Human anatomies rarely pose within the pages of this magazine and, for the most part – our 2025 fancy-dress bonanza being the notable exception – the WoI style section in particular is mostly populated by gloriously shaped, body-courting but strictly inanimate objects, be they headboards, handles, spindle legs, jug ears or ball-and-claw feet. But what are rules if not for getting bent, and the Body Issue (WoI Sept 2026) demanded a certain flexibility when it came to how we would display a selection of knobs, levers, hinges and escutcheons.
How does the human body interact with hardware? Of course, in daily life, we pull, turn, slide and push handles, hinges and doorknobs in acts most of us barely notice. What if, instead of interacting with the body, the hardware becomes part of it? As this idea developed, the disassembling and reassembling Donna Haraway theorised in her Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s, some archival medical imagery and a particularly bold Schiaparelli spinal adornment came together to produce a vision of amalgamation: a multi-metallic exoskeleton of knobs, protruding or lain flat, echoing the human body’s internal structure.
Thinking about how I might attach these nickel and chrome adornments to my very patient models, I looked for visual inspiration in medical images (too gory), shots of stage makeup (too steampunk) and settled on nylons – these would form a second skin, and create the tension needed to suspend some of the pieces like subcutaneous jewellery. Others were artfully balanced with the help of gravity and the odd hard-working length of fishing line.
The limbs here function like objects placed in a set – slightly disjointed from the body as a whole. An arm pokes through a hole cut in a piece of velvet in Vaudeville-esque trickery; legs appear through the ghostly mist of Surrealism-inspired overpainting. The works of Claude Cahun, Max Ernst and Edward Weston were the touch points for different poses, angles and compositions that abstract the body into individual, isolated extremities intertwined with man-made accoutrements. The Surrealist artist Remedios Varo often painted figures fused with mechanical parts, but without a sense that these beings have in the process become machines themselves. Here, too, limbs and domestic hardware might be merging, but without losing any of that bodiliness; the union is therefore more conceptual – a play on how our bodies become part of the spaces we inhabit.
A version of this article appears in the September 2026 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers
