Too much ink has already been spilled on the arresting design aspects of Mad Men. It's fabulous and meticulous. But Sunday's episode, "My Old Kentucky Home," #303, finally gave a walloping amount of substance to all that style everyone's been going on about. In the mid-seventies, artist Marcel Broodthaers began work on an installation that he called Décor: The Conquest. He placed objects in two separate rooms; each depicted a different century. One room was suggestive of the 19th, all lined with stiff ornate wooden chairs, palm trees, and rusting cannons placed on tidy squares of grass. The other room, outfitted with aqua blue furniture, machine guns and streamlined bookshelves was presumably meant to reflect the tastes of the modern era. Let's go inside two other starkly different interiors: Roger Sterling's country club bash and Joan Holloway's Manhattan digs.

[Photo: Gabi Porter]
Ah, wistfulness for the traditions of the Old South! You may have been to Derby Party-an event held, quite ironically, in Brooklyn-but once this soiree is removed from its recent, "enlightened" and urbane context, a Derby party is meant to be one of the most vulgar displays of wealth east of Ole Miss. "My Old Kentucky Home," the theme of Roger's Derby party and the name of the ditty he crooned whilst in blackface, is the state's official song. (The verse referencing 'the darkies' was later amended-in the 1980's.)

And though the racial attitudes, in the days of flannel suits and TV dinners, had so far evolved enough to make Don Draper grimace at Roger's minstrel act, the Derby party is still extravagance without any taste, impossible to untangle from a racist cultural "heritage."

A typical Derby party, like Roger's, features a towering circus tent filled with gaudy rose bouquets, men in ye olde style floppy bow ties, their dates in garish floral dresses, both pretending as though they were members of extinct breed of Southern gentility. At least in part, it's the shameless "fancy people" décor alone that makes a farmhand like Don uneasy.

Toss away the mint julep and let's go sip martinis in Joan's cozy mid-century apartment. Joan lives in a world about five rungs down the class ladder from Roger-but she still manages to stay chic and thoroughly modern. Her apartment has the Draper touch-Dorothy Draper, Manhattan's sometime-top interior designer until near the time of her death in 1969. The color scheme and décor here is lifted directly from a Dot Draper tear sheet.

Dorothy used vibrant, "splashy" colors in never-before-seen combinations, such as aubergine and pink with a "splash" of chartreuse and a touch of turquoise blue, or, one of her favorite combinations – "dull" white and "shiny" black. Her signature "cabbage rose" chintz, paired with bold stripes; her elaborate and ornate plaster designs and moldings – over doors, on walls and ceilings... all contributed to dramatic design often referred to as "the Draper touch".

Additionally, Joan's insistence on proper hostess etiquette comes from Dot herself. In 1941, Draper's book, Entertaining Is Fun! How to Be a Popular Hostess, was a huge best seller. Together, Dot and Joan have a loose and playful sense of decor. Clash the colors, hang an antique mirror and serve the the booze in dingbat-patterned glasses! Be exuberant but never gaudy!

Based on the dataload provided by their two interiors, Roger is a lost cause for the future. And questions about Joan's ability to adapt to what we modern viewers know is the coming cultural shift remain unanswered, but we'll keep checking her couch cushions for clues.

Natasha Vargas-Cooper has been writing The Footnotes of Mad Men since the mid-late-60s.