Product Description

A celebration of the most glamorous era of the last century - the roaring twenties, proving that fashion in the jazz age went far beyond the flapper dress and the cloche hat. Published to coincide with the major Art Deco 1910-1939 exhibition at the V&A. The world of Hollywood and F. Scott Fitzgerald is conjured up by images from fashion magazines, posters and photographs, as well as pictures of stylish outfits for all occasions from the V&A's dress collection.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7822 in Books
• Published on: 2051-01-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 96 pages

From Amazon.com
Sexy, modern, and unabashedly consumer-oriented, Art Deco was a new kind of style, flourishing at a time of rapid technological change and social upheaval. Lacking the philosophical basis of other European design movements, Deco borrowed motifs from numerous sources--Japan, Africa, ancient Egyptian and Mayan cultures, avant-garde European art--simply to create novel visual effects. Art Deco 1910-1939 surveys the sources and development of the popular style with more than 400 color illustrations and 40 chapters by numerous design specialists. The authors track Deco around the globe, from Paris to the United States—-where it got its biggest boost from mass production—-to Northern and Central Europe, Latin America, Japan, India, and New Zealand. The book's broad focus encompasses industrial artifacts (the Hindenburg blimp, the Burlington Zephyr locomotive), as well as architecture, furniture, accessories, fashion, jewelry, typography and poster design. Despite the existence of other prominent artistic movements during the 1920s and '30s, the authors tend to hang the Deco label on virtually any object that portrays the effects of technology or employs color, luxury materials or artificial light in striking ways. It does seem a stretch to include Man Ray's photographs, Sonia Delaunay's textiles and the movie King Kong in the Deco pantheon. But the great strength of Art Deco 1910-1939 is that it reveals the social context of Deco, not just its pretty face. The book accompanies an exhibition (organized by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London) at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto through January 4, 2004; subsequent venues are San Francisco and Boston. —Cathy Curtis

About the Author
Suzanne Lussier graduated with an MA in the History of Dress from the Courtauld institute and now works as a Curator in the Department of Furniture, Textiles and Fashion at the V&A Museum.