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movement "Retro" and "vintage". The upsurge coincided with declining sales in Detroit and the entire wave was meant to drum up interest in American manufacturers and muscle cars. Retro and Vintage makes the everyday consumer feel good about themselves, it conjures up warm cozy feelings, better days that preceded harder economic times. The fashionable effort continued from automakers for more than a decade and its close spurred in us the idea of commemorating the era with an Art Deco edition. We say fashionable because cars are fashion statements, both in standard trim and how its owners customize their wheels to impress upon others. Cars as a fashion statement are as common currency as picking a suit and hairstyle or dressing up for a gala event.Somewhere along the line, strolling about some of the most recognizable landmarks in the "vintage" United States; the Chrysler Building in New York or the Hardrock Hotel in Chicago, could give us the impression that the Art Deco style is patently American, as domestic and down home as apple pie and carrot cake. That mindset may be true today but can anything be more distant from the truth? Modernism, Post Industrialism, Neo Classical, these are stylistic terms used in the same breath as Art Deco but when and how did Art Deco come to be? The most well-repeated "fact" as befits any bit of information that is repeated without analysis is that Art Deco was born in 1925 at the Paris Exposition which turned a leaf on Art Nouveaux, a twenty year art style that was the epitomy of the Beaux Arts, its signature highly ornate, organic in form and flowing in structure. Some of our analysts at Citadel believe that Art Deco (Art Decoratifs) was born much earlier, sometime around the year 1890 at the heart of the Art Nouveaux movement.
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