Why Skirted Furniture Endures
Skirted furniture has been chic, passé, and everything in between. Here, AD PRO unpacks the trend lifecycle
As published in Architectural Digest, July 10, 2024
A wool felt Holland & Sherry table skirt with Samuel & Sons trim helps anchor the great room of a Miles Redd-designed Adirondacks lodge. The club chairs wear a Lee Jofa linen. Credit: Noel Dewitt.
There are certain decorating tropes—wall-to-wall carpet, mirror walls, conversation pits, chintz fabric—that remain consistent in their ability to elicit strong feelings but tend to wax and wane in genuine popularity. They follow larger trends, and their fortunes rise and fall at the mercy of the marketplace. What seems charming and idiosyncratic one moment (cottagecore, anyone?) seems dated and overly fussy the next. One trend that illustrates this perfectly is the curiously retro practice of skirting furniture, which has been having a moment for a few years now and accumulating on mood boards and showroom floors.
A Chelsea Textiles checked fabric skirts the sink of the wood-paneled kitchen in a Connecticut cabin designed by Virginia Tupker. Frank Frances
The tall tale that people in the Victorian era were so scandalized by exposed chair legs that they popularized the practice of skirting furniture may (sadly) be fiction, but it is certainly true that the frilly flourish connotes a particular moment in our shared design past. But the lifecycle of this trend commenced far earlier than that: “Priceless carpets, tapestries, and other textiles were often displayed as table coverings,” says gallerist and author Emily Eerdmans. “In the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance, when land owners traveled constantly between several properties, textiles—which were incredibly easy to transport, unlike heavy wooden furniture—were one of the foremost ways to show off one's wealth and status. They also added warmth visually and physically to a space.”
Portable, durable, and chic, a well-placed textile is the ultimate quick fix, but skirted furniture signifies something more refined and thought-through than the casual deployment of a knitted throw. “If you want to conjure the vibrations of Parish Hadley and Colefax & Fowler, a skirted table in the entryway is a good trick,” notes AD100 interior designer David Netto. “I think they signify that this is someone who knows how to live.” Picture an inverted-pleat table skirt in a dark green carriage cloth, maybe: “It telegraphs that someone who lives here knows something about history and precedent. [It suggests it’s] someone who knows what they’re doing.”
The Duchess of Devonshire’s bedroom at Chatsworth, seen in a 1985 edition of AD, featured a skirted dressing table, billowing chintz curtains, and a canopy bed. Derry Moore
For those who know what they’re doing but also experienced the excesses of the Reagan era, a floral table skirt might seem akin to a shoulder-pads-forward Thierry Mugler dress. “For many, a skirted table first calls to mind fussy, over-ruffled, 1980s-era bad decorating. The key word here is ‘bad’—there were plenty of brilliant versions of this traditional English-country-house style here in America” says Eerdmans, noting that her late friend, the legendary designer Mario Buatta, used them to great effect in his own apartment.
And skirting isn’t just for chintz; it can provide the ideal canvas for tour de force tailoring, says Miry Park, vice president of marketing at the fabric house Cowtan and Tout. “From a decorative perspective, [skirted furniture] can offer a great tailored aspect to any room. It can be an opportunity to add passementerie, such as ruche, or fringe and other tailored effects like a ruffled edge or a contrast welt.” Brooklyn-based weaver Scott Bodenner—whose eponymous Bodenner Collection draws inspiration from the work of Dorothy Liebes and Jack Lenor Larsen—notes that fringe has enough movement and shimmer to provide a modern twist on the skirted look. “Long fringe is a way to add softness to spaces while still keeping furniture’s graceful lines. I really love ottomans where the fringe is trimmed to give both movement and still maintain formality. Of course, I’m a sucker for a lot of chintz and frills, but I feel that today’s gestures in skirting are more about form and drape and keeping materials pliant.”
Skirts augment the plush living room sofas of this Georgetown house designed by Anthony P. Browne and featured in a 1993 issue of AD. Bruce Katz
Culturally, though, there’s no way to avoid the association that skirted furniture is uptight; the only thing to do is have a little fun with it. Sean Yashar, founder of the Culture Creative, a management and communications agency for design, highlights a moment that fans of Sex and the City will recall with a mix of fondness and horror: “The 2001 episode of Sex and the City where Charlotte goes shopping for bedding with her mother-in-law, Bunny MacDougal, delightfully illustrates how trends often skip a generation. As Bunny declared, ‘My dear child, you cannot not have a dust ruffle. It’s unsightly!’ Charlotte may not have agreed, but today more design tastemakers vibe with Bunny’s Waspy taste, reinforcing the pattern of trends being rediscovered and romanticized through a fresh perspective,” Yashar says. “Case in point: the ruffles on Colin King’s upholstery collection for the foremost contemporary showroom Future Perfect. It’s English country recontextualized as cutting-edge.”
Eerdmans doesn’t disagree. “Whether the pendulum of taste is veering towards more minimalism or maximalism—which could be interpreted as more masculine versus feminine, more streamlined and functional versus more decorative—it historically devolves into a muddied, over-saturated version of itself (as it did in the 1980s).” Inevitably, a backlash follows; the pendulum swings to the other side.
For now, designers like Netto are on board with the on-again look. “I am personally a fan,” he says. “It’s an opportunity to anchor a corner, introduce a strong color, or sneak in a bit of fringe. And somehow they always signify comfort. The other nice thing? They can save you money. Put one over a round plywood rental table—no one will ever know."
JP Demeyer & Co. fabric skirts the counter of the mudroom of Jean-Philippe Demeyer’s Bruges abode. Miguel Flores-Vianna