Art Deco is a hundred years old, and it's in great shape.

The Musée des Arts décoratifs is currently proving this on rue de Rivoli with a retrospective of nearly a thousand works dedicated to the centenary of the 1925 International Exhibition. Furniture, jewelry, textiles, lacquers, the Orient Express recreated in the nave. One leaves with a certainty: this style did not survive a century because it is nostalgic. It survived because it is based on something more solid than fashion.

This something is geometry. Not as a decorative motif. As a system of thought.

Art Deco was born from a refusal. A refusal of the soft curve of Art Nouveau, a refusal of ornament for ornament's sake. What made it enduring is that it replaced decoration with structure. A chevron is not a pattern applied to a surface. It is a direction given to space. A radiating pattern from a center is a hierarchy. Strict symmetry is an architecture in its own right, independent of the walls.

That's why the rug is perhaps the most accurate medium for this vocabulary. On the floor, geometry works without disputing the space with other elements. It organizes, it anchors, it gives scale to the room. In a Haussmannian apartment, a radiating pattern enters into conversation with the herringbone parquet without copying its logic. In a smoother contemporary interior, it introduces a graphic tension that twenty carefully matched cushions would never produce.

Reinterpreting Art Deco today does not mean recreating the 1920s. Gilding, shagreen, and ivory cigarette holders can stay in the cloakroom. What remains when you remove the era is a system: balance, contrast, repetition. Principles that belong to no fashion because they respond to a spatial logic that predates all fashions.

A rug can be geometric and sober. Structuring without being overpowering. Rooted in a centuries-old tradition and perfectly at home in a 2025 interior. This is not a contradiction. This is precisely what makes this style difficult to exhaust.