Fashion & Interiors

This impressive catalog explores the relationship between fashion and interior design through a gendered lens. In the Victorian era, well-to-do women embellished their bodies and interiors with draped fabrics, frills and ruffles. They visually blended into their surroundings or even threatened to disappear into them. Contemporary fashion designers conceptualise that fusion by transforming interior elements into clothing.

Fashion & Interiors also highlights how male designers, such as Henry van de Velde and Josef Hoffmann, designed women’s clothing as part of a total work of art. Fashion designers Paul Poiret and Jeanne Lanvin took inspiration from that approach and deployed interior design in the ‘branding’ of their fashion house. The impact of clothing also resonated with modernist (interior) architects such as Adolf Loos, Lilly Reich and Le Corbusier.

The historical connection between fashion and interiors continues to influence fashion designers such as Ann Demeulemeester, Martin Margiela and Raf Simons.

With text contributions by Romy Cockx (MoMu), Robin Schuldenfrei (The Courtauld Institute of Art), Lara Steinhäußer (MAK) and other subject specialists.