The Modern Interior

The frontispiece to
Elsie de Wolfe’s The
House in Good Taste,
published in 1913.
pages of her widely read advice book, The House in Good Taste, on the
first page of which she included an elegant portrait of herself accompanied
by her signature. She chose as the location for that photograph the
living room of her East 17th Street, New York home, which she redecor -
ated herself in the late 1890s and which she shared with her close companion,
the literary agent Elisabeth Marbury. Just as Worth had been able to
dictate the course of fashionable dress in France in the second half of the
nineteenth century by adding his personal artistic ‘genius’ to an item of
clothing, so de Wolfe and her followers set out to persuade wealthy clients
that the association of their names with interiors had the potential to
make their occupants appear more fashionable. Like Worth, Paquin,
Poiret and others, de Wolfe understood the importance of dress and the
interior to modern women’s search for self-identity in a world in which
flux was the only constant. She was particularly adept at creating private 83