The Modern Interior

space. 8 Building, also, on Sigmund Freud’s emphasis on interiority as a
starting point for psychoanalysis, and on his notion of the compartmentalized
house as a model, or metaphor, for interiorities which have been
constructed over a number of years, literary scholars have discussed
the idea of the fusion of ‘literal and the figural space’. The specifically
‘modern’ context of interiority has also been acknowledged and its rise
seen as paralleling the separation of work from home, the increased privacy
of the domestic setting and the emergence of the ‘modern subject’.
At the level of the social elite, dress and the interior have had a relatively
long history of interconnectivity. Female members of the eight -
eenth-century French court – Madame de Pompadour among them –
had themselves painted in their interiors adorned in stylish clothing.
Fashionable dress first acquired its link with the notion of democratized
feminine modernity in late eighteenth-century Europe with the demise
of the sumptuary laws which had outlawed the wearing of dress beyond
one’s station. The gates opened at that time for people to acquire dress
suggesting membership of a social class which was not that of their
birth. 9 In mid nineteenth-century France, an era of increasing wealth in
that country, the idea of fashionable dress was reinforced and encouraged
by a new interest in sartorial elegance inspired by the wife of Napoleon
iii, the Empress Eugénie. 10 With the birth of haute couture at that time,
the relationship of fashionable dress with the interior took on a new
incarnation which was inextricably linked to the notion of modernity.
Indeed fashionable dress and interior decoration became the visual,
material and spatial expressions of women’s engagement with modernity,
both of them offering ways in which, through consumption, women could
acquire a stake in the world of ‘taste’. Both dress and interior decoration
became, at that time, forms of modern luxury empowered to act as signs
of social status, whether inherited, acquired through consumption, or
aspired towards.
It was within the changing climate of the middle years of the nineteenth
century that the Englishman, Charles Frederick Worth, became
one of France’s first and most successful modern couturiers. His numerous
commercial innovations included the construction of showrooms
furnished to resemble the drawing rooms of well-appointed houses
(hitherto dressmakers had usually visited the homes of their clients). The
interiors in his dress establishment were extremely elegant and could be
accessed via staircases lined with exotic flowers.’ 11 For Worth the decorated
interior performed a double role, however. It was both a backcloth for his 75