ABSTRACTS
9th Annual Dorich House Conference
Fashioning the Modern Interior
Thursday 17th and Friday 18th May 2007
Eric Anderson
Columbia University, New York, USA
The Design Theory of Jakob von Falke: Dress and Interior Decoration as Cultural Expression
Jakob von Falke (1825-1897) was perhaps the earliest European theorist to write extensively about both
dress and the interior. Moreover, he was among the first to see their forms as expressions of larger
cultural patterns. These concerns developed out of Falke’s engagement in the 1850s with
Kulturgeschichte, an alternative school of historical study that turned away from the political emphasis of
traditional German historiography toward new anthropological concerns such as social behaviour and
material culture. In the 1850s, Falke wrote essays on the history of clothing and hairstyles in which he
sought a general understanding of how human adornment derived from the social values and material
conditions of an age. Later, his focus shifted to design reform. He co-founded the Austrian Museum of
Art and Industry in Vienna (1864) and wrote broadly on the modern decorative arts, including Art in the
House (1871), one of the first treatises on domestic interior decoration. His work was both academic
and popular. In addition to dense historical narratives, his writings articulated a program for the modern
decorative arts, with which he hoped to shape taste, fashion, production, and consumption in the new
bourgeois culture of Ringstrasse Vienna.
This paper will examine Falke’s theories of dress and the domestic interior, looking at his understanding
of the culturally determined nature of material forms. In what ways did he suggest that factors such as
politics, economics, and attitudes about leisure influenced design? How did he define the term fashion?
To what extent did he see fashion as an independent force that dictated popular taste? What were the
respective roles of the artist, producer and consumer in shaping design? To what extent were dress and
the domestic interior gendered issues for Falke? What effect did mass-production and the expanding
commercial marketplace have on decorative styles? How did he characterize his own culture, namely
upper-middle-class Vienna around 1870, and what did he see as its appropriate forms of material
expression? Finally, how did his ideas compare to Modernist beliefs—especially German and
Austrian—about the relationship between design and culture, and about fashion? Did he share the
general enthusiasm of his era for the possibilities of industrial capitalism or did he harbour any of the
scepticism toward unbridled market forces that characterized design criticism around 1900?
Biography:
Eric Anderson is a Ph.D. candidate and instructor in art history at Columbia University in New York.
Working under Professor Barry Bergdoll, Mr. Anderson has conducted research on the history of
modern architecture in Europe and America. His scholarship currently engages theoretical debates in
nineteenth-century historicism in both architecture and the decorative arts. His dissertation, “Historicism
at Home: Jakob von Falke, Design Reform and the Modern Interior in Ringstrasse Vienna” looks at one
of the most prolific and influential Austro-German decorative arts critics, whose writings were central to
the emergence of a new discourse on the domestic interior in the 1860s and 1870s. Other recent work
has included an exhibition on New York City housing at the Queens Museum of Art and reviews of
German architecture publications for “H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online.” In addition to
teaching art history at Columbia, Mr. Anderson lectures on the decorative arts at the Parsons School of
Design.
1
Professor Bridget A. May
School of Arts & Sciences, Marymount University, USA
Dressing and Picturing the Past:
Promoting the Colonial Revival in late 19th and early 20th Century America
The Colonial Revival style reproduces or adapts characteristics of American buildings and furnishings
from the 17th through the early 19th centuries. Since its inception in the mid 19th century, it has been
an important style and a significant social and cultural force in the United States. This presentation will
explore relationships between Colonial costuming and images of Colonial rooms and people in the
creation and marketing of Colonial Revival interiors.
Dressing as historical characters was a popular form of entertainment for men and women in mid 19th
century America. As the 1876 Centennial approached, wearing Colonial costumes for various activities
intensified. At the same time, images of people in Colonial dress and Colonial houses, interiors, and
furnishings appeared in many places and publications. By the early 20th century Colonial Revival, with
its own design aesthetic, had become Modern Colonial. Photographs and other images by Wallace
Nutting and others of interiors with people wearing Colonial dress became important in the promotion of
the style.
Colonial costuming and pictures influenced the creation and marketing of Colonial Revival interior
several ways. First, they contributed to the development and recognition of a common experience
among certain groups of Americans who took pride in their ancestry. This common experience includes
imagining a mythical, golden past and expressions of heritage and self. Second, the Colonial mystique
created positive associations of the (imagined) past. Pictures of Colonial people in Colonial interiors
accompanied descriptions of Pilgrims, heroes, and patriots in books and periodicals. This juxtaposition
of people and objects promotes the notion of a dignified age and noble people. Also implicit are
associations of home, family, the simple life, good taste, good design, and excellent construction.
Finally, dress and pictures of the past often contained symbols and objects important to and/or
appearing in Colonial Revival houses and interiors.
Biography:
Bridget May has been an interior design educator for many years, teaching a variety of graduate and
undergraduate historic interiors and preservation classes. She has been chair of the department of
Interior Design at Marymount University since 2000. Dr. May is active in IDEC (Interior Design
Educators Council) and serves as Coordinator of the IDEC Academy. For the last several years, Dr.
May has been working with two other authors on an interior design history textbook. The first volume,
Architecture and Interior Design from Antiquity through the 18th Century: An Integrated History was
published in 2001. It was awarded the Polsky Prize for excellence in design education by ASID
(American Society of Interior Designers). Architecture and Interior Design from the 19th Century to the
Present: An Integrated History is scheduled for publication in 2007. Other research interests include
Nancy McClelland, the Lady Decorators, and the American Colonial Revival.
2
Dr. Elana Shapira
School of Art History, Vienna University, Vienna, Austria
Adolf Loos: Fashion, Interiors and Rituals of Self-Exclusion
Architect Adolf Loos advocated rituals of self-exclusion through projecting the ethics of men’s fashion
onto his interior designs at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Loos established his reputation in the Viennese art scene as “the cosmopolitan man.” His colleague, the
art critic Wilhelm Schölermann in his review of Viennese Interiors in the Innen-Dekoration (1905)
acknowledged Loos’s style as the style of the “International Gentleman.” He further acknowledged the
relationship between Loos’s style and the ethics of men’s fashion by noting, before introducing Loos’s
works, the progressive movement toward the triumph of sober male clothing in interior design and the
design of objects for daily use. Ludwig Hevesi, a prominent cultural critic, compared in his article on
Loos (1907) Loos’s interiors to his tailored suits, produced by the Viennese elite men’s fashion salon
“Goldman & Salatsch,” and claimed that both represented geometric elegance. Yet, Loos did not
provide an original definition of the ethics of men’s fashion presented in his article “Die Herrenmode”
(“Men’s Fashion”) in the Neue Freie Presse (1898) and in the text “Die Kleidung” (“The Clothing”) in his
short lived journal Das Andere (The Other) 1903. Loos argued that the choice of clothing expresses an
important cultural cipher and identified the ideal of men’s fashion as that of not drawing attention in
public. Several scholars in the 1980s and in the 1990s have compared Loos’s arguments to the cultural
heritage and sartorial principles of the British dandy as prescribed by the legendary “Beau Brummell”
(George Bryan Brummell). Did Loos follow Brummell’s reform of men’s dress in the 1800 identified by
fashion psychologist John Carl Flugel as the beginning of the great renunciation of men’s dress? What
fashion ideal did Loos promote through his interior designs of studios (men’s office rooms) and men’s
fashion salons?
This paper argues that Loos used the reputation of the “English gentleman” as part of a modernist dress
narrative, designing interiors as “cultured dresses” that encouraged his clients to preserve distinguished
“outsider” (the Other) position in the Viennese society.
Biography:
Dr. Elana Shapira is an art historian living in Vienna. She has a BA and an MA degree from the art
history department at the Hebrew University and a Ph.D. from the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.
Her articles on German and Austrian Expressionism as well as on modern architecture and design have
appeared in various art journals and exhibition catalogues. She is currently lecturing in the art history
department at the Vienna University.
3
Professor Christopher Breward
Research Department, Victoria & Albert Museum, London
‘At Home’ at the St James’s: Dress, décor and the problem of fashion in Edwardian theatre.
Between c.1891 and 1914 the actor manager George Alexander and his wife Florence Theleur presided
over a golden period in the history of stage drama at the St James’s Theatre in London’s King Street.
Their celebrated ‘drawing room’ productions followed three key-principles: that British playwrights would
be promoted over ‘foreign’ writers, that well-balanced characterization and a naturalistic mis-en-scene
would be prioritized over star-players and ‘vulgar’ settings, and that the audience would benefit from
standards of hospitality that both matched the aristocratic lifestyles depicted in the plays and exceeded
the offerings of rival theatrical companies. Cultural historians have recently made much of the popular
attractions of music hall and musical comedy at the turn of the nineteenth-century, showing how the
articulation of a consumerist discourse by theatrical producers promoted new definitions of a ‘modern’
fashionable femininity to ever-widening audiences. The less-studied presentations of the St James’s
Theatre offer an alternative but parallel focus, where the dressing of stage and body spoke directly to
the more conservative taste of a late Victorian and Edwardian political and economic elite. Here
politeness, intimacy and the ultimate celebration of a comforting status quo sat alongside the more
challenging dramatic narratives of writers including Wilde and Pinero. The productions themselves,
dressed by West End furniture emporia and Mayfair dress makers, thus offered a flattering mirror up to
the well-heeled audience, their glossy polish famously dismissed by George Bernard Shaw as ‘a tailor’s
advertisement making sentimental remarks to a milliner’s advertisement in the middle of an
upholsterer’s and decorator’s advertisement.’ Yet their seemingly complacent surfaces also revealed
the tensions and contradictions inherent in a rapidly changing conception of fashionable modernity. In
many ways then George Alexander’s synthetic approximation of understated luxury – achieved on stage
through the deft juxtaposition of a Worth dress and a Waring’s dining suite - tells us as much about the
material and psychological parameters of the fin-de-siecle moment as any more self-consciously
innovative and ‘modernist’ endeavour.
Biography:
Christopher Breward is Deputy Head of Research at the Victoria and Albert Museum and a Visiting
Professor at the University of the Arts London. He has published widely on modern fashion and its
relation to culture, gender and place.
4
Dr. Valerie Mendelson
The New School, New York, USA
Decoration in Two Acts: Jacques Doucet and the Theatrical Interior
Complicating the intersection of modern fashion and interior design and their ineluctable ties to desire is
the case of Jacques Doucet, modernist couturier, who famously decorated two radically divergent
interiors: an eighteenth century luxury home and the cutting edge modernist house that provided the
setting for Picasso’s Demoiselles D’Avignon. Each of these collections was installed in a house chosen
expressly for it so that the collection and its mise-en-scène created a total environment.
His work as couturier and as collector argues for the constructedness of identity through the acquisition
of beautiful things. His fashions provided a way for women to express at once their fugitive modernity
and their eternal desirability (as Baudelaire described beauty). For example he was the designer of
choice for the actress Réjane who chose his gowns to accentuate her soft desirability and to contrast
with the high drama of Sarah Bernhardt.
His two homes are also about the “eternal” and the “fugitive” and the relationship between past and
present. Each conceived as an ensemble (much as he called his dresses ensembles) they presented
two alternative visions of how to live elegantly. The photographs of his two homes show a combination
of media, forms and textures carefully calibrated to work as an ensemble.
Everywhere one looks in the photograph of his Rue Spontini salon, there is a play and counterplay of
decoration which, if it suggests a museum, it is more a museum of a way of life than of any one art form
or artist. The same principle of decoration holds in his modernist interior, without, however, evoking a
museum. The focus of the installation is the way in which the objects are combined and arranged,
rather than on each individual object. His sense of the ensemble, was not ahistorical, and in fact he
began a collection of sales catalogues to document the provenance of his collection, which became the
basis of the current Bibliothèque Jacques Doucet d’art et d’archéologie. This scholarly relationship with
the past, so much attached to the new discipline of art history, is dependant on modernity’s
consciousness of the rupture that exists with the past.
Biography:
Dr. Valerie Mendelson is an art historian and painter living in New York City. She received her PhD from
the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is currently working on a book on French collectors of the nineteenth
century, including Jacques Doucet. Her scholarship focuses on the nineteenth century amateur, and the
anti-museum discourse surrounding this figure. She has presented papers on topics including women
collectors in France, French artist/art historians, Degas' photographs, Victorian landscape photography,
and Early Victorian museum photographs at such venues as CAA, NEMLA, VISAWUS, Hunter College
and Barnard College among others. She recently published an article “(Re)collecting Stories: Private
Libraries in Fin-de-Siècle Paris” in the International Journal of the Book. In addition to teaching at the
New School, she lectures at The Brearley School. Her paintings have been exhibited in New York,
Boston, Louisiana, Alabama and Virginia.
5
Samantha Safer
Research Department, Victoria & Albert Museum, London
Lucile: Couture and the Modern Interior 1904-1920
The English couturier Lucile, Lady Duff Gordon was a pioneering fashion designer, entrepreneur, style
guru, and a keen promoter, who in a short period of time transformed herself from a little dressmaker to
an international couturier. What is intriguing about Lucile is how she marketed herself using various
techniques including designing for the theatre, the women’s press, mannequin parades and
photography. But most importantly she utilized interior decoration to assist in her endeavors thus
intersecting her designs with her decorative environments. Her rise to fame in the early twentiethcentury was almost unprecedented for a female businesswoman, let alone a fashion designer both in
Europe and America. By 1915, she was the first and only couturier to have branches in London, Paris,
New York and Chicago, turning the Maison Lucile into a multi-million dollar company.
This paper will show how Lucile believed, as did other retailers at the time, that certain interiors or
environments affected clients psychologically; hence a beautiful interior would make her customers
want to consume more of her designs. Furthermore, in exploiting interior decoration she made women
feel as if they were in their own homes rather than a place of business. For her couture house, Lucile
used interiors like a theatre set, arranging different scenes and moods in the assorted rooms. The
drawing room was utilized as the salon where her customers would take tea on sumptuous furniture; in
another room she erected a stage or small theatre for her mannequin parades. The Rose Room, a
dedicated space for her naughty filmy lingerie, was designed by her friend Elsie de Wolfe, whom she
met through New York society. By finding correspondences between fashion and interior decoration
Lucile gained a unique advantage over her competition whilst enhancing her career, reputation and
clientele.
Biography:
Samantha Erin Safer studied Art History and Fashion History at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson,
New York, gaining experience at P.S.1, MoMA and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. In 2004, Samantha
moved to London where she spent two years as assistant curator at the Fashion and Textile Museum.
As a student on the V&A/RCA Masters degree course in the History of Design, Samantha has pursued
her interest in fashion and textile histories. Recent research projects have included eighteenth-century
fashion dolls, with special reference to the transmission of style, and the reinterpretation of bustles in
the late twentieth century. Using unpublished materials from an archive held at the V&A, Samantha is,
at present, writing her dissertation on the promotional activities of the English couturier Lucile, Lady Duff
Gordon.
Samantha has worked on several exhibitions including ‘My Favourite Dress’, ‘Zandra Rhodes: A Life
Long Love Affair with Textiles’, ‘Identity’ celebrating 25 years of i.D Magazine, and has co-curated
various travelling exhibitions in Europe. She is currently a research assistant on ‘New York Fashion
Now’ opening Spring 2007 at the V&A.
6
Dr Andrew Stephenson
University of East London, London
‘Paris Hollywood’: Masculine fashionability and Parisian modernity in the photographs of the
Séeberger brothers 1909-1939.
In the dynamic and overlapping worlds of fashion and photography in the period 1909-1939, the work of
the French photographers, Jules, Louis and Henri Séeberger - the Séeberger brothers – provides a
crucial means of understanding how fashion, photography and film produced and disseminated new
forms of visual culture that epitomised fashionability and modernity. Starting by producing postcards,
then turning to fashion photography and reportage, the Séeberger brothers specialised in capturing the
elegant styles of Paris fashion houses as worn by models and international celebrities in those locations
that formed part of the ‘beau monde’ season, such as Longchamp, Monte Carlo, Nice, Deauville,
Cannes, Biarritz and Saint Moritz.
However, in 1923, the Séeberger brothers received a request from the International Kinema Research
in Hollywood asking if they would supply detailed photographs of Paris ‘interiors and exteriors of hotels,
railway stations, cafés and theatres, shops, street scenes etc’. The objective was that American set
designers would then be able to use the photographs to re-construct accurate and identifiable interiors
for films using Paris as a location. The image of Paris that derived from the Séeberger brothers’
photographs became the archival source for a whole fictive Paris – ‘Paris Hollywood’ – that persisted in
American cinema through to the 1970s (most memorably in Minnelli’s ‘An American in Paris’, 1951).
What this paper will address is the ways in which this fictional ‘Paris Hollywood’, derived from actual
locations and landmarks offered English audiences new and meaningful ways of ‘seeing’ Paris and
interpreting its modern fashion culture. More specifically, it will examine how the Séeberger brothers’
photographs and the Hollywood films they inspired, proffered new forms of fashionable masculine
identification that were encountered in the illustrated press, in film still collections and in the cinema.
Many of these younger male consumers would, no doubt, have agreed with the German film director,
Ernst Lubitsch, who moved to Hollywood in 1922, when he remarked ‘I’ve been to Paris Hollywood and
Paris France, and Paris Hollywood is better’.
Biography:
Andrew Stephenson teaches Visual Theories at the University of East London. He has published articles on
British art and design of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries; most recently ‘Posing and
performance: the problematics of homosocial visibility and its articulations in the late nineteenth-century
London artworld’, Visual Culture in Britain (2007); ‘Palimpsestic promenades: memorial sculpture and the
urban consumption of space in post-1918 London’, The Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Art
Association (2005), and ‘’A keen sight for the signs of the races: John Singer Sargent, ‘whiteness’ and the
fashioning of Anglo-performativity’ in Visual Culture in Britain (2005). He is co-editor with Amelia Jones of
Performing the Body/Performing the Text (Routledge, 1999) and is currently working on a study of British
modernism 1920-40 and Patrilenes: Masculine self-fashioning and artistic performance in Britain 18501910.
7
Pauline C. Metcalf
Independent scholar, New York, USA
Syrie Maugham and Cecil Beaton: Stage Sets For The Modern Woman (And Occasional Dandy)
This paper will show the complementary relationship between Syrie Maugham’s interior decorating and
Cecil Beaton’s photographs. The images are taken not only of Maugham’s rooms, but of her clients
posed with her custom made furniture. Beaton’s photographs provide prime examples of the ways in
which modern interiors can be seen as stage sets for the fashionable woman and the occasional man.
Maugham’s famous all-white room at 213 King’s Road was photographed several times by Beaton in
the 1930s: (examples: 1. Syrie in black with legs crossed on sofa, 2. Baba Beaton in white silk evening
dress standing before a mirrored screen and glass column with a vase of white lilies). Maugham’s allwhite decorating scheme was the perfect foil for Beaton’s black and white photography. Beaton’s use of
lighting played off against the reflection of the mirrored screen, white lilies, and the contrast between
straight lines and soft curves.
In the words of Beverly Nichols, Beaton created “compositions of inspired prettiness.” Many of these
images were done for Vogue magazine, where both Beaton and Maugham had a special relationship
with the fashion editor Madge Garland, an early champion of their talents. The client-sitters included a
cast of society and theatrical personages on both sides of the Atlantic. Other Maugham/Beaton
collaborations include Mona Bismarck, Lady Juliet Duff, Gertrude Lawrence, and Evelyn Marshall Field.
The aristocratic aesthete, Stephen Tennant, is another Maugham client who was also a great friend and
influence on Cecil Beaton. Beaton’s famous photographs of Tennant in his rooms at Wilsford Abbey are
perhaps the most illustrative example of the relationship of interior decoration with fashionable dress.
Biography:
Pauline C. Metcalf has practiced as both an interior decorator and architectural historian. She was the
primary author of Ogden Codman and the Decoration of Houses (1988), the subject of her master’s
thesis which she was able to turn into a book and exhibition at the National Academy of Design in 1990.
Ms. Metcalf was a contributor to the book David Adler, The Elements of Style, authoring the chapter on
the interiors of Adler and his sister, Frances Elkins. Her articles have appeared in numerous
publications, including Antiques, House & Garden, and The Old House Journal. She has lectured
extensively on late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century interiors, and the influence of women in
interior design and collecting. Currently, Ms. Metcalf is working on a book about the life and work of the
interior decorator Syrie Maugham, to be published by Acanthus Press.
Ms. Metcalf has a master’s degree in Historic Preservation from Columbia University School of
Architecture and a bachelor’s degree from Sarah Lawrence. She has served on various preservation
organizations, including The Preservation Society of Newport County, has been involved with the
restoration of The Mount, Edith Wharton’s home in Lenox, Massachusetts, and is currently a trustee of
the Rhode Island School of Design.
8
Professor Nancy J. Troy
Department of Art History, University of Southern California
Inside Mondrian’s Studio: Dressing Up and Down
After the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian died on February 1, 1944, the interior of his New York studio
remained intact for several months so that fellow artists, patrons, friends, and any others interested in
his oeuvre could see the distinctive environment Mondrian had created as a space in which to live and
work. During that period, the studio was also made available as a backdrop for the display of
fashionable dresses that were photographed for publication in an upscale women’s magazine. Nancy J.
Troy’s presentation considers the implications of this intersection of interior design and fashionable
clothing for the understanding of Mondrian’s work as it subsequently circulated in both elite and popular
contexts, becoming a source for haute couture and knock-off dresses, as well as for interior designs and
furnishings that ranged across the spectrum of cultural value from high to low. Troy will suggest that
Mondrian be seen as a case study of the ways in which the work of many modern artists has been
annexed to the realms of fashion, furniture, interior design, and other non-art media and practices.
Biography:
Nancy J. Troy, Professor of Art History at the University of Southern California, and President of the
National Committee for the History of Art, has published widely on modern art, architecture and design
in Europe and America. Her latest book, Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion (2003),
explores issues of originality and reproduction, the rise of the department store and what has come to
be known as commodity culture in early twentieth-century France and America. She has published two
other books The De Stijl Environment, (1983), and Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France: Art
Nouveau to Le Corbusier (1992), as well as Cubism and Architecture (1997), co-edited with Eve Blau.
A former Editor-in-Chief of The Art Bulletin. Troy has been the recipient of fellowships from the Institute
for Advanced Study, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Guggenheim Foundation, Getty
Research Institute, and the American Council of Learned Societies, among others. She is currently
preparing a book about the circulation of Piet Mondrian’s work in elite and popular culture after the
artist’s death in New York in 1944.
9
Professor Mary Anne Beecher
Associate Professor Department of Architecture, University of Oregon, USA
Fashioning Thrift: Defining Modernity in Depression-Era Rural America
What must it have meant to “belong to the modern world” at a time when economic depression limited
many American’s full participation in the system of commercial consumption upon which the world of
“fashion” depends? In what ways might the promotion of thrift as a tactic have increased access to
modern design by challenging people to re-fashion their garments and their homes using strategies that
translated the essence of modern fashion at minimal cost? This paper will attempt to answer these
questions by examining connections between the home production of dress and of domestic interior
environments in rural America in the 1930s.
Using photographic evidence, meeting records and collected publications, this research focuses on New
York State, where Cornell University’s extension service provided thousands of rural women with
methods for “remodeling” their garments and their rooms in order to make them more fashionable at
little or no cost. At sponsored home demonstrations, lectures and week-long winter courses, extension
faculty taught women to use existing garments as raw material in the construction of new, more
fashionable pieces of clothing. In the process, rural women began to more fully understand the modern
design aesthetic. At the same time, home demonstration agents informed their rural constituents about
the desired qualities of the modern interior environment by identifying modern design principles. They
also encouraged them to imagine ways in which their existing spaces could be improved using materials
and furnishings already on hand.
This paper will assert that women’s knowledge of fashionable modern clothing design and construction
empowered them to take control over the design of their interior environments and to apply the
principles of modern design to their homes in innovative and cost-saving ways. It will also attempt to
demonstrate that the unlikely partnership of fashion and thrift helped to elevate the desire for modern
design in commonplace environments.
Biography:
Mary Anne Beecher is an Associate Professor of Interior Architecture at the University of Oregon. She
has a B.A. and an M.A. in interior design and a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Iowa.
Professor Beecher teaches several courses on the history of interior architecture and is also affiliated
with the historic preservation program. Her research interests include American vernacular interiors, the
history of domestic storage, and the history of home economics.
10
Claire Wilcox
Senior Curator Modern Fashion, Victoria & Albert Museum, London
The hot house effect; commissioning an haute couture gown in Paris 1947-57
‘The fashion houses were rather awe-inspiring, you walked into a fashion house and the atmosphere
was always a little bit like going into a high-class museum or a church…there was a silence’.1 This
paper will examine the way that commissioning an haute couture gown in the post-war period in Paris
and London was choreographed within the exclusive and luxurious interior of the couture house and the
effect that this specific environment had on such an experience. Individual clients traversed a series of
ante-chambers (entrance, boutique, stairway) as they progressed deeper into the heart of the house,
before reaching their final destination, the mirror-filled salon, where house models gave private viewings
of the collection. This experience was deliberately heightened by the heavily scented, muffled
atmosphere (vendeuses spoke in whispers). The only sound was the rustle of dresses. Having selected
a number of designs the client then moving into the fitting rooms, where their measurements were taken
(to be recorded on padded dressmakers figures, never seen by the client). They then endured a series
of fittings over several weeks, repeating the journey through the different areas of the fashion house
each time.
The paper will contrast these intimate, corporeal encounters with the experience of the boutique client.
Although located within the same grander landscape of the house, here visitors were shoppers rather
than clients, gratification was instant and the interior landscape changed constantly. Christian Dior
described the interior of his boutique in 1948 as ‘a sort of little portico entirely papered with cream Toile
de Juy, covered in sepia drawings…the boutique experienced…the feeling of showing its wares to the
public. Each season it was entirely redecorated in the spirit of the big collection.’
This paper will draw on current research undertaken for the forthcoming V&A exhibition The Golden Age
of Couture: Paris and London 1947-1957 and accompanying publication.
Biography:
Senior Curator, Modern Fashion, Victoria & Albert Museum. Curator of Radical Fashion (2001),
Versace at the V&A (2002), Vivienne Westwood (2004), The Golden Age of Couture, Paris and London
1947-1957 (September 2007). All with accompanying publications.
1
Percy Savage, The British Library Sound Archives, London
11
Dr. Meltem Ö Gürel
Dept. of Interior Architecture and Environmental Design, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey
Woman as a Representative of Turkish Modernization and the Modern Domicile in the Mid-20th
Century.
This study examines the prevalent ideas around Turkish modernity, socio-political modernization, and
Westernization as related to concepts of fashion, women and domestic interiors during the 1950s and
the early 1960s. It traces ideas, values, and norms around women’s fashion and trends of interior
design at a discursive level through a wide range of sources: visual and textual materials published in
popular magazines, professional journals, advertisements, and oral histories. The intend is to decipher
how images of women and interior design operated at a certain income level relative to the convoluted
ideas of Western and Modern amid post World War II and the ensuing cold war political and economic
dynamics.
In the mid-20th century, many threads came together to represent the ‘modern’ state in Turkey; these
included the modernization of cities, modern architecture, interior design, and a feminine culture
depicting an imported expression of the Western housewife that celebrated a clean look. Hygiene in the
city and at home was an underlying theme of Turkish modernization. Women and fashion took the lead
in playing out this theme. Western looks were associated with both proper social roles and the national
identity, which adhered firmly to the reconfigured West in the postwar years. Powerful images of stylish
women, situated happily in hygienic environments, spread through the cold war regions, including
Turkey, where capitalism was promoted to combat the perils of communism; domestic space shaped by
consumerism had a great impact. During the absence of television in Turkey, popular magazines,
Hollywood movies, and advertisements, all played a crucial role in conceptualizing the ‘modern’ Turkish
woman as a homemaker – a mother, a wife, a domestic manager, and a fashionably dressed Western
figure – in charge of the appearance of the modern domicile in the urban context. They not only
applauded this feminine culture, but they stabilized it in the domestic space as the modern way of life.
Biography:
Meltem Gürel has taught at Bilkent University in the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture in Ankara,
Turkey since 1994. She received a Ph.D. in architecture (2007), Master of Architecture (1990), a
Bachelor of Science in Architectural Studies, and a Bachelor of Science in Interior Design (1986) from
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Some of Gürel’s academic awards include a Francis J.
Plym Doctoral Fellowship, an Edward L. Ryerson Traveling Award in Architecture, an Alan K. and
Leonarda F. Laing Fellowship, Outstanding Master’s Design Thesis Project, and the Outstanding
Academic Achievement Award – for being the top ranked undergraduate student upon graduation. Prior
to her teaching position at Bilkent University, Gürel practiced in Illinois and New York. In 1997, she
visited the School of Architecture, University of Illinois as an adjunct professor. Gürel has taught design
studio, design graphics, and architecture and interior architecture theory/history courses. She has
contributed to edited books and published in journals including the Journal of Architectural Education.
Gürel’s research interests include the history and theory of modern architecture, cross-cultural histories
of modernism with an emphasis on social, gender, and cultural studies as they have influenced the built
environment in Turkey, domestic domain, interior space, and interior design/architecture education.
12
Dr. John Potvin
University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada
‘Su Casa + Mi Casa = Armani Casa: Domesticating a Global Textured Lifestyle’
In recent years a number of wildly successful and globally influential fashion designers have adapted
their sartorial savoir faire to transform the home, colonizing the domestic realm to create a recreate a
‘living’ show room or a modern day Gesamstkunstwerk. This new ‘total work of art’ has transformed
modern living into a complete aesthetic programme – or lifestyle – affecting all facets of the visual and
material culture of consuming subjects. One designer who has successfully translated his fashion
vocabulary into broader design principles for the home is Italian designer Giorgio Armani. Inaugurated
in 2000 with an initial flagship store in Via Manzoni in the heart of Milan, Armani/Casa has grown into a
critically acclaimed and highly successful design enterprise. Armani/Casa was initially inspired by his
own minimalist Milanese palazzo replete with furniture by French Art Deco designer Jean Michel Frank
as well as his volcanic stone island retreat off the Tunisian coast, Pantelleria. Armani’s home design
programme ostensibly functions as a natural progression in terms of a desire for both greater market
share and global aesthetic expansion, affecting people on a more personal and private level. As one
would expect, the distinctly ‘Armani’ principles of minimalism, essential shapes, restrained luxury, and
heightened sophistication are not only retained in, but explored in greater depth and volume in the
Armani/Casa collection.
The Armani aesthetic is a truly modernist utopian ideal that invokes a blind faith that beauty (at a high
price) can transform our spaces and even our world. At the heart of the rigorous and uncompromising
Armani aesthetic is a constant tension between the modern and the classic, the timely and the timeless.
The manner in which he seemingly resolves this tension is through the appropriation of textiles, forms,
and references from other cultures and distinct periods (Art Deco from the Shanghai of the 1920s and
1930s, for example) only to translate them into a distinctly modern and ‘Armani’ material culture.
Through an exploration of this act of ‘translation’, this paper hopes to tease out the text/ures of
globalization, aesthetics, and domesticity which have created Armani’s distinctive iconic fashion lexicon
and his rigorous interior design principles.
Biography:
John Potvin is Assistant Professor of Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century European Art at the University
of Guelph, Canada. Dr. Potvin has published articles in Genders and the Journal of Design History, and
his first book, Material and Visual Cultures Beyond Male Bonding, 1880-1914: Bodies, Boundaries and
Intimacy (forthcoming in 2008 with Ashgate) explores the visual culture of male same-sex intimacy and
the ethics of corporeality in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. He is co-editing a volume of essays with
Alla Myzelev, Material Culture in Britain, 1750-1920: The Visual Meanings and Pleasures of Collecting
as well as editing a collection, The Places and Spaces of Fashion, 1800-2006, for Routledge. He has
received a number of awards for his research including a Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council Doctoral Fellowship, a Bader Fellowship in Art History and most recently a Paul Mellon
Research Grant. He is currently working on two book length manuscripts. The first explores the
aesthetics of queer artists and domesticity in Britain, Bachelors of a Different Sort: Material Culture and
Same-Sex Desires, 1890-1940, while the second Black Label: Giorgio Armani, Modernity and the
Tailored Body critically explores the Italian designer’s influence on tailoring, the body, and global
fashion.
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Nicky Ryan
Dept. of Visual Culture and Theory, London College of Communication, University of the Arts, London
Fashioning the Modern Medici
‘[…] in the end, it all fits together: art, fashion, architecture, design – even shopping. It’s theatre really. A
modern spectacle for a modern world’.2
(Germano Celant, Director of the Prada Foundation)
Today some of the most prolific and powerful collectors in the international art world are the owners of
luxury fashion and goods conglomerates. Francois Pinault the chairman and principal owner of PPR
(Pinault-Printemps-Redoute), Bernard Arnault, Chairman and CEO of LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moet
Hennessy), Cartier’s Chief Executive Officer, Alain Dominique Perrin and Miuccia Prada, owner and
Creative Director of Prada, all possess significant art collections and have established independent Art
Foundations. The nurturing of cultural cachet through an association with the arts was nothing new, as
art historian Nancy Troy has demonstrated in relation to French designer Paul Poiret, who at the turn of
twentieth century, claimed artistic credibility through his self-construction as an artist. Poiret selfconsciously staged his performance as 'couturier, designer, art collector, party-giver and entrepreneur'
to 'mask the character of his interlocking activities’.3
This paper argues that the owners of premium brands are keen to be portrayed as model post-industrial
patrons, funding modern art and hiring architects from the international intellectual elite in order to
achieve distinction. The creation of spectacular flagship buildings and store interiors featuring
contemporary art installations and designated gallery spaces, contribute to the enhancement of brand
image and the aestheticisation of corporate identity. This strategy enables the brand owners to
construct an artistic identity that contributes to an obfuscation of commercial operations as the
‘spectacle’ of fashion is privileged above manufacturing and production processes. The proposition that
corporate identity has increasingly become linked with artistic creativity will be discussed in relation to
branded luxury interiors and tested against Pierre Bourdieu’s writings about social distinction (1984) and
his analysis of the ‘field’ of cultural production (1993).4
Biography:
Nicky Ryan is a senior lecturer in Visual Culture and Theory at the London College of Communication,
University of the Arts London. She also works as a freelance journalist and is currently completing her
PhD in the History of Art.
Address: The Marketing School, London College of Communication, University of the Arts London,
Elephant & Castle, London SE1 6SB. [email: n.ryan@lcc.arts.ac.uk]
2
Quoted by Michael Webb, ‘Open House,’ Frame Nov/Dec Issue 41 (2004).
Nancy Troy, Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion. (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2003), p. 80.
4
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. trans. Richard Nice. (London:
Routledge, 1984) and The Field of Cultural Production. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993).
3
14
Shelly Fox
Designer in Residence (2006), Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University
The work of Shelley Fox explores unusual and arresting themes, on both technical and conceptual
levels. Scorched felted wool and burnt cotton bandaging, the use of laser beams and sound waves that
strike the cloth with ‘invisible heat’, negative imagery printed onto fabric, Braille markings on boiled wool
and Morse Code communication are all examples of past work. It is very much underscored by an
interest in humanity and the interaction between people. The use of family snaps of collaborators
Scanner and D-Fuse, together with portraits of her family with those closest to her provided the notion of
future lives as the starting place for collection 14. Within this collection we see the interweaving of
dinner napkins and pillowcases sourced from international airlines and restaurants, mixed with luxury
fabrics to create a totally unprecedented result.
A key part of Fox’s work involves collaborations with creatives from other disciplines including Tomato,
the London based multi-design collective, SHOWstudio the fashion multimedia workshop led by Nick
Knight, acclaimed sound artist, Scanner, Michael Clark Dance Company and recently, Wayne
McGregor of Random Dance.
Fox is developing a following of international admirers and her work has been included in various
prestigious exhibitions including shows at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Design Museum, the
Barbican Art Gallery, Modemuseum, the Crafts Council, Antwerp Landed 2001, FIT in New York and
British Council exhibitions that have travelled through Frankfurt, Bordeaux, Belgium, Poland, Lithuania,
Prague, Copenhagen, Utrecht, Moscow, Berlin, Stockholm and Tokyo.
Recent projects have included ‘Negative’, a collection of clothing shown as part of Friday Late at the
Victoria and Albert Museum in April 2005, culminating in 4 shows in one evening, which was jointly
sponsored by the Arts Council and the V&A. This was followed by a collaborative project with Wayne
McGregor of Random Dance for the World Premiere of ‘Amu’ at Sadlers’ Wells.
Biography
Since graduating from MA Fashion at Central St Martins College of Art and Design, London based
designer, Shelley Fox has built up a following for her experimental and innovative womenswear which
has been stocked in stores worldwide including Europe, Hong Kong, USA and Japan.
Internationally recognised as a directional and conceptual designer, she is one of a rare breed of
modern designers renowned for her innovative use of materials, manipulation of fabric and a main
priority for her is the development of unorthodox pattern cutting. The result re-defines how clothes can
be worn, constantly question conventions, for example working circles of fabric to create one piece and
dual waisted skirts. Her training in both fashion and textiles produces a highly individual and distinctive
style.
Fox was awarded both the Jerwood Fashion Prize and The Peugeot Design Award for Textiles in 1999,
the Crafts Council Development Award and is now a Senior Research Fellow at Central St Martins
College of Art and Design. She was recently awarded the Stanley Picker Fellowship for Design, which
saw the launch of www.shelleyfox.com in conjunction with the project, ‘Philadelphia Florist’, a collection
inspired by a set of 1937-39 diaries found on a New York flea market.
15
Professor Ian Griffiths
Creative Director, Max Mara and Visiting Professor, School of Fashion, Kingston University.
‘Fashion and Contemporary Retail Environments: a Practitioner's View'
MaxMara is an Italian-based clothing manufacturer founded in 1953. With over 1000 stores globally, the
company has developed a strong understanding of the retail environment as an important means of
emphasising the image of the product in the context of a suggested lifestyle, communicating brand
values and highlighting specific seasonal developments.
From a practitioner's perspective this presentation will illustrate how the design of garments, and the
design and furnishing of interior space are inextricably linked in the development of an industrially based
clothing range.
Radical changes in proportion and silhouette aim to motivate the consumer to buy, but they may also
obscure the product's underlying philosophy, and therefore damage the long term interests of the brand.
This problem is at the core of our activity and one of the ways in which we attempt to communicate
enduring values is through the design of the store itself. The turnover of ideas in the fashion industry is
mercurial and bewildering, and the majority are consigned to oblivion within a few seasons. A store on
the other hand gives the impression of something permanent, a manifestation of absolute and enduring
values. The very choice of architect is perceived as a statement about the product. Thus, Calvin Klein,
Jil Sander and lately Marks & Spencers collaboration with John Pawson imply a high minded approach
to design, a sense of order, absolute modernity. Similarly, Prada's association with Rem Koolhaas
reinforces an idea of technological innovation allied to museum worthy artistic endeavour. Comme des
Garçons collaboration with Takao Kawasaki in New York invites us to consider the product according to
the criteria that would be applied to the artworks hanging in neighbouring galleries.
I will also illustrate how considerations regarding the disposition of the product within the retail
environment are central to the design process. Our collections are developed and marketed as
complete packages and our collaboration with an international visual merchandising network attempts to
ensure that our product will communicate to the consumer through its arrangement in the retail space
and windows, which in popular culture are an expression of an ideal world.
Biography:
Ian Griffiths, previously Head of the School of Fashion and Research Fellow at Kingston University, is
now Professor in the Design Research Centre. His work concerns fashion and design within the context
of mass production. He initiated the MaxMara Fashion Theory lecture series held at Kingston, resulting
in the book, The Fashion Business: Theory, Practice, Image, (2000).
Griffiths has been commissioned by MaxMara since 1987 to conceive research, design, develop and
direct a high fashion womenswear collection, which is premiered each season in Milan. The work is
based on the use of traditional tailoring techniques and technologically advanced fabrics. Griffiths is
continually re-defining the contemporary classic garment in an international high fashion context. He is
also extending the MaxMara lifestyle and brand philosophy through design, architectural and marketing
concepts for MaxMara stores worldwide.
Griffiths is responsible for the developmental strategies of the collections and products, providing the
conceptual, creative and visual framework for these strategies. This involves the development of
concepts; interpretation of themes into colour, fabric and structure; development of silhouettes and
design of garments; participation in the promotion of the product; advertising, merchandising and
display. He is the concept designer for MaxMara store interiors, including Madison Avenue New York.
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Professor Alice T. Friedman
Professor of Art and Architecture, Wellesley College, USA
Alice T. Friedman is Professor of Art and Director of the Architecture Program at Wellesley College,
Massachusett, USA, where she has taught since 1979. Research specialisms are architecture, gender
and social history. She has written widely on these subjects and is the author of Women and the
Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural History (Harry Abrams, New York, 1998). Her
most recent research is for a book on American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture.
Professor Pat Kirkham
Professor of Design History, Bard Graduate Centre for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design & Culture, USA
Pat Kirkham is Professor of Design History at the Bard Graduate Centre for Studies in the Decorative
Arts, Design and Culture, New York. She has written widely on design, gender and film. Recent
publications include Women Designers in the USA, 1900-2000, Diversity and Difference (2000),
Twentieth Century Interiors (2007) and Saul Bass (2007).
Professor Penny Sparke
Pro Vice-Chancellor (Arts), Kingston University and Director of the Modern Interior Research Centre
Penny Sparke is a Pro Vice-Chancellor (Arts) and a Professor of Design History at Kingston University,
London. She graduated in French Literature from Sussex University in 1971 and was awarded her
doctorate, on the subject of British design theory and practice in the 1960s, in 1975. She taught the
History of Design from 1972 to 1982 at Brighton Polytechnic and at the Royal College of Art in London
from 1982 to 1999. She has lectured widely, and published over a dozen books and numerous essays
and articles, in the field of Design History over the last twenty-five years with an emphasis, since the
mid 1990s, on the relationship between design, gender and the interior. Her books include As Long as
It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste (Pandora, London, 1995), An Introduction to Design and Culture –
1900 to the present (Routledge, London, 2004) and Elsie de Wolfe: The Birth of Modern Interior
Decoration (Acanthus Press, New York, 2005). She is currently writing a book, for Reaktion Press,
which will be entitled Inside Modernity: The Making of the Modern Interior.
Professor Sparke is chair of the Academic Advisory Board of the AHRC Research Centre for Textile
Conservation and Textile Studies; and a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the ARHRC
Research Centre for Study of the Domestic Interior; the RIBA Research and Development Board; the
AHRC College of Reviewers; the RAE 2008 sub-panel for the History of Art, Architecture and Design;
the Editorial Advisory Board for the Journal of Design History; the Editorial Board of Modern Italy; the
Advisory Board of the Design History Workshop (Japan); the Advisory Editorial Board of Design History
Japan; and an Assistant Editor of The Design Journal. Since 1979 Professor Sparke has successfully
supervised twelve (successful) PhD students. She is currently supervising seven others.
Dr. Trevor Keeble
Head of School, Art and Design History; Course Director MA Design History, Kingston University
Trevor Keeble studied for a BA(Hons) in Interior Design at Brighton University and an MA in the History
of Design at the Royal College of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum. He has recently completed a
PhD (RCA) entitled The Domestic Moment: Design, Taste and Identity in the Late Victorian Interior,
which considers the representation of late Victorian domestic design culture.
Trevor’s research interests focus upon late nineteenth and twentieth century design history. As an
Associate Director of the University’s Centre for the Study of the Modern Interior, his research has been
particularly concerned with the professional, commercial and consumer interfaces of domestic design
and provision throughout this period. He is currently co-supervising a number of PhD research students
whose projects include Victorian domestic design advice, the Edwardian domestic interior, Public
interior spaces at the turn of the 19th Century, and the influence of Sweden upon mid-twentieth century
British Design.
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Recent publications include ‘Creating the New Room: The Hall Sisters of West Wickham and Richard
Norman Shaw’ in Penny Sparke and Brenda Martin (eds) Women’s Places: Architecture and Design
1860-1960, Routledge, 2003; ‘The Social Space of the Interior’ in Elizabeth Darling & Lesley Whitworth
(eds) Women and the Making of Built Space in England 1870-1950, Ashgate, 2005; 'Domesticating
Modernity. Woman magazine and the modern home’ in Jeremy Aynsley (ed) Mediating Design Through
Magazines, Manchester University Press, 2004/5.
Professor Anne Wealleans
School of Design History, Kingston University
Anne Wealleans took her BA (Hons) History of Art, Design and Film and a PhD on the Independent
Group, both at University of Northumbria. Her current research interests include the history of luxury in
interior design and decoration, particularly in relation to ocean liners which is the subject of her latest
book Designing Liners: The History of Interior Design Afloat (2006). Anne has published widely on
aspects of twentieth century visual and material culture, and her books include The Independent Group
(1995), Interior Design in the 20th Century (1990, 2001), Blue Guide: Berlin and Eastern Germany
(1994) and Hollywood Beyond the Screen (2001). She has written for a range of journals, including
Block, Art Monthly and Art History and contributed to programmes broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Anne is
an Associate Director of the Modern Interiors Research Centre at Kingston University.
Brenda Martin
Curator, Dorich House Museum, Kingston University
Brenda Martin is the Curator at the Dorich House Museum, the studio home of the Latvian born
sculptor, Dora Gordine (1898-1991). She read Literature and History of Art and Architecture, with a
dissertation on Neo-primitivism in the work of the Russian artist Natalia Goncharova, at Kingston
University (1993) and took a post-graduate Diploma in Arts Administration at the Roehampton Institute
(1994).
After co-curating the overseas touring exhibition Fantasy for the Womens Art Library in 1994, she
returned to Kingston University as the Research Assistant on the Dorich House renovation project,
becoming its Curator in 1997. She is currently researching the studio houses created by Dora Gordine
in Paris, Singapore and London (Dorich House) in preparation for a co-authored monograph on the
artist due to be published in 2007 and the major retrospective exhibition of Gordine’s work to be held in
2008. Recent publications include ‘A house of her own; Dora Gordine and Dorich House (1936)’ in
‘Women’s Places: Architecture and Design 1860-1960. Eds. Brenda Martin and Penny Sparke (2003),
‘Photographs of a legacy at the Dorich House Museum’ in The Modern Period Room, 1870-1950: The
Construction of the Exhibited Interior, Eds. Trevor Keeble, Brenda Martin and Penny Sparke (2006) and
The Dora Gordine Sculpture Collection at the Dorich House Museum (2005).
Brenda instituted the series of Dorich House Annual Conferences in May 1999 to provide a forum to
discuss the issues arising from the study of Dorich House and Dora Gordine within the wider academic
community. She is a member of the Modern Interiors Research Centre at Kingston University.
18