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At the beginning of September, I escaped the city (barely) to Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx with my friends Fabio and Douglas. They’d signed us up for the landscape and architecture tour of the landmarked burial grounds, opened in 1863. I love cemeteries, and here, the 19th- and early-20th-century tombs felt almost like a catalogue of architectural trends of the day: Gothic Revival for the Vanderbilts, Art Deco for the Macy’s owners Ida and Isidor Straus, neoclassical for industrialist John Warne Gates. Most memorable for me was the mausoleum of department store mogul F. W. Woolworth, realized in 1920 by architect John Russell Pope in the Egyptian Revival style. Think: hieroglyphic-lined pillars and an entrance flanked by two sphinxes. Interestingly, as our guide pointed out, this was built before the 1922 discovery of King Tut’s tomb, an event that catalyzed a Western obsession with Egyptian material culture. Cue: my research rabbit hole into “Egyptomania,” a term we should probably retire but that nevertheless still somehow aptly captures the Western (read: colonialist) craze for the ancient North African civilization.
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The mania had actually swept Europe the century before, after Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt, during which the French emperor used his free time (lol!) to document the arts of the region. His later-published findings would inspire many of the motifs—sphinxes, winged creatures, urns, lotus flowers, and laurel wreaths—that appeared in the emergent Empire-style furniture and architecture. This continued interest is likely what inspired Woolworth’s theme-y resting place, just a few years before the next resurgence came in 1922, when furniture, clothing, and jewelry extracted from Tut’s densely packed tomb dazzled the public once again. That unprecedented unboxing would inspire elements of the nascent Art Deco, which would further abstract many of those motifs and bring Egyptian style, once an intellectualized interest of the upper societal echelons, to a wider public.
In matters of design, everything is on rotation, and so it seems we have arrived back here once again, with a new wave of Egyptian enthusiasm sweeping the globe: Cairo’s Grand Egyptian Museum is scheduled to reopen next month. The Met in New York opened “Divine Egypt” the same week that Sir John Soane’s museum opened “Egypt Influencing British Design.” And lest we forget that the globe is knee-deep in celebrations for the 100th anniversary of Art Deco, whose graphic, streamlined forms find their roots in ancient Egyptian aesthetics.
In the meantime, hints of another revival have crept into the pages of AD. Amanda Brooks lined her New York City apartment with a Pierre Frey wallpaper that depicts an Egyptian fresco from the Louvre. “Because of how graphic they are, they always look modern,” she reflects. Designer Jean-Philippe Demeyer had hieroglyphics painted on a decorative screen in Bruges. And British Egyptian designer Tarek Shamma incorporates Northern African textiles and contemporary Egyptian art into his layered interiors projects.
“It might seem like it’s a revival, but it never actually goes away,” says Shamma, who called me after doing a spin through the show at John Soane’s, which explores the collector’s relationship to Egyptomania (he famously kept a sarcophagus of Seti I in the basement, bought for £2,000 in 1824 when the British Museum declined it). “There’s the Egyptomania that influenced Art Nouveau and continued into the Art Deco period and kind of never left. It reappears in Danish design in the midcentury. It reappears in the 1980s with postmodernism. It reappears with Karl Lagerfeld’s Chanel collections in 2017 and Kim Jones’s Dior men’s show at the Pyramids. It’s always continuing.” In his own interiors, you might find textiles from Siwa, the western desert region known for its embroidery, or paintings by Egyptian talent Abd El-Wahab Morsi, whose artworks explore ancient motifs and themes.
Egyptian history might be “in the air,” but how do we approach the zeitgeist with a more informed, 21st-century understanding (a.k.a. without the colonial spirit that colored—and even prompted—the earlier frenzies)? I asked Erin McKellar, curator at Sir John Soane’s Museum. “I don’t think there’s a way for Egyptomania to exist today, because I think that cultural appropriation was inherent in the movement which adopted the forms of ancient Egypt while stripping them of their meaning,” she explained. “However, I think architects and designers can responsibly celebrate Egypt in their design by acknowledging that Egypt is not a place stuck in the past, but one which has a rich artistic present. This can involve color palettes that are inspired by Egypt and its art, as well as the art of living craftspeople.”
Rather than reviving the past, engaging with the contemporary art and craft of Egypt is one way to do that. Amanda Brooks cites Goya Gallagher, founder of Anut Cairo, as one of her go-to sources. The retailer, who threw a wild launch party at the Egyptian museum earlier this year, celebrates the heritage crafts of the region selling everything from pottery from Fayoum, a city in the middle of the country, to bedspreads made by the weavers of Akhmim, Egypt’s historic textile center. There’s also the buzzy New York brand Gohar World (their holiday shop opened last week in Manhattan), whose Cairo-born founders, Laila and Nadia, work with Egyptian craftspeople on many of their cheeky offerings, like their beloved baguette bag. Their grandmother Nabila, a.k.a. the “ribbon queen,” makes the bows.
Soane, who never went to Egypt himself, was apparently not sold on the whole Egyptomania thing. “He believed that the symbolic content of Egyptian architecture shouldn’t be separated from its form,” McKellar explains. “And he was critical of what he felt was the flippant use of Egyptian styling on things like commercial buildings. He believed that the architecture of ancient Egypt was “calculated for eternity,” so he did not think it appropriate to use it as fashion or a fad.”
Certainly this thinking put Soane ahead of his peers, but we must take that, too, with a grain of salt. Does extracting a relic—or a sarcophagus—from its intended location and reinstalling it in your London town house have nothing to do with a fashion for such artifacts? To McKeller, the key to moving forward—and to embracing a contemporary Egyptian style—is to keep asking these questions. “There has been a persistent link between Egypt and luxury, Egypt and mystery, that continues to captivate in the West,” she explains. “But this image is one that is stuck in the past.”
