The Modern Interior

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psychological link between them. Both played a key role in identity
formation, especially in the creation of (particularly feminine) modern
identities. In their capacity as material and spatial layers around the body
dress and the interior both played a role in the process of ‘interiority’
through which modern subjects developed a notion of ‘themselves’. That
link developed first within the private sphere but, as women went into
the public arena, moved out with them into the marketplace. Secondly,
there were strong professional links between fashionable dress and the
interior as the commercial practices developed by couturiers from the
mid-nineteenth century onwards were adopted by interior decorators
when they began to establish their own professional framework in the
early twentieth century. As the self-identities of both couturiers and
decor ators became important parts of their commercial brands, those
practices crossed the private and public divide. Thirdly, fashionable dress
and the interior came together in the public context of mass consumption,
in the physical spaces of the theatre, department stores and exhibition
halls, as well as in the representational spaces of women’s magazines. Such
were the workings of the fashion system as it engaged with both dress and
the interior that, as the values formed within the context of domesticity
were taken out into the marketplace, the idea of the separate spheres was,
once again, challenged.
The link between fashionable dress and the modern interior was
also facilitated by practitioners in one area openly embracing the other.
Fashion designers engaged with the interior as a setting for fashionable
dress, as a site for the formation of their own identities and as an extension
of women’s relationship with modernity. In addition, dress was
frequently linked to specific locations within the domestic interior. 4 Light
airy cottons and linens were worn in the breakfast room, for example. A
strong sense of theatricality pervaded that practice. 5 Middle-class women
of that era also went as far as ‘dressing’ furniture items with ruffles and
fringes, transforming them, in the process, into extensions of themselves. 6
The concept of ‘interiority’ assumes a blurring of the inner, mental activities
of occupants and the material and spatial environments they occupy.
That psychological reading of the interior has been explored by a number
of literary scholars interested in the relationship between writers’
work – especially those who emphasized the concept of modern interiority
– and the spaces in which they were written. 7 Some have focused on
Walter Benjamin’s phrase ‘the phantasmagoria of the interior’, used to
refer to the reverie of the subject experienced within private, interior