The Modern Interior

(Wang) #1

pages of her widely read advice book, The House in Good Taste, on the


first page of which she included an elegant portrait of herself accompa-


nied by her signature. She chose as the location for that photograph the


living room of her East 17 th Street, New York home, which she redecor -


ated herself in the late 1890 s and which she shared with her close compan-


ion, the literary agent Elisabeth Marbury. Just as Worth had been able to


dictate the course of fashionable dress in France in the second half of the


nineteenth century by adding his personal artistic ‘genius’ to an item of


clothing, so de Wolfe and her followers set out to persuade wealthy clients


that the association of their names with interiors had the potential to


make their occupants appear more fashionable. Like Worth, Paquin,


Poiret and others, de Wolfe understood the importance of dress and the


interior to modern women’s search for self-identity in a world in which


flux was the only constant. She was particularly adept at creating private 83


The frontispiece to
Elsie de Wolfe’s The
House in Good Taste,
published in 1913.

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