Venster met gordijnen c. 1885 - 1895

Léon Laroche made this print of a window with curtains sometime in the nineteenth century. It depicts a window draped with luxurious fabrics, a visual code for wealth and status in 19th century France. The phrase ‘Louis XVI’ appears at the bottom. This harks back to a period before the French Revolution when such displays of opulence were the sole preserve of the aristocracy. The institutions of royalty and nobility shaped visual culture then, and still held sway many years later. The print thus invokes the Ancien Régime, a time of rigid social hierarchy and enormous inequality. This image wasn't made for a gallery wall; it was a design proposal or sample, a tool for selling a lifestyle. By studying archives of fashion and design, we see how cultural values get embedded in the most ordinary objects and how the long shadow of history shapes our desires.