Call for Papers
Fashioning the Modern Interior
The Dorich House Annual Conference #9.
Hosted by the Modern Interiors Research Centre, Kingston University, London, in association with the Research Department, Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
Thursday 17th May and Friday 18th May 2007
The modern interior has often been perceived as a stage-set for women and occasionally men adorned in fashionable dress – in effect as a space in which both individual identity and modernity could be expressed. Elsie de Wolfe, the American pioneer interior decorator held this view, and it was shared by many other aesthetic practitioners in the age of modernity, defined here as around 1870- to the present day, who made an easy transition from the design of the interior to that of fashionable dress and vice versa. Paul Poiret, for example, famously crossed both, while more recently Ralph Lauren has blurred the boundaries between the two areas, rooting his practice in the holistic concept of ‘lifestyle’. If fashionable dress and the interior can be seen as part of the same creative and expressive continuum, then the concept of ‘fashion’ itself arguably underpins the definitions of both the interior and dress viewed from this perspective. Both, as Charles Baudelaire, Thorsten Veblen, Georg Simmel and later Walter Benjamin understood, had the capacity to contain the sense of ‘belonging to the modern world’ and of expressing, in Bourdieu’s sense of the term, ‘distinction’. Currently, the popularity of countless television programmes dedicated to the subject is still an indication of the link between fashion and the interior today.
While, on one level, fashionability and modernity undoubtedly went hand in hand, in contrast architectural Modernism, the values of which were transferred directly to the Modernist interior and to Rational dress, explicitly rejected the idea of fashion, seeing it as a threat to the universal values it sought to embody.
This conference will seek to uncover and debate the numerous ways in which the interior and fashionable dress have intersected with each other in the period in question. Papers will address the following themes, among others:
Individuals who crossed the fashionable dress/interior divide
The meaning of ‘fashion’ in the context of modernity and its impact on dress and the interior
Tensions between fashion and anti-fashion in dress and the interior
The emergence of ‘lifestyle’ in this context
The influence of the mass media
Fashionable dress and identity in the context of the interior
Fashionable dress and the interior in the context of consumption
Conference convenors are Professor Penny Sparke, Professor Anne Massey, Dr. Trevor Keeble and Brenda Martin, Kingston University.
Abstracts of 300 words, with brief cv should be submitted to Brenda Martin, Dorich House Museum, Kingston University, Kingston Vale, London SW15 3RN . e-mail
b.martin@kingston.ac.uk. by Friday 5th January 2007.
Conference website:
www.kingston.ac.uk/design/mirc
