The Happy Marriage of 1920-30s Fashion and the Art Deco Movement

Wait, you didn’t think only fabric-rationing resulted in fashion trends, did you? This is evidently a travesty as fashion with the sands of time has been like patchwork knitting, absorbing fragments and snippets of art and culture from varied eras to culminate into a big, beautiful quilt.

Alike the revolutionary vision of Salvador Dali sewed onto the lobster dress by Elsa Schiaparelli or the swift, circular strokes of Monet’s “Luncheon on the Grass” birthing a regal white dress, art and fashion clearly go way back. Another such art movement that knocked on the door of the fashion industry to imbue its modernistic sensibilities in period clothing was Art Deco. Unshrouded in the 1920s, in the architectural design strata, the movement held ground on everything anti-basic and the idea of making unique handcrafted luxury to compete with mass-production (for all the right reasons, might we add). Moreover, this period of time is referred to as the "breath of fresh air taken between the smoke of World War I and World War II and The Great Depression."

The 1920s-1930s fashion was IRL Bridgerton with whooping billowing gowns, inserted with the definitive characteristics of the Art Deco aesthetics which included geometric influences, smooth and long lines. Even the silhouette of dresses was borrowed from art and design, case in point: think Chanel’s LBD and compare it to a tall skyscraper, is the muse clear as a sky now? Now, this silhouette did not just extend ease of movement (both literal and metaphorical) to women but the underplayed bosom and bottom introduced androgyny to fashion dictionary which is now being fully explored by coming-of-age designers.

The colour palette of the era mirrored the jubilance and inner celebratory spirit of liberation that women breathed for the first time ever with loud and vibrant hues like midnight blues, orange, yellow with an overdose of beads and sequence detailing.

Much like the bootstrap paradox, art and fashion is so inextricably linked together that one can’t take one out of another and this association is no love affair but a long-term marriage that continues to reflect in modern-day avant-garde garments.