Interior Design follows Fashion

Here is an article recently posted on H&M’s (LOVE this store) website. Fashion dictates the trends we will see in the Interior Design field.

Fashion has a longstanding love affair with interior design and furniture. Maybe it’s not the most obvious of inspirations, but this spring, interiors are rocking the fashion house.

In the early 00s, avant-garde designers such as Hussein Chalayan and Martin Margiela made collections based around the idea of wearable furniture and while not exactly spawning a big fashion trend they pointed to the fact that fashion can find inspiration and beauty anywhere.

Scroll down to this season and you’ll find the wonderful dresses of Mary Katrantzou with trompe-l’œil patterns depicting actual interiors from old issues of Architectural Digest and World of Interiors. Blue curtains in photographs turned into blue fringes on the dress, a chandelier into a necklace. Katrantzou’s dresses dazzled the fashion crowd and had Tim Blanks of Style.com gushing that the concept was “so artful, but so elementary that it made you wonder why no one else had attempted it.”

Strangely enough, another distinctive micro trend for S/S 2011 is the use of tassels, seen here at H&M in belts and blouses, while houses as different as Louis Vuitton and Emilio Pucci put them on bags. Where do you often find tassels? You guessed right, as ornaments on furniture.

At the same time we’ve seen the rise of interior design blogger Todd Selby and his blog The Selby, documenting the houses of creative people together with the inhabitants. Proving there’s a link between fashion and furniture, he has since landed campaigns for fashion brands such as Dockers and Converse.

Even for the fall season, interiors seem to be in vogue, but this time it is the seats and details of cars that have piqued the interest of fashion designers. Ann-Sofie Back together with Phoebe Philo at Céline both based their collections around cars and their sumptuous designs, showing that even the most masculine of worlds can be turned into beautiful and feminine clothes.