The Modern Interior

obligatory’, she also pointed out that Henri de Noussane had echoed the same words in Le
Gout dans l’Ameublement twenty years later, proclaiming that ‘the salon of the bourgeois
home and apartment is furnished preferably in a modern style. Understand what we mean
by modern: here it signifies a mélange of styles’.
19 Ibid., p. 51.
20 Troy, Couture Culture. Troy explained that, ‘by the late nineteenth century clothing was
losing its ability to provide a readily available guide to rank or social standing’.
21 Tiersten, Marianne in the Market: Envisioning Consumer Society in Fin-de-Siècle France, p. 150.
22 Artistic Houses illustrated a wide range of very wealthy homes in the Aesthetic Movement
style. For more details of American home decorating advice books published in these years
see K. Halttunen, ‘From Parlor to Living Room: Domestic Space, Interior Decoration and
the Culture of Personaloity’ in S. J. Bronner, ed., Consuming Visions: Accummulation and
Display in America, 1880–1920 (New York and London, 1989).
23 Much of the material in the numerous advice books was first published in magazines. The
interior featured in fashion and etiquette-oriented periodicals, in domestic magazines, as
well as in more specialist furniture and interior decoration publications. For more details
about American advice publications see C. E. Clark, Jr, The American Family Home (Chapel
Hill, nc, and London, 1986) and J. Scanlon, Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies Home Journal,
Gender and the Promise of Consumer Culture (New York and London, 1995). Godey’s Lady’s
Book was the first popular women’s magazine to be edited by a woman, Sarah Josepha Hale.
24 Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman, Jr, The Decoration of Houses (London, 1897).
25 Among many others Lucy Abbot Throop’s Furnishing the House of Good Taste appeared
in 1912; George Leland Hunter’s Home Furnishing in 1913; and Mary J. Quinn’s Planning
and Furnishing the Home: Practical and Economical Suggestions for the Homemaker in the
following year. They all covered similar ground to a certain extent but had their own unique
characteristics as well.
26 D. De Marly, Worth: Father of Haute Couture (New York and London, 1980), pp. 174–5.
27 Troy, Couture Culture, p. 85. Troy has suggested that the latter was highly theatrical in nature
and that the couturier was deliberately blurring the boundaries between Spinelly as an
actress, an interior client and as a mannequin for his clothes.
28 See M. B. Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store 1869–1920
(New Jersey, 1981).
29 Ibid. As Miller explained, ‘the Bon Marché showed people how they should dress, how
they should furnish their homes’.
30 See Troy, Couture Culture, for more detail.
Chapter Five: The Decorative Interior
1 D. Todd and R. Mortimer, The New Interior Decoration: An Introduction to its Principles, and
International Survey of its Methods (London, 1929) p. 21.
2 Elsie de Wolfe, The House in Good Taste (New York, 1913), p. 5.
3 M. Snodin and M. Howard, Ornament: A Social History since 1450 (New Haven, ct, 1996),
p. 142.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid., p. 143, and C. Rice, The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity
(London and New York, 2007), p. 2.
7 Snodin and Howard, Ornament: A Social History since 1450, p. 143. 219