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In the late 1960s, developers were poised to destroy the grand foyer of London's Strand Palace Hotel. When it was built in 1930-31, this spectacular folly — a stairway rising between glowing glass handrails to a mirrored revolving door set in a cylinder of glass pillars lighted from within — epitomized the city's craze for Art Deco. After World War II, though, the style was seen as too decadent for austere times, and fell out of favor. But curators at the Victoria and Albert Museum rode to the rescue in 1969 — they retrieved the foyer and have now rebuilt it in all its garish glory to be the star of "Art Deco 1910-1939," a show of all things Deco that runs until July 20, when it travels to Toronto, San Francisco and Boston.

The recovery of the Strand Palace foyer marked the moment that Art Deco emerged from the critical eclipse it had suffered since World War II. In the 1970s, a small group of collectors and museum curators brought the style back into vogue in Britain. Art Deco was a magpie movement, grabbing inspiration from far-off cultures, modern art and dance, and the achievements of new technologies, from Bakelite radios to planes, trains and automobiles. The style's central themes are "fashion, glamour, commerce," says chief curator Ghislaine Wood. That exuberance appealed to a '70s London tired of '60s futurism and keen to rediscover its past.

Art Deco acquired its name in 1925 at the Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs Modernes et Industriels, where the best of contemporary design was displayed in national and commercial pavilions. The V&A show reunites pieces from this event, such as the upmarket furniture from Jacques-Emile Ruhlmann's Grand Salon, and presents objects from the Asian Art Deco movement, including a Japanese cabinet, Chinese textiles and a silver-covered Indian bed.

Originally the province of rich collectors and connoisseurs, Art Deco became a mass phenomenon in 1929, when the stock crash hit the luxury-goods market and designers turned to mass production and new materials like plastic, Bakelite and chrome to reproduce the sheen of crystal, ivory and silver for a fraction of the cost. In films such as The Gay Divorcee and Top Hat, rich loafers hung out in Art Deco hotels like the ones that were springing up in cities all over the globe. The style encompassed factories (Hoover's outside London) and ocean liners (the Normandy), and stretched from the suburbs (Napier in New Zealand) to the cities (New York's Empire State and Chrysler Buildings).

The discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922 provoked a wave of Egyptomania and inspired some of the most stunning jewelry in the V&A exhibition, like Cartier's flying scarab brooch, with its blue faience body and diamond, gold and ruby wings. Inspired by pioneering dancers like Isadora Duncan, such designers as Michael O'Connell and Raoul-Eugène Lamourdedieu decorated their objects with leaping female figures — they were almost as ubiquitous as the style's favorite gazelles. In the '30s, designers turned to the school geometry set: Briton Clarice Cliff's teasets are constructed out of cylinders and cones but painted with vivid orange trees. Streamlining made sense for trains and sports cars — but on cocktail shakers and radios it was purely decorative. No one minded. Radios and skyscrapers alike were modeled on the stepped pyramid — another steal from the archaeologists. New York's skyscrapers are represented here by projected film from the '30s, models and drawings, and Rene Paul Chambellan's super-industrial metal gates to the Chanin Building's executive suite. The show provides a feast of elegant objects and a glimpse into the good life of the early 20th century. It should also inspire viewers to seek out the many Art Deco buildings, like the Mecca bingo hall (once a cinema) in Islington, that survived London's postwar purge.

• LUCY FISHER | London
• Deco is back — again, in all its garish glory