House of Fashion by Jess Berry;

Author:Jess Berry;
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Figure 5.5 Eileen Gray, Rue de Lota Apartment, 1921. © National Museum of Ireland.

Gray’s designs while modern in form often included sensuous surfaces and so were considered outside and deviant to the prevailing machine aesthetic characterized by the essentially masculine features of functional minimalism.35 Attitudes such as this have historically precluded Gray from the modernist canon epitomized by Loos and Le Corbusier, whereby women’s designs were often prescribed with opposing socially determined attributes of femininity. As Lynne Walker argues, Gray’s approach to architecture and design, which focused on the comfort of the occupant, was often attributed to her femininity and attributes of instinct and emotion, rather than the masculine architectural ideal of rationality.36 I argue that Gray’s association with the fashion interior in the form of the Rue de Lota apartment presumably aligned her designs with femininity and, as such, overlooks her contribution to women’s cultures of modernism.

Between 1918 and 1924, Gray renovated and redecorated the 9 rue de Lota apartment of Madame Juliette Mathieu-Lévy—modiste (milliner and dressmaker), of the fashion house J. Suzanne Talbot. This commission was significant as it marked Gray’s transition from furniture design to the interior and architecture, where she designed walls, décors, lighting, and fixtures as well as furniture. The apartment, like much of the designer’s early work, combined modernist simplicity with material sensuality, where her use of textiles, hand-woven carpets, and throw-rugs made of fur and silk provide textual juxtaposition to geometric forms. Her approach to a modern, yet sensuous interior is perhaps partly belied by her view that design should follow from “interpreting the desires, passions and tastes of the individual, [toward] intimate needs [and] individual pleasures”37 as opposed to how “external architecture seems to have absorbed avant-garde architects at the expense of the interior.”38 This sentiment, argues architectural historian Caroline Constant, is true of Gray’s work on Mathieu-Lévy’s apartment in particular, for it was “directed more toward accentuating her client’s individuality rather than the more general human qualities that characterize her later work.”39

Photographs of the Mathieu-Lévy apartment evidence how Gray used tactile materials to enhance the sensuous aspects of her designs in intimate spaces. For example, Baron de Meyer’s photograph of Mathieu-Lévy lounging on the Pirogue day bed for a perfume advertisement for Harper’s Bazaar in 1922 highlights a range of textures and surfaces (Figure 5.6). The reflective lacquered panel walls and the dark lacquered wood of the lounge are accentuated by soft-woolen textiles and shimmering silks. Mathieu-Lévy—dressed in a sequined dress and glittering jewelry—is posed in a manner redolent of Cleopatra, so heightening the appearance of the salon as a luxurious, yet modern backdrop to her glamorous and fashionable figure.

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