This Week 100 Years Ago: Headlines from 05 15, 2025
Rewinding the Calendar
Welcome back to This Week 100 Years Ago, the slot where we trade our 5-G headsets for straw boaters and party like it’s 1925. On this very week a full century ago, the world’s style compass swung hard toward what we now call Art Deco – and Paris was its glittering North Star.
1. Paris Throws the Party of the Century – The International Exposition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts (15 May 1925)
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Picture it: the banks of the Seine shimmering under rows of new electric lamps, pavilions bursting with angular motifs, sunbursts, and chrome. On 15 May 1925 the freshly opened Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes hit its first big weekend crowds. More than 200 pavilions from 20 nations promised a bold break from frilly Victorian excess. Visitors queued to see lacquer-black Bugatti roadsters, tubular steel furniture from Marcel Breuer, and a pair of shocking skyscraper models proposed for New York’s skyline.
By Sunday the Paris press was giddy: “Une nouvelle esthétique mondiale est née!” – a new global aesthetic is born. Coco Chanel strolled the aisles in a simple jersey dress (no corset, naturally), while a young Le Corbusier grumbled that all this ornament was still too fussy and unveiled his stripped-down “L’Esprit Nouveau” pavilion just across the street in quiet protest.
2025 Takeaway
Art Deco’s love of clean geometry and luxury materials still shapes everything from the NFT galleries in Dubai to the retro hotels of Miami Beach. Yet where 1925 celebrated speed and machine power, our 2025 eye is on sustainability. Imagine telling those dazzled Parisians that the showpieces of 2125 will be grown in bio-labs instead of forged in steel.
Fast Facts
• Attendance that opening fortnight: ~1 million
• Show ran for six months, coining the very term Art Deco
• France required exhibitors to prove their work was “modern, original, and free of historic imitation” – a rule today’s patent lawyers would kill for.