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Your ‘antiques’ are the most modern things you own | THE WORLD OF INTERIORS

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Endless rehashings of Art Deco and Shaker ‘style’ ignore the radical spirit that drove them, argues Michael Diaz-Griffith in the latest round of Room for Debate

We used to play a little language game: when an object had acquired 100 years of age, it became, magically, ‘antique’. Now, that wave washes ashore the things of the 1920s. But when I look at relics from that decade – say, in a photo from the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, the Big Bang of Art Deco – I realise, tilting my neck, that I’m not looking back at all. The dining room composed by René Lalique for the Sèvres pavilion, for example, is not ‘antique’ in the way we used to mean: neither ancient, nor remote, nor quite belonging to former times. Nor…

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