Women in Interiors
The conversation begins in the late 19th century—the time when Western middle-class women had to reflect their family’s status and wealth by decorating the house and their dresses. “Women quite literally faded into their interior,” Cockx explained. Josef Hoffmann of the Wiener Werkstätte and Henry van de Velde, for example, expanded their artistic vision onto women’s wardrobes for their dress to align with the interior they belonged to.
The exhibition is composed of interesting juxtapositions. Heading into 20th-century modernism, Cockx, quite wittily, puts Adolf Loos—an Austrian architect and polemicist of modern architecture—and Lilly Reich, a modernist German interior designer, in the same room for Reich to be an immediate counter-argument to Loos’s misogynistic rhetoric.
In parallel, Cockx examines the bourgeois idea of ‘domesticity’—elements of it found in the works of Dries Van Noten, Marine Serre, and Craig Green—and contrasts it with current themes of nomadism and displacement in the collections of Hussein Chalayan, Maison Margiela, and Viktor & Rolf.
