The Modern Interior

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creations and a marker of his own artistic identity, which, in turn, became
inseparable from his commercial brand. He decorated the interior spaces
of a house he had built for himself in Surêsnes in an eclectic mix of
Gothic, Indian, Old English and Moorish styles and posed as an artist
within them. Late in his life he dressed to look like Rembrandt with a
beret, a cloak and a tied scarf. 12 Other commercial strategies developed by
Worth included his use of a live model (his wife Marie), an early version
of the fashion mannequin; his encouragement of his wife to wear his
clothes at social occasions, such as the races; mixing with the aristocracy;
the introduction of the idea of seasonal models; and the use of a brand
label sewn on to the bands inside the waists of his garments.
Several of the French couturiers who followed Worth built upon
his commercial practices. They also consciously engaged with designed
interiors as both sites in which to show their creations and through
which to define their own artistic identities. 13 The couturière Jeanne
Paquin, for example, sought to extend her interest in the interior beyond
its role as a backcloth for her fashionable designs when, in 1914, she asked
the architect Robert Mallet-Stevens to create a house for her in Deauville.
Sadly the project was never realized. A little later Paul Poiret also commissioned
Mallet-Stevens to create a house for him. The flat-roofed,
white-walled Modernist home created by the architect for the couturier
was built in Mézy-sur-Seine between 1921 and 1923. The work the Irish
interior decorator, Eileen Gray, undertook in the homes of the couturiers
Jacques Doucet and Madame Mathieu-Lévy (the second proprietor of
the fashion house of Suzanne Talbot) in the first decades of the twentieth
century also served to bridge the worlds of fashion and interior decoration.
For the latter client she created a highly decorative interior with
lacquered walls inlaid with silver. The Pirogue chaise longue, upholstered
in salmon pink, was created by Gray for that space. In her early career
Gray was committed to the use of decoration in her interiors and to the
link between interior spaces and the identities of their occupants. Like
Worth, both Gray’s clients understood the importance of the relationship
between their roles as creators of fashionable dress, the private spaces
within which they defined and communicated their own modern selfidentities,
and the more public spaces within which they showed and sold
their fashion items. Doucet’s salon was an elegant, domesticated, eight -
eenth-century-styled space, featuring a patterned carpet, panelled walls
and a chandelier, which undoubtedly made his clients feel simultaneously