There are times when I’m reviewing images of runway collections and ask myself, “Is that what I think I think it is?” Trompe l’œil, the artistic device of visual trickery that fools the viewer into believing the illusion of an object is real, has a long history in painting, architecture, and fashion. As models sauntered down the runway for JW Anderson’s spring 2025 menswear collection, I noticed four quadrants of grids stitched into a collared button-down cardigan, but wait, is that a red door on the cuff? It was.

Jonathan Anderson, founder of his namesake brand, noted that, for this collection, he wanted to construct “irrational clothing.” However, I would argue that his wearable interpretations of English architectural styles—ranging from shift dress town houses to Cornish cottage cardigans— are some of the best motifs you can add to your closet. How we dress ourselves is often reflected in how we dress our homes, and a new generation of fashion designers is game for playing house, further exploring the relationship between the closet and the rest of interior world.

Home has proven to be fertile creative ground for more than just Anderson lately, as evidenced by the runways at both Milan and Paris Fashion Weeks this past September. Vivetta Ponti has always translated her admiration for interior design into her own collections, as seen in her spring 2025 ready-to-wear collection. For this body of work, a project at home led to the creation of a light blue moiré pillow top, a garden’s worth of lily-of-the-valley embroidery and rose prints, and a recurring motif of fabric draped to resemble an open curtain.

“My first ideas came from looking for new curtains for my home,” Ponti says. “When I start to work on a new collection, I consider all of the [features of my home] that I like, and sometimes this comes from the different Sanderson wallpapers in my home; I wanted pale pastel curtains that would [nod] to the wallpapers’s colors and patterns. The pastel colors throughout the collection reminded me of 1980s interiors. The person who lives in this style of house would wear this collection.”

One of the standout pieces of this collection is a house-shaped bag featuring 2,500 colored crystals that master artisans crafted in partnership with the Milan-based accessories brand Rosantica. The luxury label’s founder Michela Panero explains that the team took a highly detail-oriented approach in weaving elements of Ponti’s life into the piece. “If you look closely, we represented Vivetta’s three cats on the bag,” she says. “Since the window motif is prominent in the garments, I wanted to make sure that the windows opened and closed. We even added a little curtain to tie it to the collection.” In my mind, another high-end house-shaped bag is situated in the same neighborhood as Ponti’s: the Maison de Famille handbag designed by Nicolas Ghesquière for Louis Vuitton SS23, modeled after Vuitton’s own Art Nouveau–style home in Asnières.

Like Ponti, New York–based fashion designer Samatha Pleet also has a fondness for floral-patterned wallpaper, specifically the bloom-adorned walls of her grandmother’s Tudor-style home. “My whole brand is inspired by my grandmother’s home,” she explains. “It’s a bohemian jewel box. Nothing’s too perfect, and there are countless antiques that enhance the maximalist environment. She matched floral wallpaper with drapes in many rooms of her home and coordinated displays of objects like opaline glass within these spaces, usually sticking to a monochromic theme like all green or all pink.”

Pleet established her eponymous brand back in 2007 and has since collaborated with her husband Patrick, an architect, on prints that draw from various points in art history as well as pieces of their personal story. For her SS16 collection, Pleet’s grandmother’s home was her main muse. The designer included windows with tiny embroidered plants on the exterior façades of lightweight button-down dresses and recreated a blue-and-green floral wallpaper pattern found in her grandmother’s home. “There’s a lot of personal storytelling in my clothes, which I feel is the most important element,” Pleet adds. “There is a human touch and a history behind my patterns [beyond] their aesthetics that connect our lives to what we create.”

While investigating this topic further, my “For You” page began serving me images and content creators who adapt elements of the home into accessories. Guy Was Right, an Atlanta-based artist and creator, crafts handbags in the shapes of shrunken versions of his grandma’s floral-printed, plastic-wrapped sofa, and beds that stash money underneath the mattress. “The idea for the ‘Loose Change in the Sofa’ bag came from trying to find a remote that fell the sofa cushions and found a lot of change with it,” he says. “I just thought it would be something funny to do.” In a TikTok video, Guy revealed that he sourced fabrics from his own closet by using a pair of jeans, a denim jacket, and a leather jacket to cover the scaled-down cushions to coordinate with future outfits.

Molly Blutstein similarly finds her muse in interior design and shares side-by-side images of her sartorial interpretations of interiors on social media. The Atlanta-based fashion content creator also pens the newsletter In the Details With Molly, taking note of a symbiosis between the way she dresses herself and how she styles her home in the mirroring of colors, patterns, and shapes that fill her closet and mood board. “I actually think looking to interior spaces as a way of getting inspired for outfits has helped me with pairing different colors, silhouettes, and textures,” she explains. “In many ways, I think it has just deepened my love for both getting dressed and well-designed spaces.”

For Jonny Johansson, creative director of Acne Studios, a visit to Sadie Coles in London to see Jonathan Lyndon Chase’s “Now I’m Home, Lips That Know My Name” exhibition sparked fresh ideas for his label’s spring 2025 collection. The exhibition emboldened him to imbue more tenderness and play into his pieces, so he commissioned Chase to design a runway installation that consisted of couches, chairs, and soft sculptures. The show’s overall environment was more akin to an abstracted living room than a standard runway setup. The intrinsic intimacy between the way we dress ourselves and the way we decorate our homes was reflected in the pieces, like the chunky crochet sets that would have fit right in draped over the edge of a bed as a throw blanket.

“In my conversations with Acne, we discussed creating something immersive yet tender and a bit alien,” Chase says. “I looked closely at the collection, particularly the exaggerated silhouettes and the tension and cohesion of the materials, translating these elements into interior spaces like the living room, bathroom, and kitchen…. The sculptures and furniture are a lot about the context and their relationship with each other, installing the work so the immersion felt fluid, architectural, emotional, and reflective of the wardrobe’s attitude.”

It’s not uncommon to see beautifully crafted chairs in a gallery, but it’s rare to find ones that are bursting with color and covered in a mosaic of archival vintage textiles like the ones crafted by Batsheva Hay. At the Hill Art Foundation’s latest exhibition for Jordan Casteel, you’ll also find the fashion designer’s furniture curated throughout the gallery, complementing the kaleidoscopic range of shades layered in Casteel’s paintings. Primarily known for her clothing brand, Hay started her own furniture line by working with upholstery textiles and began crafting furniture during the pandemic. Using these fabrics in a new format felt intuitive to her, “similar to designing a dress in the way that these fabrics take the shape of the form they cover.”

While reflecting on the relationship between the closet and the rest of the home, Hay describes the similarities between crafting furniture and garments. “Especially for those working in fashion, there is an awareness of materials and how they coordinate with one another,” she explains. “But for me, I want the interior of my home to reflect my artistic approach. The way someone dresses and displays the things they collect is a visual summary of the self.”

One of the most viral sources of inspiration for threading the seams between our home decor and fashion can be found in the 1986 book Art to Wear by Julie Schafler Dale. The vintage vessel contains vests with 360-degree views of bathrooms and basements with cheeky details like a figure midshower and a work desk covered in tools with other quotidian accoutrements hiding underneath it. Lirika Matoshi’s “apartment” pieces are reminiscent of the images within those pages, but instead of focusing on one singular room, a 3D fabric rendering of the entire home is displayed across the corset, skirt, and coat. Evidently, there’s nothing more chic than wearing your home on your sleeve. Playing house never gets old.