The Modern Interior

4 The Fashionable Interior

Who doesn’t know the woman who goes to a shop and selects wall papers as

she would her gowns, because they are ‘new’ and ‘different’ and ‘pretty’?

Elsie de Wolfe^1

By the late nineteenth century the requirement to be ‘fashionable’, espe-

cially but not exclusively for women, had spread beyond the social elite

to embrace the new middle classes. Not only was it important to be

seen to be wearing fashionable clothes, it was equally important to live

in, and to be seen in, fashionable interiors, both inside and outside the

home. Indeed for consumers of the interior and its objects ‘fashionable-

ness’ became a key criterion underpinning many of their purchases and,

as interiors began to wear out more quickly stylistically than physically,

they contributed to the accelerated consumption of those years.

The idea that fashion was a defining component of modernity pre-

occupied several writers and theorists in the second half of the nineteenth

and the first decades of the twentieth centuries, from Charles Baudelaire

to George Simmel to Walter Benjamin. In 1863 Baudelaire aligned fashion

with his view of modernity, which he saw as being characterized by the

increased fragmentation of the experiences of everyday life, describing it

as the ‘ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent’.^2 His abstract definition of

fashion as a symptom of the modern condition facilitated its transference

from dress to a range of other goods and environments which enjoyed a

close relationship with the female body, including the interior. By the end

of the nineteenth century fashionable dress and interior decoration had

also acquired the status of modern ‘art’ forms which undoubtedly com-

pensated for the increasingly overt, and much derided, commercialism of

both practices.^3 The emphasis on ‘taste’ in the negotiation between artistic

practitioners and clients in both areas concealed the large amounts of

money that passed hands, as well as the fact that both class status and an

engagement with modernity could be bought in the marketplace.

The close relationship between fashionable dress and the modern

interior was manifested in numerous ways. Firstly, there was a strong 73