The Modern Interior

80
A bedroom for a French house in the country, designed by Paul Poiret in 1913, shown
at an exhibition at the Hermann Gerson department store in Berlin, 1913, illustrated
in Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, 1914.
dedicated to gastronomy and the Orgues, a location for spectacles and
dancing. The studio’s nautical interest also extended to the interiors it
created for the French liner, the ss Île de France, which was launched in
1926. As part of the 1925 exhibition the Atelier Martine’s boutique was on
show in the Grand Palais. Velvet couches, tasselled cushions, and elegant
built-in furniture combined to create the same mood of modern sumptuousness
and exoticism that characterized the couturier’s dress designs.
A group of professional female interior decorators emerged in the
us in the first decades of the twentieth century. Led by Elsie de Wolfe, they
saw themselves as operating within the same fashion system as Worth
and his followers, and they consciously emulated a number of their commercial
strategies. Many links existed at that time between the us and
France as wealthy American women were enthusiastic customers of the
French couturiers. De Wolfe was among the first of her generation to
understand the workings of the fashion system and its relevance to the
interior, largely due to the fact that she had moved into interior decor -
ation, as an amateur, from an earlier career in the theatre. As an actress
she had liked to wear couture gowns onstage. The picture on p. 82 shows
her in an elegant gown posed against a highly decorative backcloth. In
the years before the English couturier Lucile (also known as Lady Duff