Art Deco Interior Design: How to Turn Your Home Into a Glamorous Vintage Oasis w/ Art Deco Decor
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About 100 years ago, the future looked bright and sparkly. Back then a lot of people were looking ahead and seeing shiny glamor, modern excess, futuristic skyscrapers, and lots of geometric shapes. This was the future that Art Deco fantasized about.
Now a hundred years later, we may or may not be living up to that fantasy, but when we look back, Art Deco interior design gives us a kind of blueprint for an aesthetic optimism that I think we can benefit from right now.
So today I'm giving you some Art Deco decor ideas and inspiration that will help you bring some 1920's and 30's glamour to your space!
If Art Deco was the aesthetic of a world falling in love with the future, maybe we too can find a way to fall in love with ours. 🥰
Would you rather watch than read? Here’s the video! ↓
What is Art Deco?
Art Deco was a design style that emerged in the 1910s, but really started roaring along with the '20s and into the '30s. And it was madly influential; it shaped architecture, furniture, fashion, jewelry, graphic design, transportation, film.
It was a decadent fantasy of progress, luxury, and modernity.
While Art Nouveau (which I recently did a video on) was all about flowing lines and celebrating the beauty of nature, Art Deco was all about structure and celebrating the potential of what humans could build. Art Nouveau challenged industrialization and Art Deco went full steam ahead with it.
Geometric patterns, symmetry, glitz, chrome, jazz, machines and buildings that actually looked stylish… This was a world that looked at machinery and said, "Okay, technology is happening no matter what. Let's at least make it beautiful."
And the women were looking beautiful, too. There were flapper dresses, intricate beaded patterns, daring exposed ankles, and a general air of wildness that women started to embrace. Voting rights were looking good on them!
It was a party. A party that was still filled with plenty of social injustice, wealth inequality, and a little something called the Great Depression, all bookended by two world wars… But Art Deco found a way to party through it all, like some Great Gatsby fever dream.
Ultimately, what I think we can take away from Art Deco and apply to our interior styling is its spirit of fun, optimism, progress, and glamour for glamour's sake.
And to help you capture that spirit, I have some Art Deco decor pieces for you, if you want to live in your own little Art Deco party of a home!
Art Deco Wall Decor
Art Deco Decorative Accents
Art Deco Optimism
Beyond the glamour, the underlying spirit of Art Deco is one of optimism. The 1920s looked ahead and saw promise in the future. The 2020s, on the other hand, look ahead and see… I don't even want to talk about it. 🫠
So this is where Art Deco can come in and give us a dose of positivity in our spaces.
The '20s and '30s were no strangers to societal trauma, and that's an understatement. Yet, the party of Art Deco persisted. So, I think leaning into such a fun, idealistic, extravagant style would be a decent coping mechanism for us, especially for women.
Art Deco in the 1920s was the backdrop to an extremely significant time for women's rights, which now in the 2020s are obviously under attack. Not that women became liberated in the '20s, far from it. But there was real progress.
I mean, a female artist became one of the major icons of the Art Deco movement. Tamara de Lempicka captured the modern women of the time in her paintings, and they're a major part of the visual language of Art Deco. These women were depicted in a pretty revolutionary way, looking glamorous and powerful, rarely posed with men, and literally driving forward to a future with more opportunity than before.
The fact that Tamara de Lempicka, a woman, is so emblematic of Art Deco and her subjects are women with unprecedented agency makes this style feel empowering.
So capturing the energy of this aesthetic through your decor could be a way to tap into those feelings of optimism and progress that might feel difficult to summon right now.
Interior styling really is that deep! There's a medicinal quality to decor and fashion and really any creative thing we do. So, if you're feeling down about the world right now, maybe what you need is a prescription for a hearty dose of Art Deco.
But there are some side effects…
Art Deco Illusion
Beneath the decadent party of Art Nouveau is… what? The future this aesthetic dreamed up sure didn't happen. The industrialization that allowed us to create those beautiful buildings, interesting pieces of decor, and intricately embellished fashion ended up being the very thing that eventually brought us to this bland, cheap, mass-produced cultural malaise all these years later.
Progress made things more boring when it could have continued to make beauty.
Was it all just a glamorous illusion? The original meaning of the word glamour, after all, is basically “magical spell”. When we look back on the glamour of Art Deco, are we romanticizing the memory of it rather than the reality? Like Gatsby pining over the memory of Daisy rather than the reality of her?
Gatsby's extravagant, endless party loop was carefully constructed to appear wealthy, successful, and popular. The American dream.
But it was all empty. Nobody was actually connecting with each other. The characters preferred sparkly illusions and extravagant parties over genuine human connection. The American dream.
Superficial displays of wealth and decadence to drown out the anxiety of existing as a real person. The American dream.
Maybe we're all a Gatsby yearning for a Daisy that was never really ours. Here we are looking backward when Art Deco was looking forward. Art Deco taught people to see modernity as beautiful. But was that a good thing?
Is modernity beautiful or is it just a glitzy party that only the privileged can attend?
Under the influence of the glamour of Art Deco, we bought into a promising future. But is that what we got?
Of course, the answer isn't simple. Our present day is both ugly and beautiful, just like every other time in human history.
And maybe to an extent, illusion isn't such a bad thing. Fantasizing is part of being creative. Art Deco was a creative powerhouse of an aesthetic.
And just like how Art Deco created a beautiful fantasy of the future, you can create a beautiful fantasy within your home. And what's great about that particular fantasy is you can decorate your way into making it a reality.
