The Modern Interior

The sales room in Jacques Doucet’s Couture House, illustrated in L’Illustration, 1910.
comfortable and fashionable. The modern role of interior decoration
as a constructor of identities was reinforced by Doucet, both within
the private spaces of his home and the more public environment of his
fashion house.
The early twentieth-century French couturier, Paul Poiret, was not
enamoured with the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the concept which had
played such a key role in early twentieth-century debates about the inter -
ior, describing it as a ‘substitution of the taste of the architect for the
personality of the proprietors [which] has always seemed to me a sort of
slavery – a subjection which makes me smile’. 14 Like Adolf Loos and
others, Poiret was unconvinced by the way in which a number of turnof-the-century
architects – Henry Van de Velde, Peter Behrens and the
members of the Wiener Werkstätte among them – had sought to unite
architecture, the interior, furniture and furnishings, and dress into a stylistic
entity. In their attempts to distance themselves, and the modern
interior, from what they perceived to be the superficial world of fashion
and fashionable dress, those architects had aligned themselves with the
dress reform movement, thereby embracing the idea of ‘rational dress’,
and rejecting the notion of fashion entirely. That is not to say that Poiret 77