Art Deco: The Style That Defined a Century
The world that emerged from World War I was hungry for reinvention. Industrialization was reshaping cities, jazz was rewriting music, women were claiming new freedoms, and the machine age promised a future that was faster, sleeker, and more glamorous than anything before it. Art Deco was the aesthetic answer to that moment — a style that fused ancient Egyptian and Aztec motifs, Cubist geometry, and the bold optimism of the 1920s into a visual language that felt simultaneously timeless and thrillingly modern.
No force spread that vision more powerfully than Hollywood. At the very moment the industry was transitioning from silent film to sound, MGM art director Cedric Gibbons — fresh from the 1925 Paris Exposition — began defining the look of the silver screen in pure Art Deco: soaring geometric sets, gleaming surfaces, and opulent costumes that turned every frame into a design statement. The palatial movie palaces rising along Wilshire Boulevard extended that fantasy into everyday life, making Art Deco synonymous with glamour and aspiration for millions of weekly moviegoers.
Fashion was perhaps Art Deco's most intimate expression, and it was genuinely international. In Paris, designers like Madeleine Vionnet and Paul Poiret translated the movement's geometric precision and exotic influences directly into garments, while illustrators Erté, Georges Lepape, Georges Barbier, and Louis Icart elevated fashion illustration into high art — their work circulating from Paris to New York to Buenos Aires, carrying the Deco aesthetic to every corner of the modern world.
FATHOM Art Deco Collections
The FATHOM Art Deco Collections are curated with that full arc in mind — spanning the earliest graphic art and fashion illustration of the movement's Parisian origins, through the documentary photography that preserves what cities have built and lost, to contemporary artists working in the Deco tradition today. It is a living collection, added to continuously as we uncover work that is historically significant and visually exceptional.
Robert Landau | Art Deco Los Angeles
Robert Landau has spent more than six decades documenting the visual culture of Los Angeles in all its forms — billboards, storefronts, neon signs, and the urban landscapes that make the city unlike anywhere else on earth. His acclaimed book Art Deco Los Angeles turns that same obsessive eye on the city's Art Deco heritage, and the result is a quietly urgent record — in a city defined by constant redevelopment, many of the buildings he photographed with such care have since been demolished or lost to fire. Explore Robert's Art Deco Collection | Browse More Robert Landau's Photography