The Modern Interior

4 The Fashionable Interior
Who doesn’t know the woman who goes to a shop and selects wall papers as
she would her gowns, because they are ‘new’ and ‘different’ and ‘pretty’?
Elsie de Wolfe1 By the late nineteenth century the requirement to be ‘fashionable’, especially
but not exclusively for women, had spread beyond the social elite
to embrace the new middle classes. Not only was it important to be
seen to be wearing fashionable clothes, it was equally important to live
in, and to be seen in, fashionable interiors, both inside and outside the
home. Indeed for consumers of the interior and its objects ‘fashionableness’
became a key criterion underpinning many of their purchases and,
as interiors began to wear out more quickly stylistically than physically,
they contributed to the accelerated consumption of those years.
The idea that fashion was a defining component of modernity preoccupied
several writers and theorists in the second half of the nineteenth
and the first decades of the twentieth centuries, from Charles Baudelaire
to George Simmel to Walter Benjamin. In 1863 Baudelaire aligned fashion
with his view of modernity, which he saw as being characterized by the
increased fragmentation of the experiences of everyday life, describing it
as the ‘ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent’. 2 His abstract definition of
fashion as a symptom of the modern condition facilitated its transference
from dress to a range of other goods and environments which enjoyed a
close relationship with the female body, including the interior. By the end
of the nineteenth century fashionable dress and interior decoration had
also acquired the status of modern ‘art’ forms which undoubtedly compensated
for the increasingly overt, and much derided, commercialism of
both practices. 3 The emphasis on ‘taste’ in the negotiation between artistic
practitioners and clients in both areas concealed the large amounts of
money that passed hands, as well as the fact that both class status and an
engagement with modernity could be bought in the marketplace.
The close relationship between fashionable dress and the modern
interior was manifested in numerous ways. Firstly, there was a strong 73