Wearing the Home in Times of Anxiety

For centuries, clothing and interiors have enjoyed a harmonious relationship. For example, both formed or disciplined the body of the eighteenth-century elite in accordance with social etiquette and performance.1 A century later, women were in danger of merging with the interior, while for the husband who went out to work, the ideal bourgeois home was essentially a domicile and retreat. The lady of the house was responsible for making the home comfortable and so the furnishings were characterized by an abundance of drapery, passementerie, soft textures and materials with which she also adorned herself. Or as Thorstein Veblen so aptly expressed it: “Her sphere is the household, which she should ‘beautify’ and of which she should be the ‘chief ornament’”.2 That ornamental role of the woman was given substance in the ideal home by discerning designers like Henry van de Velde and Josef Hoffmann. They approached the home and everything in it as a Gesamtkunstwerk and designed not only furniture and utility objects, but also women’s clothing and accessories. Inspired by this, French fashion designer Paul Poiret made the combination of fashion and interior a branding strategy and over the last hundred years numerous fashion houses have followed his example.3

In recent decades, interior elements have acquired wearability. In a variety of ways, fashion reflects our social anxieties4 and the vulnerability of our home as a safe haven seems to inspire fashion designers, consciously or subconsciously, to design wearable interior elements. In the run-up to the year 2000, for example, there was real concern about the so-called millennium bug, which it was believed would cause computer systems around the world to fail resulting in power outages, plane crashes and an apocalyptic recession. Thanks to Maison Martin Margiela, women could prepare for the worst and take the comfort of a warm bed with them wherever they went. Its 1999-2000 Autumn-Winter collection featured a coat made out of a duvet: two long, detachable sleeves were attached with zips to a quilted, feather-filled, white cotton duvet. The Maison presented the collection in a film in which vintage floral motifs were projected onto the models wearing the white coat. Ringing out in the background was Timmy Thomas’ song ‘Why Can’t We Live Together’. The duvet coat could be worn with a duvet cover made from 1970s floral bedsheets or with a protective PVC cover.

Simultaneously with Margiela, Walter Van Beirendonck designed several blanket coats for men. A quilted blanket made up of patches of printed cotton was secured with a cord at waist level and a safety pin at the neck. The frayed edge revealed a warm lining and underneath a bodysuit. Van Beirendonck sent his models into the new millennium in protective gear: they wore helmets designed to protect them from sunlight and the atmosphere.5 Wearing bedroom comfort outdoors has since been explored by numerous fashion designers. The Dutch designer duo Viktor & Rolf added satin pillows to a collection that merged evening wear and nightwear with bedding. The luxury materials, finished with embroidery and lace, and the title ‘Bedtime Story’ evoked the atmosphere of a dream world from which you never want to wake up.

With the Tokyo-based label Jenny Fax, pillows and pillowcases took on the shape of the body. The Taiwanese designer Jen-Fang Shueh reworked an ultra-girly teenager’s bedroom into soft armour. The pillow is no longer a pillow to drift off to sleep on, but one that helps you face the world. The collections of Marine Serre, who like Shueh studied at La Cambre, regularly feature repurposed soft furnishing fabrics, including constants like silhouettes made out of sheets, duvets and table linen. She also gives brocade home furnishing fabrics a new lease of life. In her 2020 Autumn-Winter collection, she combined them with her signature crescent-moon motif and jeans. Craig Green sent ‘carpets’ strutting down the runway. His silhouettes often boast architectural qualities, creating a sense of protection. A state of isolation is regularly expressed in his collections, as exemplified by his 2017-2018 Autumn-Winter show, which featured menswear that allows the wearer to brave unknown waters and an uncertain future.

Furniture is also a source of inspiration for fashion designers, as illustrated by Hussein Chalayan’s trailblazing 2000-2001 Autumn-Winter collection. The models entered an all-white space furnished with four chairs, a coffee table, a flat-screen television and a range of vases and bowls, which, one by one, they picked up and took with them. At the end of the show, four of the models removed the covers from the chairs. They then put the covers on over their grey shift dresses, two of the covers having first been turned inside out. The chairs were folded up into suitcases. The last model stepped inside the coffee table and transformed it into a wooden skirt. Chalayan’s show referenced the experiences of refugees hastily packing up their possessions as they are forced to flee. Not only was this a topical theme at the time, following in the wake of the war in Kosovo (1998-1999), but it was also personal to the Turkish-Cypriot designer who had had to flee his homeland in the 1970s. For a couple of years, chairs were part of Chalayan’s collection. The inspiration was largely one of form in his 2006-2007 Autumn-Winter collection: several short, black coat dresses were fitted with round, leather collars, which reference the bolster-shaped back of Charlotte Perriand’s swivel chair, her ‘fauteuil pivotant’. That same season, Maison Martin Margiela also merged fashion and furniture by re-fashioning seat covers into clothing. The collection included a jacket made using leather upholstery from an easy chair and also a velvet skirt using material from an armchair. Large sale tags listing the specifications were attached to the clothes or printed on white T-shirts. Upholstery nails adorned hems and seams and the remote control for an electrical reclining chair served as a belt. Besides translating his interest in deconstruction and repurposing into furniture, Margiela also used it to further explore his penchant for trompe l’œil. Several garments from the 2004-2005 Autumn-Winter collection were printed with the padded leather of a Chesterfield or with a woven rattan seat. The collection was presented to the press in a film in which models located in different interiors did the talking. A double trompe l’œil was created because they sat on furniture which they wore printed on their body while in a voice-over they talked about themselves, their memories and fears. Woman and furniture became one, and the interior served as an extension of the soul with the effect that the collection unconsciously evoked a nineteenth-century ideal. 6

John Galliano, who has been designing for Maison Margiela since 2014, took up the Chesterfield theme in 2018. He presented it in a layered silhouette together with a trench coat draped over the model’s head. A rucksack consisting of a pillow, yoga bolster and screen provided contemporary comfort for the nomadic wearer. As with his controversial ‘Clochard’ collection (for Christian Dior Spring-Summer 2002), Galliano found inspiration in marginalized people who “don’t want to live within the confines of society” and who dress in layers with “their most precious possessions on them”. It was his way of “creating your own world within a world that’s very troubled at the moment”.7 The fashion creations discussed above reflect the disintegration of the modern Western concept of the ideal home centred around safety, comfort and privacy.8 The ever-increasing flow of refugees is fuelling a frenetic defence of this ideal. Climate change, too, has given rise to a growing realization that we have no idea where we will find safety and comfort in the long term. Perhaps Botter’s 2022 Autumn-Winter collection can help us embrace the uncertainty. Inspired by Caribbean culture, they created lightweight, fake-fur covered, plastic chairs, which can be taken anywhere for an honest, human to human conversation.

Fashion. & Interiors: A Gendered Affair is on view at MoMu through August 3, 2025.

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Footnotes:

1. Mimi Hellman, ‘Interior Motives: Seduction by Decoration in Eighteenth-Century France’, in: Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton, Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the 18th century, 2006.

2. Thorstein Veblen, “Dress as an Expression of the Pecuniary Culture”, in: The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1899, p 180.

3. Jess Berry, House of Fashion. Fashion and the Modern Interior, 2018, p 39.

4. Caroline Evans, Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness, 2003 and Rebecca Arnold, Fashion, Desire and Anxiety: Image and Morality in the 20th Century, 2001.

5. https://www.waltervanbeirendonck.com/HTML/ PUBLICATIONS/BOOKS/belgianfashiondesign8. html#:~:text=In%20the%20Autumn%2FWinter%20 collection,of%20formal%20’fashion%20archetypes

6. See: Beverly Gordon, ‘Woman’s Domestic Body. The Conceptual Conflation of Women and Interiors in the Industrial Age’, Winterthur Portfolio, Winter 1996, vol. 31, nr. 4, pp 281-301.

7. John Galliano in a review of his collection by Hamish Bowles, Vogue Runway, 4 July 2018.

8. This interpretation began to develop in Northern Europe in the 18th century. Before that, for most of the populations of Europe, ‘home’ had been the place in which work, leisure activities, extended family relationships, the manufacture of clothes and food, and moral education had all co-existed. See: Penny Sparke, The Modern Interior, 2008, p. 22.