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 does it appear to hail from the present. The room reflects an era of high technology better than any of today’s shop-new scalloped doodahs ever could: its coffered ceiling of milky, engraved glass glowed with the electric light then transforming Paris, while the walls and floors (marble inlaid with silver niello by the Manufacture Nationale de Sèvres) represent an industrial revival of an artisanal technique dating from antiquity. For all its air of aesthetic reduction, hand-crafted ornament suffused every surface – something we can scarcely dream of in 2026, despite an epidemic of craftwashing in contemporary design discourse.
It’s almost as if dreaming was the point: in 1925, it was possible to conjure a material world that sublimated the conflict between the machine and the hand, ancient craft and modern industry pressed alike into service of how we might live. We’ve given up on that fantasy. Our rooms are from the archival past or resigned present – but, unlike the Sèvres dining room, they fail to imagine new futures.
Lalique wasn’t alone. If Art Deco dates from tomorrow, Shaker material culture was beamed in from deep space. The Shakers preceded Deco by a century, but theirs was undoubtedly the more radical proposal: where minimalism today is a style, Shaker simplicity was a sacrament – to make a thing well was an act of prayer. Where we glimpse proto-Modernism or a kinship with Japanese design in a spare candle-stand, they would have seen faith materialised. Plainness was not an aesthetic sensibility but a living theology: beauty, on their terms, drew man (and woman) closer to God. Whose culture, I wonder, is more advanced – theirs or ours?
There’s much chatter about design’s stasis, its obsession with the past, and with good reason. Shaker style is having ‘a moment’, the Art Deco revival is firmly underway, and both reduce complex material worlds to a paltry residue – volutes and ladder-back chairs stripped of the convictions that produced them. That residue, reader, is not the substance. Within each style lies an unconsummated proposal: a future offered once, abandoned, and still there for anyone willing to take it up rather than merely quote it.
A manufacturer, for example, might use its scale to extend the project of Modernism instead of reproducing its silhouettes, producing well-made goods for ordinary life. That is what the Bauhaus was, you may recall, originally about. A designer, meanwhile, might pursue Art Deco’s actual ambition, bringing craft and technology into fresh dialogue rather than rehearsing last century’s – volutes and vibes be damned. And the Shaker proposition that craftsmanship is sacred offers ballast to a mediated culture that treats objects as images to be consumed, then discarded, season after season. If design were an act of devotion, might we cherish it more?
The future lies in our antiques too, if we have eyes to see. Happily, the revival I’ve long predicted is here. Auction prices are ticking upwards, our feeds flooded with obscure histories, and design projects are turning, once more, to antiques and historic art. But what are all these objects, and all the time we spend on them, for? Lord knows we crave their beauty, and connoisseurship is a wonderfully slow, rich way to understand our material world. But I say we go further still. Raised on screens and braced for an unknowable automated future, the young collectors I know are, in this matter, the more advanced party. They buy 18th-century secretaries and handwrite letters at them, press real silver into daily use, read vintage and antique books cover to cover. For them, old things are neither pretty décor nor nostalgic souvenirs but evidence of the world, and ourselves, at our unoptimised best.
Look more closely at history and you will find limitless ideas for living more humanely, each one more radical than our algorithmic present allows: the matrilineal Iroquois longhouses, the Medieval guilds that organised labour around the dignity of makers, and the Aesthetic Movement’s insistence on beauty before usefulness, even to the point of glorious inefficiency. Are these settled histories, I ask, or unfinished futures? A society that stops imagining new ways to live does not simply pause; it forgets that living can be imagined, and settles, in Francis Fukuyama’s phrase, into ‘the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history’. Our homes can be its galleries – or the first workshops of a new age. Perhaps, when we allow ourselves to dream in our interiors, the past becomes a possibility that we can, at last, live up to.
Michael Diaz-Griffith is the author of ‘The New Antiquarians: At Home with Young Collectors’. Find it in our Bookshop
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