Modern Boudoir

Concept | Wallpaper & Fabric Design | Styling & Design | photography

The Boudoir: a personal, feminine space, to be respectfully treated as a space for women to hide, to flourish, to develop, to experiment with femininity and grow.

This my personal work where I’ve been exploring femininity and sensuality through design. Sexy wallpaper and fabric design for an ultra feminine bedroom, inspired by French 18th century Toile de Jouy, Les Liasons Dangereuses and a dash of 30’s Hollywood glamour. 

Sexy wallpaper

The boudoir as a feminine space

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The boudoir as a feminine space, a special room for a lady, was developed in the eighteenth century, in aristocratic circles. During the Victorian times the boudoir was adopted in well to do families as a room designated for the woman of the house, a room of privacy.

A boudoir is, at face value, a lady’s private dressing room, but the term is loaded with meaning. It comes from the Old French verb bouder, meaning “to pout” or “to sulk,” and so a boudoir was a space for a woman to beautify herself, improve her mood, and emerge out of an otherwise sullen state. Glamourized through 18th century romantic novels and popular lore, the boudoir became a symbol of female sexuality and male desire.
Over the centuries, the boudoir has often been interpreted as a room of secret passions,  a super-feminine hideaway that men could only glimpse voyeuristically, and gotten a “bad” reputation.
When Virginia Woolf talked about “A Room of one’s Own”, in 1929, she was, in a sense, talking about the need for a feminine space for oneself, a boudoir. But by then, the reputation of the boudoir was that of a space of female sensuality, erotic indulgence and frippery and not, as with Virginia Woolf’s room, a space where intellectuality was able to thrive. This, somehow, seems to be a thought still reigning today: femininity and sensuality don’t go with intellectuality…. and this might be why the boudoir, boudoir style, often is laughed at as a silly and flippant, “girly”, and not taken seriously or appreciated for what it really is, or can be: a personal, feminine space, to be respectfully treated as a space for women to hide, to flourish, to develop, to experiment with femininity and grow.
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