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‘Modernism, Orientalism, craft: French couture and the early furniture of Eileen Gray’

This chapter (7000 words) in a multi-authored peer-reviewed, edited volume was commissioned jointly by the editors in 2008 after McBrinn had presented preliminary research on related topics at several academic conferences (Helsinki 2008). McBrinn’s chapter is the first, in-depth, analysis of the furniture that the Irish-born architect and designer Eileen Gray (1879-1976), arguably one of the greatest figures of early European Modernism, made for Parisian fashion designers between 1913 and 1919. Much historiographical writing on Gray has focused on her contribution to high Modernism of the late 1920s and early 1930s, and after, but many of the issues and concerns found in her most important work were in fact formed pre-1920 and in the context of the elegant and luxurious world of Parisian haute couture. The research question behind this project asked how far fashion and furniture design were intertwined and furthermore if Gray’s ‘liminal’ position as a woman and a lesbian in an exclusively male/heterosexual professional context impacted, in some way, upon her choice of ‘liminal’ craft techniques in the early facture of her furniture. This research is part of McBrinn’s wider investigation into craft and its relationships with gender and sexuality, with particular reference to Ireland, which relies heavily upon the application of pioneering methodologies and theoretical frameworks drawn from Queer Theory. In terms of periodization this text builds upon the work of historians such as Peter Wollen, John Bowlt, Nancy Troy, Tag Gronberg, Deborah Silverman and Caroline Constant in drawing attention to craft as a central nexus in Gray’s early designs as well as in modern French couture. But it is expanded by the use of both post-Saidian Orientalist discourse, especially Homi Bhabha’s conceptualisation of ‘hybridity’, and of the new viewpoints offered by Queer Theory