Staging Fur: Interiors
- May 30
- 4 min read
By Theodora Dantchouk and Mercédes Claerhout
In the sale of fur garments, carefully orchestrated sales strategies played a crucial role. At the heart of this process stood the showroom: a deliberately designed space where clients could admire the latest fashions and try them on. More than a simple retail environment, the showroom functioned as a stage on which luxury was performed. Its atmosphere was both elegant and inviting, encouraging visitors to linger, examine the goods on display and imagine themselves transformed.
This exhibition focuses on the Brussels showroom of Raymond Mallien, located at the Grand Sablon. Designed in the Neo-Louis XIV style, the richly decorated interior conveys opulence through curving lines, fluted pilasters, decorative mouldings with gilded accents and refined seating. Large, oriental carpets introduce softness, colour and texture while also reinforcing associations with comfort, wealth and global trade. Throughout the showroom, strategically placed mirrors invite visitors to observe themselves and identify with the garments on display, linking appearance to self-representation and social status.
Mallien’s choice of the Neo-Louis XIV style belonged to a broader nineteenth-century culture of historicism. A growing fascination with the past, particularly in France, was fostered through books, theatre, museums, and style manuals, which codified historical aesthetics and promoted the idea of the “period room” as a unified environment. By adopting the visual language of Louis XIV rather than early Art Deco, Mallien thus aligned his fur empire with established images of luxury, exclusivity and aristocratic refinement.
The showroom’s theatrical atmosphere was further shaped by the painted decorations of the French artist Georges Paul Leroux (1877–1957). Across the walls, depictions of animals including a fox, a seal, a goat, some sheep, a skunk, weasels and ermines appear in romanticized, faraway landscapes. Their presence makes the animal origins of fur visible, but in a highly romanticized and aestheticized form that recasts their bodies as signs of beauty, wilderness and abundance.
The large central mural develops this logic further: a fashionably dressed woman in a modern fur coat stands before a full-length mirror, surrounded by cherubs, mythological figures, flowers, attendants and distant architecture. The composition recalls fashion illustration, where mirrors, elegant poses, and reflected bodies were used to heighten the display of fashionable dress. Although the composition draws on classical and mythological imagery, the woman’s dress and fur coat place her firmly within the 1920s. She appears as both modern consumer and elevated figure: an idealised image of the woman Mallien’s showroom sought to address. The Palace of Justice, visible in the background, anchors the scene in Brussels and links the fantasy space of the mural to the urban environment outside the salon.
This visual dialogue continues within the room itself. The posture and appearance of the painted woman are echoed by the life-like female mannequins who are also depicted in the showroom. The showroom mirrors extended this visual sequence into the space of the client. As women tried on fur, their reflected bodies appeared alongside the painted figure and the mannequins, turning the act of self-observation into part of the showroom’s choreography of display.
This mural also needs to be understood, however, within a broader economy of luxury. Its surrounding figures and motifs accumulate as signs of abundance, service, fantasy, and exchange. Some figures are marked through racialised or exoticizing visual cues, while others may evoke trappers, traders, or merchants, alongside mythological bodies or allegorical presences. These details expand the mural’s frame beyond the showroom itself suggesting the wider international networks on which on which the fur trade depended – many of which were shaped by colonial and imperial systems. In this mural, however these networks are transformed into a decorative fantasy in which human bodies, animal bodies, landscapes and luxury materials become signs of wealth and worldliness.
The resulting atmosphere is almost otherworldly: a space in which historical style, painted fantasy, animal materiality and global trade converged. The luxury showroom thus becomes more than a place of commerce: it is a carefully cultivated and multisensory environment that transformed the purchasing of fur into an experience of looking, wearing, imagining and desiring.
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