Carrying the Torch
the lost generation
“The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.” — Gertrude Stein
In reply to our recent article Ruthless Criticism and Losing Friends on how the interiors industry has become increasingly dull and expected, an internationally acclaimed designer, frequently featured in the likes of Vogue and Architectural Digest contacted us with the following quote from Anton Ego as played by iconic British actor Peter O’Toole (1932-2013) in the Disney/Pixar animated-comedy film Ratatouille: “In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defence of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends.” She went on to state, in her own words, “Your kindness toward the interior design community, or a tone which is more constructive and less destructive would be very much appreciated. Please also remember our job is not to please critics, magazine editors, magazine readers, bloggers or instagrammers.” To my mind this somewhat missed the point as the article in question actively encourages individuality in design, closing with the words: coming out of a pandemic that prevented us from meeting new people, seeing new things and making new connections, surely we should embrace whatever possibilities might come our way and the idea that something new and exciting, a new chapter, a new design style, might, with any luck, be just around the corner. With regard to interior design and architecture as a profession, by and large, people start out at a design school; the way in which such institutions nurture and encourage students to grow is via constructive criticism, which might necessarily be negative. It is through such discourse that we develop and build on our own inherent tastes and opinions and learn from the lessons of others who have more experience and quite possibly, a more diverse, well-rounded outlook. For that matter, it’s peculiar to think that any professional designer would wish to live in an echo chamber, whereby only positive feedback is welcome. The problem, for a good many in the industry, is that they haven’t undertaken any kind of rigorous formal education and a good many design studios are unwilling or unable to nurture their employees in a way that brings out the best in them.
Gertrude Stein in her Paris studio, sitting beneath a portrait of her (1930) by Pablo Picasso
La liseuse (The Reading Light) oil on canvas by Juan Gris (1887–1927)
The twentieth century saw the rise of the avant-garde and with it, rapid developments in all areas of the arts; which was in part due to an environment in which there was far more debate, discussion and criticism. American novelist, poet, playwright and art collector Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was one of several women in early twentieth-century Paris to hold weekly “salons” at her duplex apartment on rue de Fleurus in the heart of the city’s artistic Rive Gauche; its walls hung with so many cubist, modernist, and post-impressionist works by the likes of Matisse (1869-1954) Renoir (1841-1919) and Picasso (1880-1973), that the New York Times later dubbed it, “the first museum of modern art”. Born into a wealthy Jewish-American family, Stein inherited early on in life, and rather than going down the traditional route, buying bonds, stocks and shares she instead collected art, starting with historical works by the likes of El Greco (1541-1614) and Delacroix (1798-1863), and then quickly expanding her horizons. She moved to Paris at the turn of the century, along with her brother Leo (1872-1947), an astute collector and critic, and the pair quickly integrated into the Parisian avant-garde and began building a collection unique in its championing new and emerging talent. Evocative of her overall attitude, Stein stated in 1945 that her ambition for literature and art was to “kill the nineteenth century”. Matisse began coming by her apartment on Saturday evenings, and by the 1920’s Stein’s Saturday salons were drawing the great and good of modern literature and art such as Georges Braque (1882-1963), Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) and Ezra Pound (1885-1972). Stein’s influence on the trajectory of twentieth-century modern art cannot possibly be overstated; she was nothing short of a cultural powerhouse, constantly pushing artists to think beyond their limits and providing a space in which they could exchange ideas and criticism. Her affinity, or in her own words “intimacy”, with Picasso and Juan Gris (1887-1927) manifested itself in her patronage (she was amongst the first collectors of Gris’ work, purchasing his early Cubist paintings Glass and Bottle (1912–1913) and Book and Glasses (1914)), which extended to the provision of financial aid and publications on both artists. Picasso’s portrait of Stein is credited as being a turning point in his development as an artist, using an Iberian mask to depict the writer’s face, thus paving the way for his Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) in which he would use the same stylistic device. In the epigraph to his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises (titled Fiesta in England) Heminway refers to the “lost generation” in homage to Stein, who coined the term in reference to the “disoriented, wandering, directionless” spirit of ex-pat American writers in Paris in the aftermath of the early post-war era. Yet, despite this, Stein acted as a nexus for those striving to produce forms of expression that better reflected the world’s fractured reality, and countless artists, writers and creatives found their “place” within her illustrious salons. Indeed such interplay between artists, designers, artists and collectors was one of the key reasons for Paris’s cultural efflorescence and unique reception of experimentation, rooted in the foundation built by Modernist visionaries such as Stein.
The elegant home of World of Interiors Editor Hamish Bowles, New York, designed by Studio Peregall, photograph by Simon Upton
For many starting out early in their careers, the worlds of art, architecture and design can seem incredibly daunting, and those such as Stein who took the time to foster young talent can have an immeasurable impact on the professions as a whole. At a recent supper for artist Allegra Hicks, hosted by Isabelle Dubern at the Invisible Collection’s new Marylebone headquarters, British interior and furniture designer Isle Crawford (b. 1962) spoke of the inability of young designers and architects to get to the point and to say what they really mean; within her own studio, she considers it an important part of her role as principal to build her team’s confidence, identify skill sets and to bring people out of their shell, in the sense of feeling willing and able to put forward their point of view succinctly and with confidence. Whilst a formal design education clearly has its advantages, what really matters is mentorship, whereby a young and impressionistic designer will go to work for someone whose taste they admire; essentially, one doesn’t learn to walk by following the rules, one learns by doing and falling over, and similarily, one learns to be a designer by being in an office or studio environment and working alongside those with practical experience and on the ground knowledge. Sadly such an attitude and ethos as practised by Crawford is not as common as one might assume, and outside that, there’s very little available in terms of guidance.
There was a time when interiors publications served a greater purpose than merely satisfying society’s voyeuristic desire to glimpse inside the homes of the great and the good and to criticize, castigate or celebrate their choices of art, objet and decor. They acted as an educational tool for the design industry at large, in the sense that such magazines actively sought out and celebrated those designers and decorators who were doing something different, who were making an original contribution, and from whom lessons could be learnt, thereby actively supporting the industry at large. Inherently such publications benefited from being far more culturally significant, in that those in the industry looked to them for inspiration and guidance, and, not only that, they exposed the industry to a broader array of consumers than is the case today. “I don’t know what’s happening with magazines, I do know Instagram is all anybody cares about, really, and in a funny way it makes books more important,” opines interior designer David Netto in an interview with Dennis Scully. “You know if the magazines are less, and I don’t know about in freefall, or whatever they are, they’re in disarray, some more than others, you know, and I don’t think anybody can say they what magazines are going to be there and which aren’t in two or three years, but, Instagram is filling a hole, it’s not like there’s nothing it’s just not edited, it’s a vomit draft, you know, and books have a new important stature in that people want them and they’re, they have long lives, they have unpredictable long lives; it’s like that beautiful moment in the movie Basquiat when Julian Schnabel says ‘your audience hasn’t even been born yet, what are you so depressed about?’” Whilst Instagram clearly has its uses, especially in terms of its contribution to the democratizing interiors, one has to make sense of, and classify intelligently, a constant flux of imagery, which only highlights the importance and significance of books, which are becoming ever more relevant; indeed numerous interiors designers and architects are now taking the idea of creating (and often flaunting) a carefully curated reference library ever more seriously. Renowned Pimlico-road-based antique and art dealer Patrick Jefferson considers such physical resources to be an integral and essential part of his day to day job: “As I started dealing and learning, so my own reference library grew, and with it, my belief that knowledge — gained through reading, discussing, listening and comparing, rather than just searching the web — is truly invaluable,” explains Jefferson. “I spend my days discussing houses, interiors and furnishings, past and present, with a wide variety of designers, decorators, collectors and academics, so having the physical evidence to hand, whether written or visual, takes organisation, discipline and intuition but in return can impart crucial elements to those who are listening. As Cicero wrote, ‘Anyone who has a library and a garden wants for nothing’.”
“I don’t know if I could do any better than anybody if I was presiding over an imploding business model so I want to be very generous and careful about criticizing something I couldn’t do better. I don’t know what it’s like to have to meet with advertisers and quantify what clicks actually add up to economically, that’s a whole other heavy executive experience that I’m totally unqualified to have,” Netto concedes, “But I do think the time when you’re on your ass and there’s no end in sight, no backstop to the adversity, that is not the time to try and be a people pleaser, I think that’s the time to lead because you actually have nothing to lose, and I think that terrible mistakes are being made as, I can only comment as a consumer of certain magazines, that I love, because the leadership is not really invested in anything but trying to keep it alive, it’s the time for bold new points of view. Maybe none of it’ll work, but if you don’t stand for quality I really don’t see that you’re doing anything but looking at your watch and trying to pay your kid’s college tuition before it all goes away in a couple of years.” This might account for the increasing popularity of those magazines left of the mainstream, who operate outwith the traditional advertising model, such as cult quarterly Kinfolk — whose neutrally-hued aesthetic became a go-to for avocado-toast-loving Millenials (and to some extent has become something of a cliche, shorthand for an aspirational decorating style of white walls, bare floorboards and an eclectic assortment of Hygge-ish, folk-ish Bric-à-brac) and, more recently, Paris-based periodical Neptune Papers, headed by former model and fashion stylist Daytona Williams, which came about during the first Covid-19 induced “confinement”, with a focus on “conversations with creatives from around the world”. Essentially the role of interiors and lifestyle magazines should be to challenge us and to open our minds to new aesthetics, people and interiors that we would quite possibly never encounter in our ordinary day to day lives; and as such, a bolder, less formulaic approach should be encouraged as, essentially, over the past decade — on the whole — things have become so stagnant that there’s nowhere to go but up (or at least sideways). “We have a very narrow stable of people that are celebrated in architecture and design magazines, if you aren’t aware, in an aggressively self-educating way, taking the initiative to find out what’s out there, you’re not gonna learn it from magazines the way you would have thirty years ago,” Netto continues, “You’re gonna see Scott Disick’s house, you’re gonna see some sort of weird stuff that’s symptomatic of a lack of faith that showing people quality will cut it and be enough.”
There has of course always been one exception to the banality of populist trend forecasting and articles on “what’s hot and what’s not” in the form of The World of Interiors magazine, the industry’s pedigreed country cousin, which since its inception has professed no interest in such mainstream trivialities as the glitz and glamour of Holywood, how-to articles, tips on decorating with sheets or, to a large extent, the digital epoch. Raised in quasi-aristocratic affluence, the magazine’s founding editor Minn Hogg (1938-2019) was committed to producing a publication about idiosyncratic interiors, rather than sleekly decorated spaces (“a certain sort of mellow and knocked-about English country house predominated, interspersed with Moroccan riads, Scandinavian palaces, and Austrian schlosses” explained Nicholas Coleridge (b. 1957), former chairman of Condé Nast Britain). “I try to get nonprofessionals who aren’t going to use interior-design jargon and words like silk slub,” Hogg told The New York Times in 1983. “What we end up with instead is a story on a couple who say they used heavy shutters on their windows because they stay in bed all day and like to sleep. Do you see?” And who can argue with that logic!
The home of Dorothy “Sister” Parish (c. 1970), principal at Parish Hadley, photograph by Horst P. Horst
Now, amidst great fanfare and aplomb, following the departure of former editor Rupert Thomas (a protégé of Hogg, who served the title for 22 years), a new sheriff has arrived in town, in the purple-hued-form of Hamish Bowles (b. 1963) — thirty-year Vogue veteran and long-time dinner companion of Anna Wintour (b. 1949) — which heralds the start of an entirely new era. Thomas and Bowles are of course like chalk and cheese, and whereas the former skipped the party circuit and steered clear of social media, Bowles has the sort of celebrity and larger than life personality that was once far more common amongst such great industry doyennes as Diana Vreeland (1903-1989) who once famously said: “I think part of my success as an editor came from never worrying about a fact, a cause, an atmosphere. It was me—projecting to the public. That was my job. I think I always had a perfectly clear view of what was possible for the public. Give ‘em what they never knew they wanted.” Whist known for his foppishness, which Vogue has spent years exploiting for comic effect, Bowles is by no means stuck in the past, having fully embraced the new media age, hosting multiple podcasts and the YouTube series “Vintage Bowles”, in which amongst other exploits he can be seen shooting hoops with former pro basketball player Amar’e Stoudemire. Whilst Bowles, like every other editor, has the grim task of luring young, digital-first consumers away from social media, he’s been keen to reassure the magazine’s existing readership, telling The New York Times: “I have not come into this storied title to wreak egomaniacal havoc.” Yet despite this, a good many of the title’s 55,000 print subscribers are anxious, worried that a magazine so staunchly resistant to change will bow to the pressure of advertisers and the heckling of publishers. “Min detested market research, cover lines, interference, anything commercial,” Coleridge wrote. “When Condé Nast later purchased the American magazine Architectural Digest, Min declared, ‘Now we know for certain that Condé Nast has no taste.’”
Of course, one can’t hope to please everyone, and whilst there are already those who think the magazine has in recent years strayed too far from its old-world bohemian roots, there is, at the same time, a grudging admission that the sort of rough-around-the-edges-interiors Hogg favoured — which included anything and everything from a squatter’s stable, to an Irish castle and a Finnish egg farm — are now in somewhat short supply. In any event, WoI 3.0 might even be an improvement, as already in the first two issues, there have been a number of interiors that are demonstrative of the direction in which the industry at large should be going, including the colour-saturated home of Thomas du Pré de Saint Maur and his husband, Grégoire Marot and the Paris hôtel particulier of Léopold and Géraldine Meyer (and for those loyal to Hogg’s penchant for the cluttered, aristocratic and plain eccentric, a lovingly restored Genoese palazzo and a pictorial celebrating wild garlic). Bringing such unique interiors to the fore, because of their inherent quality, and not merely because of their owers celebrity, is surely taking print magazines back into the realm of cultural relevance, a source from which those new to the industry can take inspiration.
Although something of a serious departure and without wanting to dampen the mood, one very important factor when one looks at interiors and architecture in the last thirty or forty years, and in particular, mentorship and education, is the nineteen-eighties AIDS epidemic, in which the design industry was probably the worst hit. The impact in terms of the loss of talent is immeasurable if one considers for example that we should still have designers like Angelo Donghia (1935-1985) (whose private clients included Diana Ross, Mary Tyler Moore, Halston, Ralph Lauren and Neil Simon), Tice Alexander (1958-1993), Mark Hampton (1940-1998) and Kalef Alaton (1940-1989), to name but a few. Such was the social climate that the stigma attached to the disease was career-ending, and Donghia kept the truth of his condition secret from even close friends for nearly two years, even then swearing them to secrecy. “I thought Angelo [was] a friend that I would grow old with,” recalls Paige Rense (1929-2021), the Architectural Digest editor who gave the designer his first-ever cover story. “As it turned out, I didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye.” The nineteen-eighties uptown aesthetic might now seem camp and anachronistic — over primped, overstuffed and in the words of Andrée Putman (1925-2013) “too much Louis and too many flowers” — but at the same time, in its way, it was as revolutionary and avant-garde as the work of modernists Jean-Michel Frank (1895-1941) and Pierre Chareau (1883-1950). Decorators like Donghia and Hampton transformed grand pre-war apartments — drafty, impractical and decked out in uncomfortable, inherited furniture — into tranquil, luxuriant havens, chocked to the rafters with mod cons and adorned and upholstered in a cacophony of checks, stripes and chintzes, akin to an English country house on acid. Donghia furnished with potted palms, white slipper chairs and pouffes upholstered in men’s suiting fabrics, whereas Hampton festooned the homes of Estée Lauder and others with elaborately layered silk swags and jabots in an over the top celebration of the sort of WASP culture seen up and down Fifth Avenue (all of which coincided with the publication of the 1981 bestseller The Official Preppy Handbook, which in the words of Janella Zara was “a guide that allowed countless rust belt gay men like Andy [Warhol] to pass for middle class”).
Societally speaking, we have essentially been deprived of a huge raft of talent, not only in terms of the work such designers would have produced, and its contribution to the overall canon of design, but also in respect of their role as teachers and educators, who could have provided much-needed mentorship — an essential component of the industry — thereby helping to mould and shape the next generation, who would themselves have gone on to produce great things. One only needs to look at the legendary interior design firm Parish-Hadley, which essentially acted as a training ground for dozens of designers, now acclaimed in their own right, including Bunny Williams (b. 1944), David Kleinberg, David Easton and Brian J. McCarthy. To an extent, stylistically and creatively speaking, designers and their clients now have far greater freedom than ever before. Magazines don’t really tell us what to think anymore in the way they once did, in terms of dictating trends and fashions, telling us what to put in our homes, what colours to paint our walls, and articles on whether dust ruffles or fringed lampshades are now passé. Essentially everything is now possible and as a client, one can hire Axel Vervoordt (b. 1947) or Studio Peregalli and have them create a carefully crafted, nostalgic fantasy, akin to the homes of Yves Saint Laurent (1936-2008) and Pierre Bergé (1930-2017), or at the opposite end of the spectrum, architect John Pawson (b. 1949), who will give you assiduously designed and detailed no-clutter minimalism. It is of course the role of such studios, designers, artists, architects and magazines to provide mentorship, so as to ensure the next generation can build, and hopefully even improve upon, those legendary works that came before them. The phrase “those who can’t teach” is a true misunderstanding of how each and every one of us can help to shape future generations and to “give ‘em what they never knew they wanted.”