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One of Art Deco's most vivid legacies, the pochoir printing technique, captures the sensuous spirit of affluent society in the first quarter of the 20th century and documents the uninhibited era that gave us jazz, the tango, high fashion, and modern art.
The pochoir process, which involved the manual application of gouache or watercolour pigments through the medium of stencils, was itself an intriguing marriage of commerce and art, of originality and mass production. At its height, there were some 30 pochoir studios in Paris where as many as 100 variations of colour could be applied laboriously to a single print.
The vibrant colours and flamboyant designs distinguished Art Deco from previous artistic styles, together with its respect for Japanese heritage and its contribution to modernism.
The pochoir fashion print, so linked to the Art Deco period, was strongly influenced by many aspects of French society of the 1920s, including the emergence of the female identity, the lure of the exotic, the role of music and dance, and the arrival of haute couture fashion. These fashion prints have thus remained synonymous with the spirit of Art Deco.
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