VT 16.5.13

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I'm sure, today, that the interior decoration of Arturo Lopez-Willshaw's yacht, La Gaviota, looks like bad taste to many, but in its just-post-war heyday, the Orientalism and leopard velvet furnishings were as refreshing as Dior's contemporary New Look.  Likewise, after the bad taste bling and glitz of Versailles coming as it did on the heels of the colder, far more austere Renaissance style, the court breathed a sigh of relief at seeing Marie Antoinette's lighthearted and light-giving cottons and gauzes at that purposely tumbledown creation, the Hameau; and her sister Queen Maria Carolina, having fled the mauve marble and silver stucco of Naples, preferred bright, natural colors and sparsely furnished Turko-Gothic interiors for the Chinese Palace in Palermo.  The decor of both these interior schemes was thought to be the height of almost perverse whimsicality; now they may seem affected, but dull they are not.  Taste irons itself out over time.


Nicky Haslam, The Question of Taste
(T), The New York Times