The Modern Interior

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fashion show became a widespread phenomenon, actresses wearing couture
dresses on stage had performed a similar function and de Wolfe
frequently wore Worth, Paquin or Doucet gowns for her performances.
The stage set itself also became a means of propagating fashionable
interior styles, and many domestic dramas of those years were set in fashionable,
eighteenth-century French interiors. Lucile’s early catwalk shows
took place in an interior into which a small stage had been added in recognition
of the pioneering role of the theatre in that context. The idea of the
stage-set also encouraged an understanding of the modern interior as a
‘psychic backcloth’ for which the architectural frame was unimportant but
for which the identity and self-expression of the character being enacted
were paramount. The idea was transferable to the domestic setting and
became an important component of the modern interior in those years.
While the theatre provided one means of bringing fashionable
dress and the interior into a single frame of reference in the public
sphere, department stores also recognized the important relationship
between them. In the 1850s and ’60s, as we have seen, a number of such
stores were established, including the Bon Marché, the Louvre store and
the Printemps store in Paris, as well as Macy’s and Lord and Taylor,
among others, in New York. In 1869, at the time of the opening of its new
store in Paris, the Bon Marché department store focused on a range of
cheap goods which would appeal to women – nouveautés – from clothing
to fabrics to sewing goods to interior furnishings. Beds were available
from the 1850s and rugs from the 1860s, while the following decade saw
the introduction of tables, chairs and upholstery. Eventually room sets
were constructed in the store. Some displayed deluxe cabinet-work and
others country furniture. Kitchen wares came into the store in 1900. 28 A
decade later complete modern kitchen installations could be found there.
The stores provided bourgeois women with complete material
environments. They could purchase a range of goods – from dresses to
furnishing fabrics to lamps. The process of shopping for dress and the
components of the interior in a single store served to reinforce the links
between them. 29 In the last years of the nineteenth century and the early
years of the twentieth, the stores also began to take over the earlier role
played by theatres in that context. The French couturiers were keen to
show their work on live mannequins on American soil and the department
stores gave them the opportunity to do so. In the 1890s Lord and
Taylor imported designs by Doucet (possibly the source of de Wolfe’s
gowns) while Poiret undertook a tour of American department stores in