SIMPLICITY DE LUXE...?

I am a Deco girl. I admit it, I love Art Deco and its era – those wonderfully glamourous inter-war years of bull markets and excess and recklessness. It was a hell of an age, if you think about it, from the rebalancing of power with the enfranchisement and increasingly widespread employment of women, to Carter's discoveries in the Valley of the Kings. As usual, France started it with the Exhibition Moderne in 1925, from which we date Art Deco as a style, even if it wasn't called that then.

But when I look at Deco, especially early Deco, before the advertisers got hooked on the 'streamlining' thing, i have to wonder how on earth I can begin to say it's simple, or compatible with my stated aim of simplifying my life.

Deco is a style hung up on the exotic, on Africa, from Egypt's ancient treasures to safaris and big game, on Asia and the Orient. Yes, travel was, with giant steamers and the advent of Henry Ford's (relatively) affordable motorcar, suddenly a whole lot more possible for a lot of people, and there was wide world out there to explore. This obsession Deco has with travel might make it rich and fun and all things “luxe” but it doesn't make it simple or minimalist.

Of course, what we generally categorise as the Deco period covers the Great Depression as well. That didn't tone it down. It's when the mood is one of hardship and depression that Deco comes into its own: it's escapist, it offers affordable dreams of colour and light and style and luxury which are probably no less enjoyable for being merely dreams. We dream of what we desire but do not yet have, after all. (And having it, we no longer desire it – this is the eternally exploitable conundrum of humanity which keeps advertisers and manufacturers solvent).

Besides, designer Deco was for the rich, and when did a recession ever bite them to the bone? The rich, especially the super-rich, of whom there plenty in the inter-war years, always seem to manage to stay wealthy through these economic storms. While designer Deco was there for them, the rest of the world had knock-off high-street Deco. Clarice Cliffe crockery, all bright colours and modern, trendy shapes, was within the reach of most of the middle-classes. The radio revolution saw deco wireless sets enter more and more ordinary homes. The Great Depression may have nudged Deco down a slightly different route, but it didn't do it any harm.

So, knowing all of this, how can I still instinctively feel that Deco is a simple style? Is it the clean lines and simple shapes like a fresh breeze after the gothic fussiness of Victoriana? Or is it, actually, all about the very obsession with movement that makes Deco so hung up on the exotic? The feeling of just packing up and going, somewhere, anywhere, no matter the destination as long you travel, and travel in style.

(Don't tempt me. I would love to give in to that urge to just pack up and go, see the world, visit all the places I've not yet been. It's only the damn bills that stop me).

Travel, by definition, demands a certain simplicity – you can't fit your entire wardrobe into your suitcase, nor should you try to. Travel requires a hacking away of the unessential, and the more your travel, the better your definition of the unessential becomes. (I am already making mental packing lists for my bike trip in summer. Alas, all the lists in the world won't prevent a luggage space problem, which will require a rethink of the unessential).

Travel then was easier – borders weren't so tightly controlled and terrorism wasn't yet an issue. And journeys took longer. Flight was still in its infancy and aircraft didn't have much range before requiring landing and refuelling. It was all such a great adventure, made at a human pace, before we invented jet-lag. The diaries of the explorers of the age reflect this slower, simpler world; this enjoyment of the journey and their encounters, mundane and small, with the exotic.

Maybe this is where my love of Deco and simplicity can meet – in those wonderful lines and curves and exotic patterns and materials and rich colours – just fewer of them. And thus all the easier to pack in my suitcase.