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:
“The habit some writers indulge in of perpetual quotation is one it behoves lovers of good literature to protest against, for it is an insidious habit which in the end must cloud the stream of thought, or at least check spontaneity. If it be true that le style c’est l’homme, what is likely to happen if l’homme is for ever eking out his own personality with that of some other individual?”
—Dame Ethel Smyth (1858–1944)
“Sometimes among our more sophisticated, self-styled intellectuals—and I say self-styled advisedly; the real intellectual I am not sure would ever feel this way—some of them are more concerned with appearance than they are with achievement. They are more concerned with style then they are with mortar, brick and concrete. They are more concerned with trivia and the superficial than they are with the things that have really built America.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)