and modernity. It also highlighted the breakdown of the boundaries
between the private and the public spheres. That both dress and the inter -
ior could play such a key role in identity formation and in the trans-
mission of the experience of modernity depended, to a significant extent,
upon their shared potential for personal, and collective, expression. That
level of expression was facilitated by the commitment, on the part of
both couturiers and decorators, to the expressive function of their prod-
ucts, which was made possible, to a large degree, by their understanding
of the role of decoration both of the body and of the spaces that con-
tained them.90