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Page 20
20INTERIOR DECORATING
carried out to its finality. It embraces a hundred forms of production, perhaps a thousand. The temptation especially to manufacture fabrics must have appealed to many decorators during the war, when fabrics in the general market were so extremely difficult to secure. Some decorative establishments have supplemented their regular processes by having materials made under their supervision in batik or machine embroidery or hand embroidery or by some printed or stencilled process, to say nothing of tapestries and needlepoint, in order to carry out their designs and color schemes for which they cannot find any adequate substitute in the market. The limit of activity, I suppose, is reached when departure into a new field requires the attention of a large force and a large amount of machinery, such as would be the case if decorators attempted to produce satins and brocades and velvets actually in their own shops. This being impossible even to the largest decorators, they have resorted more than ever during the last couple of years to the special dyeing of existing fabrics or sometimes to the treating of these so that they appear antique.
Some of the interesting questions that present themselves through a consideration of all this are whether, when the decorator becomes a manufacturer he necessarily ceases to be a professional man, whether he cannot claim compensation for his personal services aside from the profit on the sale of his merchandise, whether his authority as a man of knowledge, both in design and production, should not be greater than that of the architect when it comes to decisions in regard to the interior of a home; and how, if he insists upon
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A man's bedroom in the style of the Italian Renaissance with damask draperies and bedspread.
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