Stand on the Bund at dusk, face the Peace Hotel’s stepped green roof, and you are looking straight at 1929. The style is Art Deco — and in Shanghai it is no museum piece. It is the city’s everyday backdrop: bank facades, cinemas, ballrooms, apartment blocks, even the way a shopfront catches the evening light. The modern Shanghai you walk through today — iced drinks, department stores, café society — was already here a century ago, dressed in exactly this style.
Art Deco began in Paris. The 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs gave the movement its name and its brief: beauty for the machine age. Where Art Nouveau had curved and bloomed, Deco went geometric — sunbursts, zigzags, stepped forms, strict symmetry — set in bold colours and new materials. It was elegant, repeatable and modern, and it travelled fast.
Its first great stage was New York, whose skyscrapers wore the style from crown to base. Its second may surprise you: Shanghai. In the 1930s this was the richest city in the Far East, and it built accordingly — the Bund’s bank row, the Peace Hotel, the Paramount ballroom, the Majestic Theatre, the apartment streets of the old French Concession. By common count, Shanghai keeps one of the world’s largest collections of Art Deco architecture outside New York.
Because Deco was born of the machine, its jewellery sounds a different note from what came before. Flowers and vines gave way to crisp geometry — symmetric planes, sharp angles, colour set against colour. Cutters invented new gem shapes to fit the lines: baguette, kite, half-moon. A 1920 Boucheron brooch of jadeite and diamonds says it perfectly — Parisian geometry, an Asian stone, a Shanghai mood.
That is the thread I follow when I host. The same style runs through the architecture of the Bund, the lobbies of the old hotels and the windows of the jewellers we visit together — read one, and the others open up. A city and its crafts, telling a single story in stepped stone and calibrated gold.