The Modern Interior

Various forms of the mass media were quick to represent the ideal -
ized domestic interior and to use it as a mechanism for stimulating desire
and mass consumption. Viewed inside the home the printed pages of
magazines, mail order catalogues, advice books, exhibition catalogues
and newspapers played important roles, while outside the domestic arena
world exhibitions, department stores, restaurants and museums began
to contain constructed interiors which were also intended to stimulate
consumption, or at least the desire for it. 6 The late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries witnessed a number of ways in which the mass media,
in its various manifestations, helped to construct relationships between
consumers and interiors. Developments in lithography and photography
made it increasingly easy to represent whole interiors in two dimensions
and to reproduce those images in large numbers. The problems of early
flash photography and the long exposures that were needed to capture the
interior meant that it took longer than other areas of the environment to
photograph. By the last decades of the century, however, those technical
obstacles had mostly been overcome. Women’s magazines extended
their promotion of fashionable clothing items to include components of
the interior and complete interiors. An image of a woman wearing a
Poiret dress from the 1920s, for example, was published in the French
women’s magazine La Revue de La Femme in May 1927. She was framed
by, and depicted gently caressing, a pair of curtains designed by the same
couturier, suggesting a unity between her body, her dress and the interior
in which she was located. 7 By the early twentieth century interiors had
become an important component of a wide range of women’s magazines,
including the ‘upmarket’ Vogue, then as now a fashion-oriented
magazine in which sumptuous interiors created by interior decorators
complemented the fashionable images of modern luxury evoked by the
couture clothing which graced most of its pages. It was sharply contrasted
with the ‘pseudo-rationality’ of other, more ‘downmarket’ magazines such
as Good Housekeeping, which targeted home-makers and the work that
went on in the home. It claimed to undertake laboratory tests of many of
the items it featured as a means of ensuring their scientific validity, their
reliability and their value for money.
Magazines, read and looked at in the home for the most part,
attempted on a number of different levels to focus women’s attention on
idealized versions of the very interiors in which they were frequently sitting
while they read. Magazine culture was very important in nineteenthcentury
England. ‘The magazine’, one writer has explained, ‘bought by an 59