Style
Dorothy Draper was quoted saying "Never look back, except for an occasional glance, look ahead and plan for the future. Success is not built on past laurels, but rather on a continuous activity. Keep busy searching out new ideas and, experimentally, keep ahead of the times, or at least up with them." Dorothy's work changed the concept of "period rooms" and provided an image of "design" that revolutionized the way we look at spaces today. She was always trying new things and pushing people to see something special in design -- not just neutrals, but color and pattern.
Draper created a new style known as "Modern Baroque", adding a modern flare to a classical style. She used ornate mouldings and plaster designs on almost every surface of a room, combined with flamboyant color combinations. She used dramatic interior color schemes, and trademark cabbage-rose chintz. The opposite of minimalism, her designs were incorporated in homes, hotels, restaurants, theaters, and department stores. The Dorothy Draper Collection is a collection of furniture and reproductions from her design work with Carleton Varney. “Draper was to decorating what Chanel was to fashion. She brought color into a world which was sad and dreary.These splashy vibrant colors were used to make the public spaces represent a place for people to come and feel elevated and where the dramatic design could absorb them in the interior. Today…everyone wants color around them again.” –Carleton Varney.
Dorothy Draper believed the energy of beautiful and bright vivid colors would make people feel happier, so she led design away from the dark color schemes used throughout the Victorian style by introducing bright colorful color schemes. She also chose very dramatic and contrasting color schemes, such as black with white and adding in some bits of color. Along with using bright and extreme color schemes, she also employed bold textures and materials in her designs. She combined different colors, fabrics, and patterns together, combining stripes with floral patterns. She often used large, oversized details and numerous mirrors. All of the colors and patterns contributed to her dramatic design now referred to as "the Draper touch."
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Famous quotes containing the word style:
“Where there is no style, there is in effect no point of view. There is, essentially, no anger, no conviction, no self. Style is opinion, hung washing, the calibre of a bullet, teething beads.... One’s style holds one, thankfully, at bay from the enemies of it but not from the stupid crucifixions by those who must willfully misunderstand it.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)
“There are neither good nor bad subjects. From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establish it as an axiom that the subject is irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things.”
—Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880)
“I concluded that I was skilled, however poorly, at only one thing: marriage. And so I set about the business of selling myself and two children to some unsuspecting man who might think me a desirable second-hand mate, a man of good means and disposition willing to support another man’s children in some semblance of the style to which they were accustomed. My heart was not in the chase, but I was tired and there was no alternative. I could not afford freedom.”
—Barbara Howar (b. 1934)