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."
Read more about this topic: Dorothy Draper
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“No change in musical style will survive unless it is accompanied by a change in clothing style. Rock is to dress up to.”
—Frank Zappa (1940–1994)
“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)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)