Art Deco

Art Deco is a single grammar worked across a wide range of materials, and the range is the point. The style was named after the 1925 Paris exposition, where the luxury end of it was on show — shagreen, ivory, lacquer, palmwood — but the same stepped geometry was already being pressed into metal and moulded plastic for a much larger market. Neither end is the authentic one.

The two met more often than the tidy version suggests. A French-designed object could be manufactured; a factory could lacquer; a workshop in Prague, Stockholm or Milan would take the vocabulary and settle on its own balance between craft and quantity. What separates pieces is usually the budget behind them, not the country.

The shared vocabulary is what makes the period recognisable: the stepped silhouette, the repeated fan, the edge that turns rather than blends, ornament that is composed rather than applied. Read a piece by how precisely that grammar is carried out, and in what material — that tells you more than any national label.