Performance, Fashion and the Modern Interior

An international assessment of how the last 150 years of interior design have been influenced by the clothes people wear and the desire to create drama and social rituals.

Performance, Fashion and the Modern Interior examines the interior as a stage upon which modern life and lifestyles are consciously fashioned and performed, and from which modern identities are projected by and through design. Scholars from Europe, Canada, America and Australia present a range of interior environments - domestic interiors, sets for stage and film, exhibition spaces, art galleries, hotel lobbies, cafés and retail spaces - to explore each as an intersection of fashion, lifestyle and performance. Sharing the thesis that the fashionably-dressed body and the interior can be seen as part of the same creative and expressive continuum, the essays highlight the ways in which interiors can give shape to and dramatise modern life.