Photo by Chris Dessaigne

Homes and decorating magazines are the latest victims of the credit crunch. Circulation figures for Living etc, 25 Beautiful Homes and my personal favourite, the musty-bookshelved, gilt-gessoed World of Interiors, are all heading unceremoniously down the CP Hart marble-and-bronze toilet.

This is no doubt due to the fact that a lot of people are sick of looking at rich people’s wetrooms, and are yearning for a more innocent, less rapaciously capitalistic time, when a house was a house, wallpaper was woodchip, and an Arco lamp was something a welder used to build Royal Navy warships.

There’s one title, though, that seems to have escaped the maelstrom. Does Elle Decoration editor Michelle Ogundehin know something the others don’t? Has she discovered the secret to maintaining reader loyalty at a time when half the British population wouldn’t care a jot if they never saw another Le Corbusier ponyskin recliner?

A clue may lie in her editorial welcome in the current (March 2009) issue. Close analysis suggests that Elle Deco’s continued popularity may be due to Michelle’s gift for sensible and practical leadership at a time when many of us feel that we have lost our way.

Consider her opening volley:

There are a number of things that feel really right to me at the moment:

Yellow patent leather

Marks & Spencer’s machine-washable cashmere

Classical music

Flat shoes

‘Michelle,’ you might reasonably ask, ‘what the bloody hell are you on about? Don’t you know there’s a recession on? Millions of people are struggling to get by without so much as a weekly organic veg box, and here’s you bibbling about machine-washable cashmere and shiny yellow leather. What are you like?’

But aha, Michelle is cleverer than you. Behold her masterful use of the rhetorical device of erotema to anticipate and defuse your objection:

A random list? Well, actually no. These things feel right because as a group they embody optimism and pleasure, indulgence and practicality, comfort and informality.

Do you see now? Yellow patent leather is the embodiment of optimism and practicality. We would never have survived the Blitz if it hadn’t been for the WI knitting yellow patent leather tea cosies in the depths of Aldwych tube station. And now we’re in the midst of an economic Blitz, we must again look to yellow patent leather to help us through the dark days and nights ahead.

These are the keys to what’s next on the home front.

Michelle skilfully employs the rhetorical device of metaphor to reinforce the notion that our current situation is similar to the Second World War. We must fight the recession on the home front, she is saying, on the beaches and the landing grounds, in the fields and streets and hills, armed with nothing more than a CD of the Enigma Variations, a pair of Crocs and a drawerful of machine-washable cashmere.  And we must never surrender.

I suspect, like me, you’re getting fed up with the unrelenting speculation about an impending global apocalypse.

See how Michelle uses the rhetorical device of non sequitur to recapture the attention of the reader, who may otherwise have drifted into a pointless reverie about ration books and powdered egg.  This is no time for nostalgia - it’s time to face reality. And if anyone knows about reality, it’s Michelle:

Yes, we’re in the midst of an economic crisis of unprecedented severity, but we’ve accepted where we are, and we just want to get on with it as best we can.

Just the kind of pragmatic attitude we should expect from a woman who knows that as long as we have yellow patent leather, we can weather any financial storm. For is not a sou’wester made of yellow patent leather, or something very like it? And is not an oilskin jacket made of the same material? Michelle Ogundehin is truly the Grace Darling of her generation, battling through a roiling sea of household debt to rescue us from the shipwreck of our own greed.

Once she’s plucked us from the water and wrapped us in the machine-washable cashmere blanket of informal optimism, Michelle takes a moment to remind us how we got into this predicament in the first place:

Uniformity is dead. Gimmicks are over and the real, the solid and things we can trust are in.

Chastened, we solemnly promise never to buy nebulous, uniform and untrustworthy gimmicks again. But can Michelle succeed where Alistair Darling, Gordon Brown and Mervyn King have failed, and lead us out of this financial Charybdis to safety?

Need you even ask?

In the coming months, colour will be bold and brave - it’s the fast track to the dose of confidence we all need.

Simple as that. Surround ourselves with brightly coloured things, and renewed prosperity will follow. Today a yellow patent leather shower curtain, tomorrow the wherewithal to re-hire the gardener, send the kids back to Marlborough and hop on the first flight to Necker Island. No unpleasant bank nationalisations, or four-day weeks, or executive pay freezes. Just bold, vibrant colour.

It’s so simple, it might just work.

There’s a new mood coming and it’s good… watch this space.

Oh I will, Michelle, I will.

Fiona Campbell-Howes blogs at: Quinquireme