The Museum at FIT Presents ‘Designing Women: Fashion Creators and Their Interiors’

“Designing Women: Fashion Creators and Their Interiors,” the first exhibition that shows the connection between the worlds of modern high fashion and interior decoration, will take place at The Museum at FIT from Nov. 30 to May 14.

More than 60 garments and accessories by 40 female designers, including Coco Chanel, Elsa Schiaparelli, Ann Lowe, Mary Quant, Carolina Herrera and Anna Sui, will be accompanied by small photographers of interiors, as well as a selection of large-scale drawings created exclusively for the exhibition by artist and FIT adjunct associate professor of illustration Bil Donovan.

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The interiors range from luxe couture salons and apartments designed by the leading architects and interior decorators of their time, to modest ateliers and homes decorated by the designers themselves.

“Fashion designers have avidly incorporated interior decoration into their personal and professional lives,” said Patricia Mears, MFIT deputy director and curator of the exhibition. “Although there have been many articles and books documenting this phenomenon, ‘Designing Women: Fashion Creators and Their Interiors’ is the first exhibition to explore the connection between these intertwined disciplines.”

Among the examples are Chanel’s sumptuous Paris pied-à-terre and Sui’s whimsical New York apartment. In the swinging 1960s, Quant commissioned Terence Conran to design her boutique called Bazaar. The exhibition begins with objects dating to the 18th century, while the main focus is on the highly innovative period between 1890 and 1970.

The exhibition also includes the work of fashion designers who did their own decorating, such as American sportswear designer Bonnie Cashin, and several fashion designers who left the field to become decorators themselves, such as Barbara Hulanicki and Carolyne Roehm, as well as Pauline Fairfax Potter, later known as the Baroness de Rothschild. While her French home, Chateau Mouton, was a masterpiece of modern interior decoration, so too was the modest New York City apartment she inhabited years earlier while working as the chief designer for the house of Hattie Carnegie.

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