The Modern Interior

tions to that programme of reform in the domestic interior. 23 In 1897
novelist Edith Wharton and architect and decorator Ogden Codman, Jr
shifted the emphasis away from what had by then degenerated from an
initial commitment to taste reform into a promotion of the house as a
site for fashionable statements, towards a plea for respect for the architectural
context and, above all, for a return to classicism. 24
Many more household advice books appeared in the early twentieth
century, Elsie de Wolfe’s The House in Good Taste (1913) being among
the most popular. 25 The years after 1914 saw the emergence of a vast quantity
of published material focusing on advice for amateur ‘craft’ in the
home. They included articles in popular woman’s magazines, manuals
for male artisans (carpenters and house-painters among them), domestic
economy and management books containing chapters on home decor -
ation, from both practical and taste perspectives, and more specialized,
‘upmarket’ books about interior decorating styles and strategies. Each
one addressed a particular sector of society, defined usually (although
not always overtly) by class and gender. A sense of the existence of the
modern world and of the need to embrace it in one’s private interior
became increasingly clear in those years and was addressed from a wide
range of perspectives. Numerous possible models of modernity were
represented and suggestions made about ways in which readers could
negotiate them, either through an engagement with ‘hand-making’, or
through the application of taste in the consumption of goods for the
interior.
As well as sharing styles and cultural meanings, fashionable dress
and interiors also had a number of commercial strategies in common
and they shared many of the same settings in that context. As has already
been mentioned, the theatre provided an important mediating role for
both of them. Most nineteenth- and early twentieth-century couturiers
designed clothing for the stage. Worth, for instance, created a dress for
Eugenie Dich who played Marguerite in a production of Alexandre
Dumas, fils’ La Dame aux Camélias. He also created costumes for the
actress Sarah Bernhardt in 1867 as well as for the popular French playwright,
Victorien Sardou, who was a close friend of Elsie de Wolfe. 26
Several couturiers dressed actresses both on and off stage. That early
use of ‘stars’ to endorse products and brands had, by the early years
of the twentieth century, become common practice. Jeanne Paquin also
designed dresses for actresses and Poiret often dressed actresses at no
cost. 27 As has been noted already, in the days before the live catwalk 87