From Puccini to powder boxes, how China infused art deco era
The 1920s and '30s saw an explosion in Western interest in 'exotic' China, and nowhere is this more evident than in the fashion, jewellery and accessories produced for a generation of newly liberated women, writes Patrick Lecomte
In 1934, when Lenthéric, one of the most successful perfume makers in pre-second world war France, decided to modernise its blockbuster scent, Heart of Paris, it began by modifying the formula, adding aldehyde chemical compounds similar to those that had made Chanel N°5 stand out. The scent was then repackaged in an archaic Chinese-bronze-style bottle and renamed Shanghai. Advertisements for the modernised perfume emphasised the Chinese metropolis' mix of ancestral tradition and cutting-edge modernity.
As a gateway to the Middle Kingdom, Shanghai, the "Paris of the East", was uniquely positioned in Westerners' idealised vision of Asia. Indeed, between the world wars, China was seen as both exotic and mysterious. It was, as New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art describes it, "an empire of free-floating signs" whose myths and riches had fired Western imaginations since Marco Polo chronicled his travels to the East in 1300.
In 1857, French writer Edmond de Goncourt wrote that China was still a "world upside down! A paradise of paradoxes! Jade sky, red trees, rivers of Nanjing, chimerical creatures, cities of porcelain, and ten-storey-high pagodas whose bells sing with the wind! The land where everything happens!"
It was a faraway land that the Yellow Cruise, a 1931 motoring expedition from Beirut to Peking, sponsored by the Citroen car company, pictured as the reward at the end of an arduous 13,000km journey from the Mediterranean to the China seas.
After the doom and gloom of the first world war, the elites of the exuberant années folles (roaring twenties), the international cafe society, had an insatiable appetite for travel, adventure and intellectual discovery. British playwright and novelist W. Somerset Maugham made his first trip to China, via Hong Kong, and along the Yangtze River in the winter of 1919-20, publishing On a Chinese Screen in 1922.