The Nature of the Phenomenon
The wardrobe is the most fundamental, most solid, most family-oriented object in the interior of the modern apartment. And this is no coincidence, for it is the wardrobe that is the forerunner of virtually all furniture in existence today.
Development
Remarkably, the first wardrobe stood horizontally: it was assembled from thick planks joined at right angles, fastened with wooden pegs, and its lid was attached with massive wrought-iron hinges — and the whole thing was known by a rather different name: the chest.
Until nearly the end of the 15th century, the chest was the single most important piece of household furniture. Wars, fires, floods, and disease demanded great mobility from the inhabitants of medieval towns, and a chest allowed one to quickly load one's essential belongings and move to a new home. The chest was also highly versatile. Large, wide chests served as beds; chests were lined along walls and used as seats; clothing, crockery, and tools were stored inside them. A specially made chest known as a larder was used as a cold storage unit for dry goods — grain, flour, salt, and sugar. The precise fitting of its planks ensured that foodstuffs kept for a long time. No household was complete without a chest. In fairness, it should be noted that by the 15th century there were already structures that we would recognize as wardrobes in the modern sense — namely, hinged doors covering alcoves and recesses. Such doors typically did not reach the top or bottom of the opening and resembled more of a ranch-style swinging gate, yet functionally they were quite similar to a wardrobe. Examples of such doors can be found in ecclesiastical architecture of the 14th and 15th centuries in Germany, the Netherlands, and England.
And then, at the end of the 15th century, some unknown but utterly brilliant Dutchman had the idea of standing a chest on its end — and the wardrobe was born. Two chests placed side by side yielded the double-door wardrobe. At almost exactly the same time — at the beginning of the 16th century — someone in France thought to set a chest atop a table frame, producing the famous "cabinet": a chest with a drop-down lid. From that moment on, one can speak of the age of the wardrobe. The wardrobe, without losing its utilitarian function, began to transform into a refined and significant element of interior design. Changes came first in materials: crude plank panels gave way to exquisite veneers, carved decoration, turned elements, inlay work, the famous Carthusian mosaic, and openwork metal mounts.
In France and Germany, wardrobes were made primarily from oak, adorned with fine carving and metal fittings. In Switzerland, Italian pine was the most common material. The Italians favored walnut. Italian "cassone" wardrobes are ornate and elegant; French and German ones are more Gothic in character — austere, tall, and broad. It was the Gothic style, however, that defined the subsequent direction of fashion in wardrobes. The griffins and chimeras of late Gothic, which had appeared on cornices, gave way to the atlantes and caryatids of the Renaissance. By the 16th century, the wardrobe was built entirely on the principle of a two-storey building: a plinth, a massive lower storey decorated with pilasters, columns, and friezes, and a recessed, lighter upper storey bearing a wealth of carved and turned ornaments, with doors inlaid with mosaic and stained glass.
Yet all of this bears the clear imprint of the wardrobe's ancestor — the chest. Clothes in the wardrobe were stored on shelves only, folded flat; and handles on the side panels persisted right up until the 18th century.
By the 17th century, wardrobes began to be differentiated by purpose — the clothes wardrobe, the sideboard cabinet, the "cabinet" for storing business papers, and the bureau, a bookcase with a fold-down writing surface. There were also exotic types of wardrobes, now lost to history: the Dutch, for instance, were known for wardrobes with built-in beds in which one slept in a semi-reclined position. It was in just such a wardrobe-bed that Peter the First slept during his stay in Holland, where he had gone incognito as a carpenter named Alekseyev. It is also worth noting that the Dutch were the first to abandon the division of the wardrobe into tiers and to begin making full-height doors spanning the entire wardrobe.
Analogues
To speak exclusively of Europe when recounting the history of the wardrobe is not entirely fair. Our Asian neighbors have been acquainted with the wardrobe for just as long as Europeans. The wardrobe was not common in the homes of even well-to-do city dwellers, but in mosques — in every mosque — in the direction of Mecca, there was invariably a special, richly ornamented wardrobe for storing the Quran, known as the Qibla or Keblah; similarly, every synagogue has a special cabinet for the Torah.
Distinctive varieties of wardrobes can be found in China and Japan, though folding screen partitions are more widespread there. Among virtually all peoples living in hot climates, the interior includes a niche or recess that serves the function of a wardrobe. It is worth noting the role of ecclesiastical architecture in the evolution of the wardrobe. In churches of virtually every denomination, wardrobe-type structures serve a great many functions — the sacristy in the Orthodox tradition, the confessional in Catholicism, and so on.
Evolution
If until now history has been silent about the nameless figures who drove the evolution of the wardrobe forward, at the very end of the 18th century a more than famous figure emerges. Legend attributes the birth of the sliding-door wardrobe to Napoleon Bonaparte. The story goes that it was he, angered by the extreme disorder in officers' barracks, who ordered all clothing to be concealed behind sliding screens. Whether or not this is true is not entirely clear, but what is known for certain is that by the mid-20th century sliding screens — and later doors — were already running on rollers in the wardrobes and room dividers of California residents.
Thus was born a new type of wardrobe: the sliding-door wardrobe. Since then, the history of the wardrobe has moved rapidly forward.