How changing rooms have changed

It's hard to believe but World of Interiors, once the subversive newcomer in, well ... the world of interiors ... is now a grown-up 20-year-old.

Launched by Kevin Kelly, with Min Hogg as its editor, in November 1981, it was acquired by Condè Nast a year or so later. It's even harder now to remember how different most interior design magazines used to be - preoccupied as they were by the houses of the rich and famous, which we, the less privileged reader, were assumed to aspire to from afar. They did, from time to time run features on "how to decorate on a budget", in acknowledgement of their readers' inexplicable lack of trust funds. But the aspirational interior of the time was mostly awash with a sea of Colefax and Fowler, antiques and the visible handiwork of the posh interior designer. Good taste mattered and its boundaries were clearly defined. Kitsch was around, but only in very circumscribed circles.

That first issue gave little hint of what was to follow. In some ways it is oddly conventional - the arrival of folding screens to hide the "sight of a naked radiator" is greeted with much relief, Mrs (now Lady) Mark Weinberg's house is shown in all its sumptuous glory, Bryan Ferry relaxes in the "countrified comfort of his London house". Of the crumbling walls, the dusty shacks, the mossclad rusty garden implements, the shabby chic that the magazine helped define, not a sign. But Min Hogg had not yet got into her subversive stride. When she did, it blew gales through the world of interiors.

Hogg made us look at things in a different way. Beauty was not just to be found in grand and expensive objects. A bowl of perfectly green apples could be as beautiful as a bunch of roses. Never intended as a practical journal ("You couldn't," says Condè Nast's managing director, Nicholas Coleridge, "imagine it doing three cheap and cheerful ways to do up a spare room, could you?"), its prime intention was always to inspire.

As Rupert Thomas, who took over the editorship from Hogg two years ago, puts in his introduction to the 20th anniversary issue: "It introduced forgotten fabrics such as checks, stripes and toile de Jouy to a new public, and showed that a pigsty can be as captivating as a palace."

A look through the back files to the July/August 1983 issue shows the first time we were introduced to the interior designer John Pawson's bare, perfectly white, minimalist family apartment, bereft of colour, pattern, fruit, toys, clothes or any single sign of human habitation. Most of us still remember the shock. At that time, the dinner tables of the decorating classes reverberated to one-upmanship about which esoteric supplier of paint supplied the most subtle shade of white. It was in World of Interiors that many of us first came upon the delights of sisal carpeting, where we found pleasure in plain wooden floors, in dilapidated bits of furniture, in yards of Bolton sheeting draped like a plaster-carving at the window. We learned there that shabby is so much more appealing (not to mention classy) than spanking new. We saw the charms of the eclectic look but noted how difficult it was to do.

In the magazine's pages you can track the rise and rise of affluence - the development of the high-maintenance, swagged and tasselled, lavish interiors of the late Eighties. It pioneered the clean simplicity of the Gustavian look, plundered from late 18th century Swedish interiors - the painted furniture, the slightly greyish shade of white, the fresh blue-striped fabrics, the pretty voiles. Then they were scarcely known, today they are everywhere.

Little was missed by its eagle eye - though, just as Wallpaper* magazine, a rival launched in 1996, started to pioneer the trend for 20th century modernism, World of Interiors seemed to pass it by. Mysteriously, it didn't seem to cut the mustard.

But in the celebration issue, out tomorrow, we see how the times they are a-changing; it has - in ironic homage to its famed obsession with shabby chic - a wonderfully lush photographic essay on unfaded grandeur. And, if you are wondering where the chic interior is going next, I have a tip. Flocked wallpaper, that's where.