Art Deco

Art Deco took shape in Paris in the 1910s as designers associated with the Société des Artistes Décorateurs pushed back against Art Nouveau's fading organic curves in favor of streamlined geometry, symmetry, and rich materials. The style was officially christened at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, held in Paris from April to November 1925, which drew over sixteen million visitors to pavilions from twenty nations and gave the movement its later name — Art Deco, shortened decades afterward from the exhibition's title. Furniture designer Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann's exotic-wood cabinets, René Lalique's glasswork, Cartier's jewelry, and A.M. Cassandre's crisp travel posters translated Cubism, Futurism, ancient Egyptian and Aztec motifs, and the fast pace of the Jazz Age into a luxury vocabulary of chevrons, sunbursts, and stepped forms. The style crossed the Atlantic and reshaped American skylines, most spectacularly in William Van Alen's Chrysler Building (1930), with its stainless-steel sunburst crown, and found expression in ocean liners, cinemas, and consumer products from radios to cocktail shakers. As the Great Depression deepened, Art Deco grew more restrained and increasingly incorporated industrial materials like chrome and Bakelite; by the outbreak of World War II, wartime austerity and the rise of unadorned modernist architecture — championed by figures like Le Corbusier, whose stripped-down pavilion at the 1925 exposition anticipated the shift — had pushed the style into decline. Its glamour resurfaced in a major revival beginning in the 1960s and continues to shape design, film, and luxury branding today.