stuffed largely with merchandise you could buy at your local mall. And while the magazine still manages to scrounge up some interesting items from smaller boutiques across the country (and I confess that I continue to buy it, though I'm increasingly exhausted by its boundless enthusiasm for stuff that's really pretty mediocre, like a recent pedestrian lineup of ho-hum kerchief tops), it no longer views its target audience as someone who just might be as interested in old LP covers as she is in 1,001 jeweled flip-flops.

Maybe that's the crux of the problem. Ask any shopping-magazine editor what her target audience is like, and you'll probably hear words like "savvy," "informed" and "intelligent." The editors of most magazines need to believe that their audience has at least a few active brain cells -- otherwise, how could they sleep at night? But their real M.O. is something else again. Shopping magazines know what you want before you even want it; they also think you're stupid.

Stupid in a well-informed sort of way, that is. For instance, Domino knows you're cool enough to know who Sienna Miller is. One feature in its premiere issue -- its headline is "Can This Outfit Be Turned Into a Room?" -- features a photograph of a nouvelle-boho babe draped in necklaces made of giant wooden beads, her hair a careless tousle of blond waves. The caption next to this trendoid cutie reads "Oversized necklaces, patterned dress and pink cords -- so Sienna Miller." Turn the page, and the key details of this outfit have been transmuted into a dicor scheme, a dining area replete with vanilla-colored Eames chairs, a '60s-style mod citrus print tablecloth, and burnt-orange and avocado dishes.

The spread is clever, in a way. Particularly if the notion of resuscitating '60s-era design has never occurred to you. But the voice of Domino -- the friendly but authoritative tone that permeates every picture and detail -- suggests that mining the past for ideas is a thrillingly novel concept, not the sort of thing you could ever come up with on your own. (Tell that to any of the millions of Americans out there who, by necessity or by choice, have furnished entire homes, beautifully, from thrift-shop discards or oddball junk picked up off the street.)

Domino knows we have choices -- too many choices. We're living in a golden age of design, in terms of having access to a great number of affordable, fabulous-looking things for our homes. But this is a comfortable golden age, not a revolution: It's not as if we've just had our senses jolted by a significant design movement, like art nouveau or art deco. Instead, we're simply surrounded by lots of well-designed stuff, plenty of it within the reach of just about anyone: We can buy a Philippe Starck tissue-box cover or Michael Graves bottle opener at Target. Even a bottle of liquid soap, like the dispenser Karim Rashid designed for Method hand wash, is a small, teardrop-shaped wonder of functional beauty.

With all this thoughtful, interesting design around us, how much hand-holding do we -- or should we -- really need when it comes to deciding what we like and don't like? Domino assumes we need a lot: Feeling a sudden hankering for a chartreuse vase? Domino gives you two whole pages of them, lined up in a row. You might scrutinize them for 30 seconds, and lust after one in particular for about three seconds, but before you know it, you've turned the page and you're onto the next obsession. That might be wallpaper, or a selection of hooks and bowls to help you arrange your jewelry on a dresser, or a panoply of cool TV sets. Domino manages to increase our anxieties about having too many options even as, supposedly, it attempts to ease them.

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