Art Deco in Paris

“The year is 2026, a Dickensian ‘best of times, worst of times’, where total oppression and manipulation of the masses is wielded by the unquestionable power of the few.”

Written by the legendary German director Fritz Lang as the opening credits to his iconic film Metropolis, the 100-year-old quote feels remarkably on point for our era. A celluloid incarnation of Art Deco aesthetic, the 1926 production presented a phantasmagoric future in a massively overcrowded, vertiginous city, the space between its stacked super-tall towers crisscrossed by beetling flyovers and slick airborne vehicles.

When the film, large parts of which had been lost or destroyed, was restored by Giorgio Moroder (the father of disco – as in, “Love to Love You, Baby”) and re-released in 1984 with a soundtrack by Freddie Mercury, Pat Benatar, Loverboy and Adam Ant, it fired frenzied synapses in postmodern minds, seeming at once of an era and kinda timeless.[[That Madonna would blatantly appropriate the film in her 1989 video for “Express Yourself” – all steamy geysers and churning machinery, Lang’s downtrodden prols morphed into line-dancing beefcakes – only confirmed that we’re all, as a culture, still on the Fritz.]]

It’s this seemingly inexhaustible appeal of Art Deco, its capacity to hook into a mood no matter when we consider it, behind a major exhibition at the Musée des Art Décoratifs in Paris marking the 100-year anniversary of the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts that eventually gave the globally-recognised style its name.