The Modern Interior

(Wang) #1

1913 , orchestrating fashion shows for eager customers. A handful of cou-


turiers also established their own individual outlets across the Atlantic.


Madame Paquin, for example, opened a shop for furs in New York in 1913


(the source, very probably, of the coat worn by de Wolfe in the frontis -


piece to the House in Good Taste). At around the same time American


stores began to establish departments dedicated to interior decoration.


The journalist-turned-decorator Ruby Ross Wood directed the Wanamaker


store’s first ‘atelier’ Au Quatrième, which opened in 1913 , just a year after


the fashionable French store, Au Printemps, had established its Atelier


Primavera. (Other French stores, as we have seen, followed in the early


1920 s: Galeries Lafayettes with La Maîtrise, the Louvre department store


with its Studium Louvre, and Bon Marché with its Atelier Pomone).^30


World exhibitions provided yet another important shop window


for the public’s simultaneous encounters with fashionable dress and inter -


iors. Worth exhibited designs at the French universal exhibitions of


1855 , 1889 and 1900 , while, at the Paris 1900 exhibit, as we have seen, the


department stores Bon Marché, the Grands Magasins du Louvre and


Au Printemps created pavilions in which to exhibit a wide range of their


wares. They did so again at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts


Décoratifs et Industriels Modernesin Paris, where the emphasis was on


complete interior assemblages created by the leading decorators of the


day. Women’s mass circulation fashion magazines also provided an


important means of taste dissemination which embraced both dress and


the interior. When Condé Nast first launched Vo g u emagazine in the us


in 1909 , for example, he was, as we have also seen, deeply committed to


showing interior decoration alongside couture fashion. At the level of the


market at which he was directing his publication, the assumption was


that Vogue readers would be able to buy couture clothes and employ an


interior decorator. Architectural and decorative arts magazines of the


period, the Studioamong them, also included interiors within them but


their fashionable face was less in evidence and dress was rarely included.


The close alliance between dress and interiors that developed


through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was sustained, there-


fore, through their common cultural meanings, the shared commercial


strategies of their creators, and the commonality of the commercial sites


that framed them. Dress led the way for the most part, defining the


nature of the fashion system, but interior decoration followed swiftly


after it. Their relationship served to emphasize the psychological func-


tion of the interior and its close links with feminine subjectivity, identity 89

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