The Velvet Touch: Fashion, Furniture, and the Fabric of the Interior

Abstract

This article engages with Walter Benjamin's critical readings of velvet linings in nineteenth-century domestic interiors and fashions in The Arcades Project, as well as Jacques Derrida's more recent etymological and symbolic excavation of the hymen as textile, to argue for sensuous textiles as literal and figurative mediators of the nineteenth-century bourgeois desire to possess, articulated in the act of touching. Through an examination of velvet's “softening” of the domestic interior over the course of the nineteenth century and significant parallels between domestic furnishings and women's fashions, it explores an age in which sensuality was subsumed within the fabric of everyday life, but palpably present in the lining's “velvet touch.” Within the cultural landscape of an increasingly modern Paris, marked by Haussmannization, industrialization, and a burgeoning consumer economy, velvet gowns and linings functioned not simply as protection from modernity, but also as facilitators of a new consumerist paradigm of suspended gratification. The article employs evidence ranging from period costumes and upholstery to the writings of Emile Zola and Marcel Proust, as well as the decorative paintings of Édouard Vuillard and the Art Nouveau furniture of Eugène Gaillard, in support of the ultimate claim that fin-de-siècle design reformers attempted to overturn the sexual politics of drapery by fusing surface with substance.