Why are so many successful women interior designers married to rich men?

[quote] Is it a hobby career for society women?

Yes.

Because hubby funded their design business.

For her birthday, I bought her a master's of interior design from DePaul. She knows all the colors now.

-Duke Snyder, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

Gives her access to wealthy clients.

It's not like it requires real credentials. Even if you don't get what credentials there are, you can still work.

Real estate and interior design (or decorator) are full of spouses (of either sex) with well off husbands. This and or they come from money themselves.

Obvious first reason is simple; you need some sort of steady income until a business grows and becomes profitable. Real estate and interior design/decorating are all commission based professions. No work comes in, you don't make any money.

Coming from, married or being adjacent to wealth gives persons access. Real estate at certain levels is largely about people doing business with those they feel comfortable. This is why like interior decorating, art, and some other things blacks and other minorities just cannot often break above a certain level or even get a foot past front door. If Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Haines are seeking to sell their Park avenue apartment or house in Great Neck, they're likely going to rely upon a RE broker known to themselves or their circle.

Ask Jeremiah Brent.

Gay designers go after wealthy men, too. They all like beautiful and expensive homes, furniture, art and antiques, and those things cost money....lots of money. All of my gay designer friends are married to multi-millionaires.

The interior design business is also about a chic and luxurious lifestyle that involves designer clothes, luxury cars, expensive vacations, etc.

R1 …

See also: documentary film maker

Interior design, as we know it today, was created by a bored, rich housewife of a Lord, Lady Mendl, or Elsie de Wolfe. Her book on Interior Design was published in 1913.

For the woman from a good family background who completed united, maybe taking a degree in Art History, who has money of her own and/or a prosperous husband, it's a perfect job.

She makes a tasteful house for herself and her family, a few friends admire it and encourage her, next she's helping some nice but taste-free friend of a friend do over a house they just bought, going to auctions, buying from to the trade showrooms and interior design centers and antique dealers, making buying trips. A license and a stack of business cards in hand, ind day she spots a perfect Cotswold cottage of a place that used to be a lamp shop for the carriage trade but would make a perfect shop and design studio.

She works as much or as little as she wants, accounts for all her expenses, takes August off because everyone us away anyway, and whenever else she wants. The small card in the shop door says, "By appointment." She gets sn Instagram page and sells off a few of her mistakes or pieces where her client changed her mind. She has a business that gets her out as much as she wants. She sells her own good taste as a professional service. And it can be as much or SS little as she wants.

How much better is that than working at an office, or hawking real estate, or looking for a job in an art gallery at 45 years if age.

It's a great gig.

*who completed university

I’m reading Capote’s Swans, and it seems like the three “almost” careers very wealthy women could have are interior design, fashion adjacent, and “guest” editor in woman’s magazines. And still their husbands were very resentful of them doing any of it. Especially C.Z. Guest could have really helped her husband from financial ruin had he let her be more involved in interior design, she had a small shop on the UES, but didn’t really let her pursue it. Instead allowing his art and furniture collections to be confiscated by creditors and sold off at auction, selling their NYC apartment and even down sizing and selling Templeton the Long Island estate. Her use of animal print carpets to hide dog’s paw prints alone could have brought in millions had she endorsed it and other design features she was known for.

Of course Edith Wharton’s Decoration of Houses really opened up the possibilities and helped remove the stigma of wealthy women doing that kind of work as well.

Winston Frederick Churchill Guest was in and out of debt way such families sometimes found themselves. However source of his largest ruin (and the aforementioned IRS issues), was debts from business ventures including an airline what went belly up.

I’m kind of intrigued by this story I learned last year about Beastie Boy Mike D’s mother, Hester Diamond, who grew up a poor Jew in the Bronx, but had a great eye with her husband and amassed a cutting edge art collection and became well known art dealers and a wealthy UES couple in the process. Seward Johnson asked her to design an apartment for him and his bride to be, the Polish caretaker he married on the fly, and she just jumped in and did it with no real background. She said everything she knew was from visiting the Met. For a decade she became a highly sought after and well paid Interior Designer for other very wealthy people.

It’s easier to be an interior designer when you are already wealthy because you are moving in that mileu, you go inside other wealthy people’s homes and see the trends/styles/taste, you know all the “right” touches people want etc.

Still it’s not easy being an interior designer. The clients can be demanding and nasty. My wealthy neighbor did it and she fought with all the clients who couldn’t see her “vision” and her business cratered. Plus, many of the wealthy people are cheap and want discounts on everything and fight all the bills.