Art deco has a history of being a glitzy distraction from effecting genuine change during moments of turmoil, writes Catherine Slessor as part of our Art Deco Centenary series.
You can tell a lot about a style by the company it keeps. In 2021, before his acquisition and despoliation of what was then Twitter, Elon Musk tweeted “I love Art Deco” (709,000 likes). This random assertion has since become a monotonous refrain, with Twitter now recast as X, signified by an art deco-inflected letter X, refashioned for the digital age. Ironically, X’s monumentally ugly branding, with its salacious overtones of adults-only content, was crowdsourced, following another gnomic Musk-style edict: “If X is closest to anything, it should, of course, be Art Deco.”
As well as grotesque graphics, Musk’s penchant for deco has manifested itself in outre objects. Apparently inspired by the streamlined forms of 1930s American trains, the Tesla Robovan (pictured top) is a self-driving pod designed to convey people and goods. Arguably, it resembles more a giant toaster unsettlingly come to life, but Musk is clearly high on his own supply. “Can you imagine going down the streets and you see this coming towards you? That would be sick!” he crowed at last year’s much-hyped Robovan launch.
Art deco attempted to elevate the Gradgrindian realities of commerce and industry
To paraphrase pop artist Richard Hamilton, just what is it that makes art deco so different, so appealing? Why is it still catnip to a fanbase that extends from self-regarding squillionaires to middlebrow aficionados of the Antiques Roadshow?
As a sumptuous veneer brushed over the economic and social turmoil of the interwar decades, art deco always connoted a kind of retro-futurist escapism. If the real future was too terrifying to contemplate, shaded by economic collapse and the rise of fascism, then art deco, a world of svelte contours and luxurious allure populated by men in tuxedos and women in opera coats, promised a soothing “moderne” style-du-jour, the non-threatening obverse to modernism’s radical cultural and social upending. After all, “deco” stands for “décoratif”. And every hour is cocktail hour.
Running like a gleaming Vitrolite thread through the interwar years, deco’s satin-gloved grip on public consciousness was comparatively brief. Nonetheless, it compensated by vigorously rifling through architecture’s dressing-up box. From Mesoamerica to Japan, “exotic” cultures were appropriated, cosplayed and sanitised, another factor in its enduring appeal.
Ancient Egypt proved especially popular, impelled by the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, which unleashed a torrent of Egyptomania applied to anything and everything, from sewing machines to buildings. Epitomising this Pharaonic trend, the Carreras cigarette factory in London’s Mornington Crescent – “where the famous Black Cat cigarettes are made under ideal conditions by contented workers”, as Carreras advertising of the time put it – boasted a polychromatic facade, papyriform columns and liberal allusions to the Egyptian cat goddess Bastet.
Not everyone approved. Nikolaus Pevsner, the distinguished architectural historian, described the Hoover Building as “perhaps the most offensive of the modernistic atrocities” along London’s Great West Road. Conceived by “fancy factory” specialists Wallis, Gilbert & Partners as a gaudy synthesis of Egyptian and Native American motifs, Hoover was a brash architectural billboard designed to catch the eye of passing traffic and promote the company’s wares.
As lavish set-dressing for office blocks and factories, art deco attempted to elevate the Gradgrindian realities of commerce and industry. Yet beyond the beguiling facades, conditions for the “contented workers” remained pretty much unchanged.
It served to reinforce existing inequalities
Unlike modernism, deco was not underscored by a socially transformative agenda. Instead, it served to reinforce existing inequalities. While the masses might enjoy the new super-cinemas, those at more privileged end of the spectrum could cocoon themselves in an exclusive milieu of deco-themed restaurants, bars, houses, hotels and even ocean liners.
Though the exigencies of wartime ultimately precipitated deco’s decline, its tuxedo-clad spectre has periodically resurfaced over the years. From the 1974 The Great Gatsby movie with its jazz-age stylings (who doesn’t love Robert Redford in a cream suit?), to London’s famous Biba emporium featuring a Golden Age of Hollywood interior, deco proved the perfect antidote to the chill economic winds and social anomie of the early 70s.
Once again, its escapist allure papered over wider societal cracks. By the 80s, the Hoover Building was up for listing and deco’s legacy was being reassessed and championed by architectural and design historians.
More recently, the remodelling of Battersea Power Station involved the restoration of Control Room A (imagine Claridge’s meets Chernobyl) to function as a characterful backdrop for weddings and corporate events. “Teak parquet floors, marble finishings and an elaborate gold-coffered glass ceiling present art deco glamour at its most authentic,” trumpets Battersea’s website. The power station’s resurgence is further evidence that deco has now attained the status of national treasure, winkling its way into public affection.
Though in some ways, it was never out of it. Reprised and replayed through endless repeats of Poirot (who, for televisual purposes, has an apartment in Florin Court, a 1936 deco block in Charterhouse Square), amplified by yet another remake of The Great Gatsby (Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 version substitutes Redford for DiCaprio and goes gangbusters on the party scenes), deco is a soft style for hard times, a suave companion on the road to hell.
Riven by existential threat and political turmoil, the future currently feels decidedly ominous. Rather like the interwar decades, in fact, as history seems doomed to repeat itself. Relapsing into the gilded seductiveness of art deco takes the edge off things, in the manner of a well-mixed cocktail.
So as it turns 100, it’s no surprise to see deco being avidly embraced by the likes of Elon Musk. But endlessly recycling the past as a vacuous costume drama only serves to constrain and deny the potential for genuinely transformative change. Time to consign the dressing-up box to history.
Catherine Slessor is an architecture editor, writer and critic. She is the president of architectural charity the Twentieth Century Society and former editor of UK magazine The Architectural Review.
The image is courtesy of Tesla.
Art Deco Centenary
This article is part of Dezeen’s Art Deco Centenary series, which explores art deco architecture and design 100 years on from the “arts décoratifs” exposition in Paris that later gave the style its name.
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