Roaring Twenties

Art Deco in Fashion: Jewelry, Textiles, and Accessories

Art Deco’s influence on 1920s fashion was the most direct and most durable transmission of the style. The geometric vocabulary of the architecture and the decorative arts was reproduced, at smaller scales and on personal objects, in the jewelry of Cartier and Tiffany, in the beadwork on evening dresses, in the textile patterns of fashion fabrics, in the vanity cases and cigarette cases of the period, and in the fashion illustration of the magazines that defined the Jazz Age look.

For the wider Art Deco context, see the parent Art Deco Design cluster page and the 1920s Arts and Entertainment pillar overview. For the history of the style, For the buildings,

Cartier and the Art Deco Jewelry of the 1920s

The jeweler most identified with Art Deco in the 1920s was Cartier, the Parisian house founded in 1847 by Louis-François Cartier and led in the 1920s by the three grandsons of the founder: Louis Cartier (1875-1942), the designer; Pierre Cartier (1878-1964), the New York dealer; and Jacques Cartier (1884-1942), the London dealer. The decisive event in the firm’s Art Deco period was the 1911 trip of Jacques Cartier to India, the visit to the court of the Maharaja of Baroda and other princely houses, and the subsequent purchase and incorporation into Cartier’s Paris work of Indian Mughal jewelry. The Mughal-cut emeralds, rubies, and sapphires, the carved and pierced Indian stones, the kalgi (turban ornament) and sarpech (plume holder) forms, and the Indian taste for dense, polychrome, multi-stone composition entered the Cartier vocabulary within a year.

The 1922 discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun by Howard Carter was the second decisive event. The Egyptian revival in jewelry, the use of lapis lazuli, carnelian, turquoise, and scarab motifs, and the hieroglyphic-like repetition of small geometric ornaments, all entered the Western jewelry vocabulary in the years after 1923. Cartier’s “Tutti Frutti” bracelets, necklaces, and clips of 1924-26, with their Indian-inspired combination of carved emeralds, rubies, and sapphires set in platinum, were the most famous products of the firm’s Art Deco period.

The 1920s Cartier vocabulary also included the “Bandeau” watch of 1924, the “Garland” style, the roll-on bracelets (rigid platinum and diamond bracelets), the onyx and diamond combination, and the famous “Mystery Clocks” (clocks with hands mounted on rock crystal discs, designed by Maurice Couet for Cartier from 1912 and perfected in the 1920s).

The use of platinum was the technical signature of the Art Deco jewelry of Cartier. Platinum, harder and whiter than gold, could be drawn into fine wire and shaped into small prongs, allowing the stones to be set in delicate, almost invisible metal frames, so that the stones seemed to float on the skin. The combination of platinum, diamonds, and colored stones (sapphires, emeralds, rubies, lapis lazuli, onyx, jade, coral, mother-of-pearl, and rock crystal) defined the Art Deco jewelry look.

The Watch Bracelet and the Tank Watch

The watch bracelet, the small, slim wristwatch mounted on a wide metal bracelet, was a Cartier invention of the Art Deco period. The first model, the Santos watch of 1904, was designed for Alberto Santos-Dumont, the Brazilian aviator, and was the first practical wristwatch for men. The most famous Cartier watch of the 1920s was the Tank watch of 1917 (named for the resemblance of its case to the overhead view of a Renault FT tank), which became the signature product of the firm in the 1920s and is still in production.

The Cigarette Case, the Compact, and the Lipstick Case

The 1920s was the golden age of the cigarette case, the vanity case, and the compact. The materials were gold, silver, platinum, lacquer, enamel, mother-of-pearl, onyx, and carved jade. The cases were engraved with monograms, the geometric chevron and sunburst patterns, the Egyptian and Mughal motifs, and the personal arms of the owner. Cartier, Bulgari, Tiffany, Van Cleef & Arpels, and the smaller houses all produced cases. Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein both commissioned Art Deco cases; the Coty house, founded in 1904 in Paris, was an early adopter of the Art Deco vocabulary for packaging.

The Beadwork and the Evening Dress

The 1920s evening dress was a vehicle for geometric beadwork and soutache braiding. The principal French and American dressmakers, including Lanvin, Vionnet, Chanel, Patou, Hattie Carnegie, and Mainbocher, all produced evening dresses with heavy Art Deco beadwork. The beadwork was geometric, symmetrical, and all-over, in contrast to the floral beadwork of the Edwardian era. The 1920s evening dress was typically straight, with a dropped waist, ankle length, and long tasseled fringes that moved with the wearer. The beaded fringe, a long skirt-covering of hanging glass or jet beads, was the most distinctive single feature.

The Textile Patterns and the Fashion Illustrators

The textile patterns of the late 1920s were dominated by the Art Deco vocabulary. The leading designers included Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979, the Ukrainian-born French artist who, with her husband Robert Delaunay, developed the Orphism style and applied it to fashion and textile design), Raoul Dufy (1877-1953, the French Fauvist painter who designed for the Bianchini-Férier silk manufacturer in Lyon), Erté, and the French Georges Lepape (1887-1971). The 1925 Paris exposition was the showcase for this new fashion vocabulary; Paul Poiret’s “Sorbet” dress of 1925 was the most discussed single garment of the fair.

The fashion magazines of the 1920s, particularly Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Vanity Fair, and La Vie Parisienne, were the principal vehicles for the new style. The covers of Vogue in the 1920s, with their stylized, geometric, often Egyptian-derived figures, were the most reproduced single graphic image of the Art Deco style. Within three years of the exposition, the Art Deco vocabulary was dominant in the major fashion houses of Paris, London, and New York.

The Influence on Perfume Bottles, Automobiles, and the Object World

The Art Deco vocabulary was applied, in the 1920s and 1930s, to almost every category of manufactured object. The Lalique and Baccarat perfume bottles of the period, the Cord L-29 (1929), Duesenberg Model J (1928), and Bugatti Royale (1926) automobiles, and the Hudson and Chrysler cars of the late 1920s, with their stepped hoods and chrome ornament, were all variations on the same visual idiom.

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