The new special edition from the World of Interiors, Top Shelf, turns its attention to sex and erotica in design, exploring the deep history of these motifs and themes in interiors objects from a range of historical eras and cultures. To celebrate the release, Public Knowledge invited Lucy Roeber of literary and art journal The Erotic Review to speak with World of Interiors Style Director Ruth Sleightholme about the ideas and research behind the publication.

Lucy Roeber: I was thrilled to discover that your prestigious publication The World of Interiors was producing a special edition called Top Shelf. My excitement was partly because I love design and find it sexy. And partly because as the editor of Erotic Review I’ve found a growing contemporary audience taking ideas around the erotic seriously. Are you finding that in the world of design?

Ruth Sleightholme: I think a lot of it is down to generational rhythms and associations. I remember that as a child our parents' generation would bring sex into their conversations and jokes - and 90s advertising campaigns and magazines did this too - in a way which myself and my peers found a bit cringey. When we started creating rooms as young adults, many of us wanted rooms that felt like ‘young’, more anarchic versions of our grandparents’ rooms (which could be broadly described as 1950s furniture and 1980s fabrics). I think enough time has elapsed for certain associations to die out and new ones to be formed. There is always a delicate dance to be had in anything erotic between something being exciting and something being cringey. It's a strange phenomenon for such a personal topic, but I think that it has an effect.


LR: Why did you decide to publish Top Shelf now?

RS: First of all, we had decided to mould our September issue around the theme of the body. Our desire to do this was perhaps triggered (although this was largely subconscious) by the rise of AI, and the subsequent urge to re-address and to be praiseful of our own physical humanness. The body is an incredibly broad subject within interiors and can be very visual (figurative murals, anthropomorphic furniture), or more thematic (we did a story on a modernist Finnish sanatorium, for example).

In this process, we realised that there would be a host of objects and stories of a more
sexual nature that we wanted to explore, but we felt that these should be somehow signposted or separated out, because an existing subscriber hasn’t necessarily signed up for the sexy stuff!! To put it simply, we required the consent of the reader. So the idea just grew beyond the bounds of the regular print edition, into this beautiful, stand-alone object: Top Shelf.


LR: My first taste of Top Shelf was Polly Brown’s extraordinarily sexy short film on Instagram, sent to me by about seven people. I’m a huge fan of Polly, one of her photographs was the first cover of Erotic Review in March 2024. Why did you choose her to lead the campaign?

RS: I think it is hard to put into words because Polly’s ideas don’t really express themselves in linguistic form. I suppose she works by being playful with the layered meanings that certain objects, colours, and materials have: instinctively exploring those semiotics to create tension, innuendo and symbolism, without being literal. It's an unusual way of working that I think is best left slightly unexamined!


LR: The cover of Top Shelf has some of the last remaining fragments from I Modi, an
infamous, banned 16th century book, and the opening page is from an anonymous 18th
century novel entitled ‘The Hot & Wanton Makings of Mankind or Top Shelf’. Why did you enter the subject through the illicit and historical?

RS: I think we at the magazine are so interested in antiques, historical interiors, decorative traditions, etc, that that is just the natural lens with which we see the world. So, even if the item is a phallic bowl or a 19th-century netsuke that opens to reveal a tiny couple having sex, we still chose them according to our eternal standards: their beauty or their unusual provenance, and so on.

I think with I Modi we loved its story, we loved the formal composition of all the cuttings: much like a display of china on the wall of a dining room or a topiary garden from overhead. Plus the very ineffective ‘censorship’ of the image was just such a good visual joke: it felt perfect for the cover. As for the frontispiece, I think we did want to outline what would be in the book, but wanted to add an extra layer of inventiveness to the way in which we did it, and those long 18th-century titles are just so recognisable and amusing: so we wrote a brief intro as if it were an eighteenth-century book title. It allowed us to be playful, simply!


LR: The first of your four essays, by Imma Ramos, is about the Secret Museum at the British Museum, somewhere “between archive and fantasy” Much of the design highlighted in the magazine also leans into fantasy – the opulence of Shona Heath and Jonas Bethge’s interiors for the film Poor Things (2023), for example. Was that something you were consciously highlighting or do you think it is inherent in designing for the erotic?

RS: I am not entirely sure I agree! Although it's an interesting debate to have. Top Shelf in a lot of ways functions a bit like a printed exhibition, with the addition of four little written reveries which spin off from the objects. I think, on balance, I was surprised about how most of the objects we unearthed were fairly straight-to-the-point in their depictions(!!). If anything, when they spin off into imaginative realms, it tends to err towards the surreal rather than the fantasy. In his essay on the erotic furniture of Catherine the Great, David Lipton notes the furniture’s proto-surreal qualities, and I think objects like the winged phallus (whose tail is a penis and which itself has a penis) are also surreal.


LR: Much of what we might think of as erotic design or art has imagined the naked body, particularly female. And you included a photograph by Helmut Newton and Allen Jones’s ‘Table’, but you also included a healthy amount of designs and art based on the phallus. Were you conscious of opening the conversation out of the female body?

RS: Absolutely, which is why the second essay in Top Shelf, written by Priya Khanchandani, is a response to an image of the ‘legs’ toast rack. We all wanted to know why so many 20th century mass-produced domestic objects depict women’s bodies, and why they seem to do so in the strange space between humour and titillation. I think she explores this really deftly. Both she and I were surprised when she discovered that so many of them had been designed by women. But gosh, the phalluses! There are just so many iterations of phalluses across so many times and places, so many treatments of that one image, that it transcends sex even. It honestly represents something a bit divine (as do the vulvas).


LR: The collections in the 72 images spread across the magazine fall into three types:
erotic interiors like Casa Devalle in Turin; art throughout the ages, particularly devotional art; and then specific furniture, like the Henryot & Cie reproduction of Catharine the Great’s side table. Were there more categories that you’d like to explore further?

RS: I think as an interiors magazine, we are primarily interested in those three things: interiors, art / history, and furniture! So that is very simply a World of Interiors lens on the topic, and I am really glad that it is evident. So I would say that I am wildly excited to explore a multitude of topics through the lens of The World of Interiors, rather than personally looking at the erotic again through other lenses. Top Shelf is our take on that subject. But I would love to see more of others’ unique take on the subject, and other ways in which people can explore connections between the erotic and the world of design or art.


LR: Will there be more Top Shelfs?

RS: I don’t think so - although we may need to talk about doing another print run as we are nearly sold out! I do hope that we will continue to make beautiful additional print objects for people who love interiors, along these surprising lines and in all sorts of physical formats, but I think each one will have a different theme and approach.

World of Interiors: Top Shelf is available now, for direct purchase and trade orders.