White the walls, white shoes, clothed white: from his Paris atelier, fashion designer Martin Margiela reworked the world, including both fashion and interiors, in merciless whitewash. Charting the intricate dance of these two applied-art disciplines – by turns synchronised and discordant – the exhibition at Antwerp’s Momu, subtitled A Gendered Affair, traces their interplay all the way back to the late 19th century. Inside the show, a bleached bureau reappears in an installation by the Belgian master of Postmodernist deconstruction – one of the most striking encapsulations of the connection between garments and garniture today. Simultaneously recalling the totality of Gilded Age environments, and neutralising them with his brush and bucket of white emulsion, Margiela – as well as the entire show – questions not only the way interior design has reflected fashion but how their relationship engages the philosophical atmosphere around them.
From simulacra to synecdoche… where the infamously anonymous designer imagined a jacket, printed in trompe l’oeil with the quilted latticework of a chesterfield sofa, so the bourgeois housewife of the 1870s found herself turned by her wardrobe into living upholstery. As silhouettes changed, and the crinoline deflated, the volume of fashion worked its way round to the back in tiered and bustle-capped constructions. Like chameleons embodying the contents of their vivariums, such dresses echoed the drapery hung around window fixtures, four-poster beds, and the fashionably fringed and flounced seats introduced by Empress Eugénie: the goût tapissier come to life. The delineation between gender roles was as rigid as the corseted contrivances that engineered such structures: men in their grey, tailored clothes inhabited the smoggy architectural urban environment, and women, draped in the same paisley pashminas with which furniture was bedecked, the interior.
Women may have escaped their plush and patterned pens; fashion’s obsession with transposing interior decoration to clothes, however, persists: for autumn/winter 2005, Viktor & Rolf wrapped their models in duvet-couture and rolled them down the runway with bed-hair overflowing pillow-bonnets; the verdure tapestries of Kelmscott Manor have found themselves cut down and transposed into tailored tapestry-suits by Dries van Noten for spring/summer 2017; and, in one of fashion’s most memorable performances pieces, for the finale of Hussein Chalayan’s autumn/winter 2000 show, a model carefully extruded a coffee-table like a telescope, and exited with it suspended from her hips. Displaced and evacuated: the last-mentioned British/Cypriot designer may have been directly influenced by his experience of forced migration, but in the work of many contemporary designers, the meshing-together of fashion and interiors reflects a more metaphysical dislocation – lives where work is done as much in bed as from the office and fast-fashion is bought on the same phones where interior existence is increasingly lived out.
Homes change, and fashion with them: even digital backgrounds are now known as wallpapers. A zenith of alignment – and, indeed, refinement – was perhaps, never more fully achieved than in the rooms of early 20th-century design and the clothes that passed through them. The Modernists saw it necessary to liberate themselves from the strictures of bourgeois domesticity by remaking the world – everything from floors and cutlery to shoes and dresses – in their singular vision. The tidy-minded practitioners of the Wiener Werkstätte, for instance, imagined handcrafted patterns overflowing the room and on to the body. Adolf Loos, conceiving their constructions as effeminate, tailored interiors like the unadorned cut of the Savile Row suits he so admired. Consistency was the key. Over into the world of haute couture, meanwhile, designers from Paul Poirot to Jeanne Lanvin designed for themselves ateliers and shops reflective of the values they transposed into the clothes – which became aids as much to commerce as grand ideals of design.
Interior design as glorified consumer space: thus is the dance between the two increasingly defined today. Where the 19th century interior sucked fashion into its highly delineated orbit, increasingly fashion dominates the moves of the modern interiors industry. It is the Ralph Laurenification of shopping – the ultimate one-stop lifestyle shop. The fount of inspiration Ann Demeulemeester found living in the only house Corbusier built in Belgium is analogous to how the precepts underlying interior design have worked their way not only into fashion but back into homewares. Often it seems that the relationship between clothes and interiors is more a question of style contagion: once infected, like the rocaille of gilded woodwork, it cannot but force its way across everything – until fashion, always ready to get bored by over-exposure, disposes of it in favour of something fresh. What is clear is that, never mind how much Margiela reaches for the emulsion, the relationship refuses to be whitewashed.
‘Fashion and Interiors. A Gendered Affair’ runs until August 2025 at Momu – Fashion Museum Antwerp. For more information, visit momu.be.
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