The Modern Interior

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Eileen Gray, Pirogue chaise longue, designed for Madame Mathieu-Lévy’s rue de Lota
Apartment, 1918–22, shown in the window of the designer’s Paris shop, Jean Desert,
in the early 1920s and illustrated in Wendingen, 1924.
was not interested in constructing a bridge between fashionable dress and
the interior. On the contrary, he simply did not see architecture as the
starting point. From his fashion-centric perspective he sought to transfer
the values of fashionable dress into new areas, including the interior.
Poiret had trained as a fashion designer in the couture houses of
Doucet and Worth where he had come to understand the complex meanings
and operations of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
fashion system, which was predicated upon the idea that modern women
were in search of luxurious, material means of expressing their modern
identities. In 1911 Poiret formed his Atelier Martine, an interior designoriented
initiative, and two years later he created a set of brightly
coloured rooms for a Berlin exhibition. The walls of a dining room he
showed there were covered with painted plant stems and leaves which
blended with the floral pattern on the fabric used for the curtains and as
upholstery for the little chairs that Poiret had introduced into his space.
A ‘bedroom for a French house in the country’ was also displayed at
the same exhibition. 15 That interior was characterized by the juxtaposition
of the dark patterning of the wallpaper and floor covering with the white