Art Deco was the dominant decorative style of the 1920s and 1930s, expressing the optimism, glamour, and technological confidence of the interwar years in an aesthetic of geometric precision, luxurious materials, and streamlined elegance. Named retrospectively after the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes held in Paris in 1925, it synthesised influences from Cubism, Futurism, African art, Ancient Egypt (newly fashionable after the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922), and the machine aesthetic into a style that was simultaneously modern and opulent. In architecture, it produced the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building in New York, the Radio City Music Hall, and hundreds of glamorous cinemas and hotels across the world. In the decorative arts, it found expression in the jewellery of Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels, the fashion of Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli, the ocean liner interiors of the Normandie, and the graphic design of Cassandre. Art Deco was the style of jazz, cocktails, and the cinema — an expression of modernity as luxury and speed.
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The 1925 Paris Exhibition — Launching a Global Style: The Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes of 1925 was the defining event of Art Deco’s international emergence. Held in Paris along the banks of the Seine, it brought together the finest decorative art, fashion, jewellery, and interior design of its moment, promoting a vision of modernity that was simultaneously avant-garde and commercially desirable. The exhibition gave the movement its retrospective name and established Paris as the capital of the new decorative aesthetic.
Geometry, Luxury, and the Machine: Art Deco’s visual language was essentially geometric — chevrons, zigzags, sunbursts, stepped forms — combined with luxurious materials: chrome, lacquer, ebony, ivory, jade, and precious stones. This combination of machine-age geometry with handcrafted opulence was its defining paradox. The style embraced the aesthetics of the machine while insisting that the finest things should still be made by hand from the finest materials, available only to those who could afford them.
The Chrysler Building — Art Deco’s Greatest Monument: William Van Alen’s Chrysler Building in New York (1928–30) is perhaps the supreme architectural achievement of Art Deco. Its gleaming stainless steel crown, its gargoyles modelled on Chrysler car ornaments, its soaring verticality and luxuriously decorated lobby represent the movement at its most spectacular. Completed in a race against the Bank of Manhattan Trust Building to be the world’s tallest structure, it briefly held that title before being overtaken by the Empire State Building.
Egyptian Revival and Tutankhamun’s Gift: The discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb by Howard Carter in November 1922 triggered an Egyptian craze that swept through fashion, design, and popular culture. Scarabs, lotus flowers, hieroglyphics, and sphinxes appeared on jewellery, fabrics, cigarette cases, and cinema facades. Egypt offered Art Deco designers a source of geometric ornament with an aura of exotic antiquity — the perfect complement to the movement’s taste for luxury with a veneer of archaeological authority.
Ocean Liners, Cinemas, and the Architecture of Glamour: Art Deco was above all the style of the spaces in which modern life was most glamorously lived: the great ocean liners — the Normandie, the Queen Mary — with their vast first-class saloons lined in lacquered panels and Lalique glass; the picture palaces where Hollywood dreams were projected in surroundings of fantastic luxury; the hotel lobbies, cocktail bars, and department stores that made the experience of modernity feel like entry into a world of effortless elegance.
Legacy — From Hollywood to the High Street: Art Deco never entirely went away. Its revival in the 1960s and 1970s — when its combination of glamour and geometry seemed freshly appealing after decades of modernist austerity — established its place as one of the most beloved and widely reproduced styles in the history of design. Today, Art Deco buildings are among the most protected and cherished in every city that possesses them, their interiors restored with care and their aesthetic recycled endlessly in fashion, graphic design, and popular culture.