Performance Fashion And The Modern Interior

An international assessment of how the last 150 years of interior design have been influenced by the clothes people wear and the desire to create drama and social rituals.

Since Charles Fredrick Worth established his luxurious Maison de Couture in 1858, the interior has played a crucial role in the display of fashion. House of Fashion provides a full historical account of the interplay between fashion and the modern interior, demonstrating how they continue to function as a site for performing modern, gendered identities for designers and their clientele alike. In doing so, it traces how designers including Poiret, Vionnet, Schiaparelli and Dior used commercial spaces and domestic interiors to enhance their credentials as connoisseurs of taste and style. Taking us from the early years of haute couture to the luxury fashion of the present day, Berry explores how the salon, the atelier and the boutique have allowed fashion to move beyond the aesthetics of dress, to embrace the visual seduction of the theatrical, artistic, and the exotic. From the Art Deco allure of Coco Chanel's Maison to the luminous spaces of contemporary flagship stores, House of Fashion sets out fashion's links with key figures in architecture and design, including Louis Süe, Robert Mallet-Stevens, Eileen Gray, and Jean-Michel Frank. Drawing on photographs, advertisements, paintings and illustrations, this interdisciplinary study examines how fashionable interiors have shaped our understanding of architecture, dress, and elegance.

Challenging the notion that fashion and furniture were or are separate enterprises and distinct material aesthetic traditions, this collection focuses on three material and conceptual links central to understanding the relationship between interior design and fashion-the body, fabric, and space. The volume considers the changing visual, material and spatial character, methodological challenges posed by, and formal, political and historiographical significance of, a wide range of British, European and North American case studies since the eighteenth century. The volume's eleven case studies allow the reader to understand connecting notions behind the formation of interiors and fashionable clothing. The essays combine a wide range of significant and challenging new examples alongside powerful reversionary analyses of the various periods, artists, designers, and their best and significant objects. Fashion, Interior Design and the Contours of Modern Identity is concerned not only with fabric, but also with the body and the implications of embodiment in the practices of both design domains which are equally invested in the comfort, aesthetic pleasure, extension and support of the body in different and yet seemingly identical ways.

Edwardian Culture: Beyond the Garden Party is the first truly interdisciplinary collection of essays dealing with culture in Britain c.1895-1914. Bringing together essays on literature, art, politics, religion, architecture, marketing, and imperial history, the study highlights the extent to which the culture and politics of Edwardian period were closely intertwined. The book builds upon recent scholarship that seeks to reclaim the term ‘Edwardian’ from prevalent, restrictive usages by venturing beyond the garden party – and the political rally – to uncover some of the terrain that lies between. The essays in the volume – which deal with both famous writers such as J. M. Barrie and Arnold Bennett, as well as many lesser-known figures – draw attention to the nuanced multiplicity of experience and cultural forms that existed during the period, and highlight the ways in which a closer examination of Edwardian culture complicates our definitions of ‘Victorian’ and ‘Modern’. The book argues that the Edwardian era, rather than constituting a coda to the Victorian period or a languid pause before modernism shook things up, possessed a compelling and creative tenor of its own.

The fashion show and its spaces are sites of otherness, representing everything from rebellion and excess through to political and social activism. This conceptual and stylistic variety is reflected in the spaces they occupy, whether they are staged in an industrial warehouse, on a city street, or out in the open landscape. Staging Fashion is the first collection of essays about the presentation and staging of fashion in runway shows in the period from the 1960s to the 2010s. It offers a fresh perspective on the many collaborations between artists, architects and interior designers to reinforce their interdisciplinary links. Fashion, architecture and interiors share many elements, including design, history, material culture, aesthetics and trends. The research and ideas underpinning Staging Fashion address how fashion and the spatial fields have collaborated in the creation of the space of the fashion show. The 15 essays are written by fashion, interior, architecture and design scholars focusing on the presentation of fashion within the runway space, from avant-garde practices and collaboration with artists, to the most spectacular and commercial shows of recent years, from Prada to Chanel.

Since Charles Fredrick Worth established his luxurious Maison de Couture in 1858, the interior has played a crucial role in the display of fashion. House of Fashion provides a full historical account of the interplay between fashion and the modern interior, demonstrating how they continue to function as a site for performing modern, gendered identities for designers and their clientele alike. In doing so, it traces how designers including Poiret, Vionnet, Schiaparelli and Dior used commercial spaces and domestic interiors to enhance their credentials as connoisseurs of taste and style. Taking us from the early years of haute couture to the luxury fashion of the present day, Berry explores how the salon, the atelier and the boutique have allowed fashion to move beyond the aesthetics of dress, to embrace the visual seduction of the theatrical, artistic, and the exotic. From the Art Deco allure of Coco Chanel's Maison to the luminous spaces of contemporary flagship stores, House of Fashion sets out fashion's links with key figures in architecture and design, including Louis Süe, Robert Mallet-Stevens, Eileen Gray, and Jean-Michel Frank. Drawing on photographs, advertisements, paintings and illustrations, this interdisciplinary study examines how fashionable interiors have shaped our understanding of architecture, dress, and elegance.

Filling a critical gap in Vienna 1900 studies, this book offers a new reading of fin-de-si?e culture in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy by looking at the unusual and widespread preoccupation with embroidery, fabrics, clothing, and fashion - both literally and metaphorically. The author resurrects lesser known critics, practitioners, and curators from obscurity, while also discussing the textile interests of better known figures, notably Gottfried Semper and Alois Riegl. Spanning the 50-year life of the Dual Monarchy, this study uncovers new territory in the history of art history, insists on the crucial place of women within modernism, and broadens the cultural history of Habsburg Central Europe by revealing the complex relationships among art history, women, and Austria-Hungary. Rebecca Houze surveys a wide range of materials, from craft and folk art to industrial design, and includes overlooked sources-from fashion magazines to World's Fair maps, from exhibition catalogues to museum lectures, from feminist journals to ethnographic collections. Restoring women to their place at the intersection of intellectual and artistic debates of the time, this book weaves together discourses of the academic, scientific, and commercial design communities with middle-class life as expressed through popular culture.

Design and Agency brings together leading international design scholars and practitioners to address the concept of agency in relation to objects, organisations and people. The authors set out to expand the scope of design history and practice, avoiding the heroic narratives of a typical modernist approach. They consider both how the agents of design construct and express their identities and subjectivities through practice, while also investigating the distinctive contribution of design in the construction of individual identity and subjectivity. Individual chapters explore notions of agency in a range of design disciplines and historical periods, including the agency of women in effecting changes to the design of offices and working practices; the role of Jeffrey Lindsay and Buckminster Fuller in developing the design of a geodesic dome; Le Corbusier's 'Casa Curutchet'; a re-consideration of the gendered historiography of the 'Jugendstil' movement, and Bruce Mau's design exhibitions. Taken together, the essays in Design and Agency provide a much-needed response to the traditional texts which dominate design history. With a broad chronological span from 1900 to the present, and an equally broad understanding of the term 'design', it expands how we view the discipline, and shows how design itself can be an agent for social, cultural and economic change.