The Modern Interior

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boudoirs for her female clients where personal identity, rather than social
status, was at stake. The suite of rooms she created for her close friend,
Anne Morgan, for example, comprising a bedroom, a sitting room and a
dressing room, were intended for private use only. The dressing room
was filled with mirrors, fixed to the doors of fitted wardrobes, enabling
Miss Morgan to see herself from all angles. 16
The model of the fashionable ‘signature-decorator’ established by
de Wolfe was emulated and built upon by several other female decorators
through the first half of the twentieth century, among them Ruby Ross
Wood, Frances Elkins, Rose Cummings, Dorothy Draper and Syrie
Maugham. Maugham was the only Englishwoman among them and her
most influential design was a striking all-white living room which she
created for her own house in Chelsea. In reality it brought together a
number of shades of off-white, cream and beige: the settee and chairs
were upholstered in beige satin, and the rug, designed by Marion Dorn,
was composed of two tones of cream. A folding screen, comprising
mirrored glass panels, stood behind the settee. Like their dress-oriented
counterparts, those twentieth-century interior decorators presented
themselves as fashionable beings first and foremost. By extension, their
work was perceived as fashionable and their clients as fashion-conscious,
modern and discerning. Just as couturiers created exclusive items for
replication by department stores, although most of the interiors created
by decorators were for individual clients, their fashionable spaces also
became widely accessible through their presence in mass media publications.
Furthermore, the decorators stocked their showrooms with items
resembling those they had used in individual settings, thereby enabling a
wide range of customers to purchase them. 17
By the end of the nineteenth century the idea of the seasonal
model, promoted by Worth and others, had become the norm in the
world of fashionable dress. Similarly in the world of interior decoration
certain furnishing and upholstery colours and styles came regularly in
and out of vogue. While surface changes to the interior – paint colours
and textile patterns among them – could be made quite frequently, other
transformations were necessarily more infrequent as some interior items
represented a considerable investment. Often fashions began in the world
of dress and moved, albeit usually with a time lag, into interior decoration.
18 In France, bourgeois families moved home more frequently than
the aristocracy because they were not limited by inherited homes and
bulky items of furniture. 19 In New York, also, from the 1860s onwards, the