Art Deco took shape where luxury craft met industrial production, mass communication and a new consumer culture. Its finest interiors were handmade and available to few, yet their image travelled through exhibitions, department stores, magazines, cinema, advertising and tourism. The object could remain exclusive while the lifestyle it represented became widely visible.

Before the rules broke — the classical system

Much of official nineteenth-century decorative art spoke through inherited styles. An interior might be Gothic Revival, Neo-Renaissance or Louis XV in character. Each came with an established grammar governing architecture, furnishings and ornament. Objects made by different workshops could still belong together because they followed the same historical rules.

Industrialisation did not displace this system; it expanded its market. Improved manufacturing offered the growing middle class a wider choice of revival-style goods. Motifs once embedded in a coherent historical language could now be lifted from it and applied to almost any object.

Arts and Crafts challenged machine-dominated production and tried to reunite design with making. The decisive question was no longer how convincingly the past could be reproduced, but what a decorative language of the present should look like.

Art Nouveau — the first modern decorative language

Art Nouveau offered the first international answer. Victor Horta and Hector Guimard developed its organic, curvilinear form. In Vienna, Josef Hoffmann, associated with the Vienna Secession and Wiener Werkstätte, moved towards stricter geometry. In Scotland, Charles Rennie Mackintosh developed the Glasgow Style, joining Arts and Crafts principles to Art Nouveau. In Catalonia, the same search took the distinct form of Modernisme, most visibly in Antoni Gaudí’s architecture.

Its ambition extended from the building to the smallest fitting: a line could pass from a stair rail into furniture, glass, textiles and a door handle. Yet complete, individually designed environments were expensive, while their most recognisable features were quickly commercialised.

Art Deco inherited this ambition but adapted it to another social and economic world. It did not simply reverse Art Nouveau: botanical and geometric strands were stylised and recombined with classicism, avant-garde art and the imagery of the machine age.

After the war — modernity becomes a market

The First World War did not create Art Deco. The international exhibition eventually held in 1925 had first been planned for 1915. War delayed the project and changed the social meaning of the modernity it would present.

The 1920s did not bring prosperity evenly, but consumption and leisure became more visible in urban culture. Department stores, fashion, cinema, radio and illustrated magazines connected identity to purchasable things. Cars, trains, aviation and ocean travel turned mobility into a public ideal. The independent “modern woman” became one of the period’s most powerful media images, even if she represented only part of women’s lived experience.

The interior entered the same economy of images. Art Deco could be encountered in exhibitions, cinemas, hotels, shops, trains and liners; imagined through posters, film and advertising; and owned as a lamp, vase, clock or radio.

Much of French Art Deco was not mass-owned, but it was mass-seen. Few could commission Ruhlmann or travel first class, while millions encountered the associated lifestyle through a shop window, magazine spread or travel poster. Media, commerce and transport circulated not only motifs, but a complete scenario of urban, mobile and pleasurable modern life.

Paris 1925 — luxury, industry and the modern object

The Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes was both a cultural event and an economic project, intended to reinforce France’s position in the luxury trades. More than 16 million visitors saw displays ranging from architecture and complete interiors to jewellery, fashion and perfume. Exhibitors were expected to present original modern work rather than direct copies of historical styles.

The title joined the decorative and the industrial, but the French displays exposed the tension between them. Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann’s Hôtel du Collectionneur presented contemporary luxury through rare materials, exacting cabinetmaking and the model of the ensemblier, who conceived interiors as complete environments.

Art Deco did not replace craft with the machine. It used traditional craftsmanship to fashion an image of modernity.

That image could also be concentrated in an individual object. Clear silhouettes and controlled surfaces allowed a cabinet, lamp or vase to remain visually complete outside its original room. Electric lighting became an important field for Art Deco experimentation: metal provided structure, while frosted, opalescent and moulded glass shaped light into a decorative form. Advances in glass manufacturing also made such effects easier to produce at scale, helping the style reach a broader market.

Art Deco table lamp, France, circa 1925 — patinated metal and opalescent glass make the distribution of electric light part of the design, with richness carried by proportion and surface rather than applied ornament.

 

Art Deco table lamps, France, c. 1925

American Art Deco — when the modern city entered the interior

The influence of the Paris exposition became tangible in the United States in 1926, when 400 objects selected at the fair travelled to eight American museums. Department stores widened that visibility through exhibitions and their own interpretations. The exchange was reciprocal: European design met American patronage, immigrant designers, expanding cities and a culture of public entertainment.

The skyscraper became one of its clearest American forms. Paul Frankl translated the stepped setbacks of Manhattan’s skyscrapers into bookcases and cabinets. Donald Deskey used furniture, screens and abstract surfaces to give the interior a coherent modern identity, most famously at Radio City Music Hall. Vertical ribs, stepped profiles and tapering silhouettes moved between architecture, furniture, lighting and glass.

Amber pressed-glass vase, circa 1935 — its faceted, tapering body translates the silhouette of the modern tower into a domestic object designed for serial production.

Amber pressed-glass vase, circa 1935

During the Great Depression, Streamline Moderne redirected this image towards continuous curves and horizontal movement. Streamlining also had a commercial function: it could make a familiar object appear new, efficient and directed towards the future.

Why high French Art Deco lost its world

The Depression weakened the market for the rare materials and intensive labour associated with high French Art Deco. Some designers moved towards industrial production and Streamline; some clients returned to simplified classical forms; functional modernism offered another account of contemporary life.

The Second World War disrupted production, trade, travel and the social world of the interwar luxury interior. After 1945, austerity, rationalism and the demand for more economical furnishings favoured different materials and methods.

Art Deco did not disappear because people suddenly ceased to find it beautiful. The economic and social system that had sustained its most elaborate French expression disappeared first.

From revival to permanent reference

Art Deco became a historical category and a source of new design almost simultaneously. Yvonne Brunhammer’s 1966 exhibition Les années 25. Art déco. Bauhaus. Stijl. Esprit Nouveau gave the period an institutional framework, while Bevis Hillier’s 1968 book popularised the name in English. Original pieces entered collections as Deco-derived patterns returned to fashion and interiors.

The 1970s widened the revival through exhibitions, cinema and retail. In the 1980s, Postmodernism made historical quotation an explicit method, and Art Deco became one reference among many. That language continued into the early 1990s, increasingly absorbed into eclectic design rather than presented as a complete revival.

Designed in 1987, Jaume Tresserra’s Spinnaker armchair belongs to this late-twentieth-century afterlife rather than to historical Art Deco. Tresserra’s wider practice has been described as balancing Art Deco and Rationalist references; here dark walnut, black upholstery and polished nickel recover material refinement, while the continuous sweep of the backrest and exposed fittings keep the design contemporary. These circa 1990s examples come from the penthouses of Hotel Arts Barcelona.

Pair of Spinnaker Armchairs by Jaume Tresserra, Spain, c. 1990s

Since the mid-1960s, Art Deco has remained continuously available as a historical language. What changes is its visibility and the promise attached to it. Its recurring peaks suggest that the style becomes more prominent when design is asked not only to function, but to stage a desirable way of life — through abundance, technological optimism, escape, glamour or the pleasure of a single resolved object.

Art Deco has become unusually visible again. The Musée des Arts Décoratifs marked the centenary of the 1925 exhibition with a major 2025–26 survey, while current sourcing data point to renewed interest beyond the long dominance of post-war mid-century design.

The renewed interest is selective: strong silhouettes, rich materials and carefully balanced surfaces, with ornament used sparingly. Art Deco remains relevant because it shows that formal clarity and material richness are not opposites.

Irene Ore
Founder & Curator Cultural Habits