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