The Modern Interior

(Wang) #1

tions to that programme of reform in the domestic interior.^23 In 1897


novelist Edith Wharton and architect and decorator Ogden Codman, Jr


shifted the emphasis away from what had by then degenerated from an


initial commitment to taste reform into a promotion of the house as a


site for fashionable statements, towards a plea for respect for the architec-


tural context and, above all, for a return to classicism.^24


Many more household advice books appeared in the early twenti-


eth century, Elsie de Wolfe’s The House in Good Taste( 1913 ) being among


the most popular.^25 The years after 1914 saw the emergence of a vast quan-


tity of published material focusing on advice for amateur ‘craft’ in the


home. They included articles in popular woman’s magazines, manuals


for male artisans (carpenters and house-painters among them), domestic


economy and management books containing chapters on home decor -


ation, from both practical and taste perspectives, and more specialized,


‘upmarket’ books about interior decorating styles and strategies. Each


one addressed a particular sector of society, defined usually (although


not always overtly) by class and gender. A sense of the existence of the


modern world and of the need to embrace it in one’s private interior


became increasingly clear in those years and was addressed from a wide


range of perspectives. Numerous possible models of modernity were


represented and suggestions made about ways in which readers could


negotiate them, either through an engagement with ‘hand-making’, or


through the application of taste in the consumption of goods for the


interior.


As well as sharing styles and cultural meanings, fashionable dress


and interiors also had a number of commercial strategies in common


and they shared many of the same settings in that context. As has already


been mentioned, the theatre provided an important mediating role for


both of them. Most nineteenth- and early twentieth-century couturiers


designed clothing for the stage. Worth, for instance, created a dress for


Eugenie Dich who played Marguerite in a production of Alexandre


Dumas, fils’ La Dame aux Camélias. He also created costumes for the


actress Sarah Bernhardt in 1867 as well as for the popular French play-


wright, Victorien Sardou, who was a close friend of Elsie de Wolfe.^26


Several couturiers dressed actresses both on and off stage. That early


use of ‘stars’ to endorse products and brands had, by the early years


of the twentieth century, become common practice. Jeanne Paquin also


designed dresses for actresses and Poiret often dressed actresses at no


cost.^27 As has been noted already, in the days before the live catwalk 87

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