Playing House: How the Home Became a Muse for Fashion Designers

There are times when I’m reviewing images of runway collections and ask myself, “Is that what I think I think it is?” Trompe l’œil, the artistic device of visual trickery that fools the viewer into believing the illusion of an object is real, has a long history in painting, architecture, and fashion. As models sauntered down the runway for JW Anderson’s spring 2025 menswear collection, I noticed four quadrants of grids stitched into a collared button-down cardigan, but wait, is that a red door on the cuff? It was.

Jonathan Anderson, founder of his namesake brand, noted that, for this collection, he wanted to construct “irrational clothing.” However, I would argue that his wearable interpretations of English architectural styles—ranging from shift dress town houses to Cornish cottage cardigans— are some of the best motifs you can add to your closet. How we dress ourselves is often reflected in how we dress our homes, and a new generation of fashion designers is game for playing house, further exploring the relationship between the closet and the rest of interior world.

Home has proven to be fertile creative ground for more than just Anderson lately, as evidenced by the runways at both Milan and Paris Fashion Weeks this past September. Vivetta Ponti has always translated her admiration for interior design into her own collections, as seen in her spring 2025 ready-to-wear collection. For this body of work, a project at home led to the creation of a light blue moiré pillow top, a garden’s worth of lily-of-the-valley embroidery and rose prints, and a recurring motif of fabric draped to resemble an open curtain.

A model wears a ruffle pillow top embroidered with “sweet dreams” on the runway for Vivetta SS25 at Milan Fashion Week.

Image courtesy of Vivetta

A purse made in collaboration with Rosantica from Vivetta’s SS25 collection.

Photo: Marco Mantovani

“My first ideas came from looking for new curtains for my home,” Ponti says. “When I start to work on a new collection, I consider all of the [features of my home] that I like, and sometimes this comes from the different Sanderson wallpapers in my home; I wanted pale pastel curtains that would [nod] to the wallpapers’s colors and patterns. The pastel colors throughout the collection reminded me of 1980s interiors. The person who lives in this style of house would wear this collection.”

One of the standout pieces of this collection is a house-shaped bag featuring 2,500 colored crystals that master artisans crafted in partnership with the Milan-based accessories brand Rosantica. The luxury label’s founder Michela Panero explains that the team took a highly detail-oriented approach in weaving elements of Ponti’s life into the piece. “If you look closely, we represented Vivetta’s three cats on the bag,” she says. “Since the window motif is prominent in the garments, I wanted to make sure that the windows opened and closed. We even added a little curtain to tie it to the collection.” In my mind, another high-end house-shaped bag is situated in the same neighborhood as Ponti’s: the Maison de Famille handbag designed by Nicolas Ghesquière for Louis Vuitton SS23, modeled after Vuitton’s own Art Nouveau–style home in Asnières.

The exterior of the whimsical home that belongs to Samantha Pleet’s grandmother.

Photo: Tara Violet

Like Ponti, New York–based fashion designer Samatha Pleet also has a fondness for floral-patterned wallpaper, specifically the bloom-adorned walls of her grandmother’s Tudor-style home. “My whole brand is inspired by my grandmother’s home,” she explains. “It’s a bohemian jewel box. Nothing’s too perfect, and there are countless antiques that enhance the maximalist environment. She matched floral wallpaper with drapes in many rooms of her home and coordinated displays of objects like opaline glass within these spaces, usually sticking to a monochromic theme like all green or all pink.”