"My parents were punks"

It's the new counter-culture.

Can Good Feminists Bake Cupcakes?

For Nikki Shail, the aesthetic of the 1950s housewife has always been attractive. "My mother was not remotely like that, so for me it's a glamorous, romantic thing," she says. "I love the way it's very feminine and I find a strength in that femininity." The events marketing manager from Kingston, Surrey, devotes her spare time to dressing up as her alter ego, Cherry Bakewell, a 50s goddess who whisks up batches of fairy cakes for the good of humanity.
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Anything which is very personal and behind closed doors and pleasurable for women is subversive these days," she says wryly. When her book, The Gentle Art of Domesticity, was published last year, she was horrified to be dubbed a purveyor of "pinny porn", as if she was committing some kind of sacrilege by knitting her own tea cosies.

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it is this frisson of the taboo that appeals to a new generation of young women, who seem to love the novelty of baking and dressing up in aprons. Jazz D Holly, 24, an aspiring playwright from east London, is the president of the Shoreditch Sisters, the youngest branch of the Women's Institute, which has 20 members who meet regularly to swap recipes and knitting patterns. For her, domesticity is about rebellion: "I think it is a reaction to 1990s ladette culture and the sense of androgyny around that. I don't like the idea that we are exactly the same as men. I think it is damaging to women's self-respect."
...For my generation, girls in their 20s, all my friends, it's a cultural shift, almost a movement: many people are fascinated by retro ideas. I have always been fascinated by the postwar mentality." Part of this feeds into the thrift movement. "It's coming back to something with a bit more value when everything today is so fast, and technology is so advanced."
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In Holly's case it is also a personal stance. "My parents were punks," - her father was Joe Strummer of the Clash -"so I had a chaotic childhood. You try to be subversive by not doing what your parents did. It was not rebellious for me to go out drinking and taking drugs because that was what my parents did. I've always been fascinated by knowing how to knit but I had to learn it from my great-grandmother because my mother did not do anything like that and my grandmother was part of the whole 1960s women's lib thing."