The idea that you can design your own wardrobe online might excite a lot of people. It could be part of a self-build project. It might be a chance to add design elements to match the colours of your favourite football team, or it may even include some historical or futuristic aspects.
You can certainly find fertile grounds for imagination. It is easy to think of a wardrobe as a functional item without considering the long history of this form of furniture, while it can equally be easy to ignore the question of what future designs may include. Never mind flying cars, what will wardrobes be like 30 years from now, or even in 300 years?
Wardrobe history might not be up there with the Norman Conquest or the Fall of Rome as a topic, but it contains a few surprises that you may glean useful ideas from.
Nobody can say for sure when wardrobes started being used, but as Komandor notes, the French word for it, l’armorie, hints at how they were originally used, being a place not just for hanging robes, but other items too, although this is not the same as ‘armoury’ – it was not a place for weapons.
However, the notion of a dedicated place for storage became popular in medieval times, although it was often about shelving to stack things rather than an open space in which to hang things.
Moreover, they differed from today in another way; visit the City of London and you may see signs to the church of St Andrews by the Wardrobe, which gained this moniker in 1361, when the King’s Great Wardrobe was moved to an adjacent site, marked by a plaque in Wardrobe Place.
Having a wardrobe was clearly a big deal in those days, though most would not have the ‘great’ label attached. King Edward III’s wardrobe was an exception, of course, but it did typify a reality of wardrobes for hundreds of years.
Quite simply, these were the preserve of the wealthy, who would have a lot more space as well as many clothes. Indeed, by the time of King Edward, wardrobes had become something more than just a storage space; they were small buildings where important people had a whole clothing department to take care of their garments, including a tailor.
Poor people, by contrast, didn’t have wardrobes in either sense of the word. After all, they wouldn’t have much choice about what to wear or places to put any spare clothes they had. Only in the 19th century, as affluence spread with industrialisation, did wardrobes start to become commonplace.
If you want a wardrobe that harks back to olden days, it is safe to say you probably won’t have an in-house tailor or full clothes department, nor a whole building to put them in. But you might want to design something with a few medieval themes, perhaps by focusing on the materials of the time, such as oak, with a slightly rustic look.
If looking back into history is one option, looking forward into the future is another. The question is, how far?
You might want to be really inventive and make the wardrobe look like something that wouldn’t be out of place in Star Wars or Star Trek, complete with colourful, lit-up elements, bleeping and flashing lights and various things that resemble the incredible technology of a universe of warp drives and hyperspace.
Admittedly, you may not be able to use the force to lift garments off their hooks or beam them up, but if you are a fan of sci-fi films and TV series, this could be a great theme to play with, especially if you have a few themed outfits for fancy dress purposes hanging up in there.
However, you might also want to incorporate some futuristic elements that involve the very latest technology.
According to A Beautiful Space, smart technology already has a big role to play, with sensors and tags that can locate every item in there.
This could be particularly useful when you have items you seldom use, but need to find for an important occasion. Who hasn’t had a panic when they suddenly need to find that particular themed dress for a party, or a black tie for a funeral? All the worry can be taken away by having an electronic inventory and location devices.
According to the article, this can even be like “having your very own personal stylist within the confines of your wardrobe”.
If that sounds familiar, perhaps it’s worth reflecting that this is exactly what the important folk like kings and bishops had in medieval times, when their wardrobe was a whole building with an in-house tailor.
The difference this time is that a computerised device will do what a person did and you won’t need the same space. However, the effect is basically the same, ensuring you are kitted out appropriately for every occasion.
In this sense, it could be said that you are indeed going back to the future. The incorporation of the latest technology, while beyond the wildest dreams of people back in medieval times, could become commonplace in the wardrobes of the future and some are even using it now. Could your design make even more use of it?
If you can track where everything is, this enables more compartmentalisation, a greater number of drawers and increased order and organisation. If the wardrobes and cupboards you have been using all your life have felt too cluttered and items within them too hard to find, you could make use of this technology to resolve all these problems.
Of course, you may have some limitations, depending on the size of your home and the room where the wardrobe will be located. But the wonder of the design tool we provide is that you can address this issue, shaping and sizing it just as you need to maximise the use of space, as well as adding design elements, be they mock medieval, futuristic, or both.
So it is that you can enjoy the best of the past and future alike, combining the capacity to organise and use space like a medieval VIP without needing a whole dedicated building, using the most futuristic of tools to find, design and maximise technological solutions to create the wardrobe of the future.
When it comes to helping to store clothes in the most efficient and user-friendly way, It’s all a lot more useful than flying cars and hoverboards could ever be.
