Not so long ago, a fashionable person’s status in society was mainly measured by the clothes that hung in their wardrobes. But today, the wardrobes themselves — whether custom or a vintage find from a flea market — can make as much of a social statement as the clothes they contain!
Our homes and the things that fill them have always been powerfully bound up with our identities. After all, homes are our shelter, our nest. But in the last decade, especially since the pandemic, interiors have moved from the backdrop of our lives to centre stage.
Home is the new fashion: what surrounds you has become as much of a social signifier as what you wear. Now, your sofa can be as recognisable as an ‘it’ bag, your dinnerware as collectible as a rare sneaker release. Instagram and Pinterest are flooded with “tablescapes” and “shelfies.”
Setting the table is one of my longtime favourite pastimes, but these days I use the term “dressing the table” because that’s precisely what we do now. What tablecloth you use, what plates you pick and how you arrange the flowers are choices that can be as revealing as how you style your looks.
Fashion houses have taken note, building significant homeware extensions where their codes play out in porcelain, wallpaper, lighting — even fully decorated residences. On the flipside, interior design brands have borrowed from fashion’s seasonality, drop culture and narrative framing, embracing tactics like pop-up installations and limited-edition collaborations.
Covid-19 lockdowns and rise of new technologies, from Zoom to Instagram Stories, played key roles in this shift, making our relationships with our interior spaces both more intimate and more visible to colleagues, friends and followers. Our increased investment in our homes was as much about self-presentation as comfort, as interiors became part of our personal brands.
The right tablescape or vase can now earn as many ‘likes’ as the right coat, as the boundary between fashion, lifestyle and interiors dissolves into a single, curated visual signature. Crucially, images of your interiors can also showcase who you spend time with — another major social proof point.
This shift has big implications for the business of fashion. First, it offers new revenue streams in a category with a value proposition that feels less fleeting: a $6000 gown may be worn twice; a $6,000 dining table is used daily and can be marketed as a lifetime investment. Second, it extends a brand’s presence into the most intimate sphere of a consumer’s life.
It’s also playing into a rethink of how retail spaces should function, as stores become more like living rooms, designed to be inhabited as much as shopped, showrooms for a life and not just a wardrobe — and that’s without mentioning the “private residences” to which top customers are being invited.
The fashionisation of the home — and the elevation of interiors to the level of fashion — is not a trend. It’s deeply rooted in the reality that self-expression doesn’t end with what you wear.
But if at least part of the sector’s appeal is that it hasn’t become as relentlessly marketed and ubiquitous as fashion, the shift comes with potential for risk as well as reward.
Do we really want the home business to follow fashion in its ‘always on’ marketing and endless product drops? Wouldn’t that threaten the very essence of what makes a home meaningful — craftsmanship, permanence, individuality? Perhaps. For now, the jury is out.
Martina Mondadori is the co-founder and CEO of Cabana, a bi-annual magazine and homeware brand. She lives between Milan and London and is a trustee of World Monuments Fund Britain.
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