Following Germany’s defeat in World War I, Paris cemented its status as one of Europe’s most cosmopolitan cities and the center of a rapidly modernizing culture. In 1925, the city hosted the highly influential International Exposition of Decorative and Industrial Arts, the purported source of the moniker “Art Deco” as well as the site where Le Corbusier first exhibited his infamous Plan Voisin. Around the same time, as the city’s industrialists embraced Taylorism and Fordism, Paris emerged as a hub for aerospace and automotive manufacturing, with a French-made Bréguet plane making the first direct flight between Paris and New York in 1930. But by 1937, when Paris opened its third Exposition Internationale in less than two decades, the veneer of peaceful sophistication had worn thin: another war of unthinkable proportions loomed on the horizon, and the expo grounds were dominated by competing monuments to the Third Reich and the Soviet Union that faced off in front of the Eiffel Tower.

A 1929 Hermès advertisement on view in the exhibition. Image © Hermès