Building on earlier European traditions, the American dressing room emerged as a domestic interior space tied to changing notions of privacy and class. Design writers and practitioners emphasized its role in preserving the “sentiment of the bedroom” while accommodating the bodily rituals of grooming and costume change. Furnishings such as the dressing table, mirror, and storage units were scaled to the body and organized its movements, mapping stages of preparation and self-scrutiny. These objects, I argue, functioned as extensions of the body itself, mediating tactile and visual engagement with space.
The paper focuses on popular images of retail dressing rooms in the early twentieth century, which transformed this intimate interior into a visual stage for embodied perception. Drawing on Rod Bantjes’ notion of “monstrous space” as a perceptually real yet geometrically unstable experience, I argue that early-twentieth-century retail dressing rooms—circulated through popular images and visual culture—invited shoppers to encounter interior space haptically, collapsing distinctions between observer, body, and enclosure. Whether framed as intimate, comedic, or subtly erotic, these popular views reveal how commercial interiors shaped—and were shaped by—modern understandings of how bodies in space were seen, felt, and regulated.
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