Paris/New York: Design Fashion Culture 1925-1940

Featured image: Radiator grille (detail) inspired by the 1925 Parisian decorative arts exposition and featured in New York's Squibb Building, 1930. Designed by Buchman & Kahn. Museum of the City of New York, Ely Jacques Kahn Collection

The 1920s and ‘30s witnessed a burst of creative energy in the fields of architecture, design, and fashion. Shaping new styles of buildings and furnishings, redefining fashion, and giving visual form to avant-garde performing arts, architects and designers forged a still-influential modern aesthetic. The era’s most creative figures rarely worked in isolation, preferring instead to participate in international dialogues that crossed national boundaries and linked capital cities in collaborative artistic enterprise. Between the world wars, no two cities engaged in a more fertile conversation than Paris, capital of 19th-century refinement, and New York, the upstart challenger that represented 20th-century dynamism.

Paris/New York: Design Fashion Culture 1925-1940will explore not only architecture and design, but also film, fashion, and the performing arts. Styles from Art Deco to neo-romanticism will be examined along with the work of such legendary figures as Helena Rubinstein, Coco Chanel, Salvador Dali­­, and Josephine Baker, and lesser-known figures such as costume and set designer Pavel Tchelitchew. The exhibition and its accompanying publication (Monacelli Press, forthcoming in September 2008) will bring together never-before-exhibited drawings, furnishings, decorative objects, costumes, photographs, posters, and films.

 

 

 Audio Guides are available in the Museum Shop.  You can also download the free mp3 podcast of the audio tour here.

 

Partnership with the French Institute Alliance Française

Receive a free pass to the exhibition, Paris/New York: Design Fashion Culture 1925–1940 , for every Art de Vivre ticket purchased. Or, receive an individual membership to the museum with a series subscription.  Learn more about  French Style at Home and the French Institute Alliance Française.

 

Paris/New York: Design Fashion Culture 1925-1940 is supported by a generous grant from the Florence Gould Foundation.  

Major sponsorship is also provided by Van Cleef & Arpels.  Additional funding is provided by ELLE and ELLE DECOR Magazines, The Grand Marnier Foundation, OpenSkies, Mel Seiden and Janine Luke, The New York Design Center, New York State Council on the Arts, Mrs. Stephen M. Kellen, and NYSE Euronext.  The exhibition is also made possible by American Society of the French Legion of Honor, Mr. and Mrs. Jeremy H. Biggs, Mr. and Mrs. Robert G. Goelet, Ronay and Richard Menschel, Pierre and Maria-Gaetana Matisse Charitable Foundation, Mary Ann and Bruno A. Quinson, Elizabeth Stribling, and many other generous donors.