Art Deco arrived in 1925 at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris — a world's fair dedicated entirely to demonstrating that modern design could be luxurious, optimistic, and distinctly of its time. The name came later; in 1925, it was simply "the new style."

The timing was precise. Europe had survived the First World War and was experiencing a decade of deliberate forgetting. Art Nouveau's organic curves had belonged to the Belle Époque; the new style needed harder edges, cleaner geometry, a visual language that felt like the future rather than memory. Architects, jewelers, fashion designers, and typographers converged on the same vocabulary: symmetrical geometry, gold and silver metallics, sunburst radiating lines, stepped forms.

The style crossed the Atlantic and became American in a specific way. The Chrysler Building (1930), the Empire State Building (1931), Rockefeller Center (1933) — New York's skyline was built in Art Deco. In Hollywood, every studio used it for sets, posters, and title cards. The visual language of Jazz Age aspiration was inseparable from Art Deco.

The Great Depression did not kill it — it made it more democratic. The streamlined variant, Streamline Moderne, applied the same geometric optimism to mass-produced objects: radios, refrigerators, toasters. Art Deco became the aesthetic of recovery, the design language that said the future was still worth building.