The 30th edition of the International Cultural Heritage Fair will honor the Art Deco movement when it opens at the Carrousel du Louvre from October 23-26, 2025. Organized by Ateliers d'Art de France, this year's event commemorates the centennial of the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, celebrating an aesthetic that defined the elegance and geometry of the Roaring Twenties while continuing to inspire contemporary creators.
Every autumn, the Carrousel du Louvre hosts Europe's largest gathering dedicated to the preservation, transmission, and promotion of cultural heritage. The International Cultural Heritage Fair serves as a showcase for living heritage, bringing together craftspeople, restorers, architects, and cultural institutions from across Europe and beyond.
The 2024 edition demonstrated the fair's significant impact, attracting 346 exhibitors from 11 different countries and drawing nearly 20,700 visitors to the Carrousel du Louvre. These impressive numbers confirm the event's major role in promoting French and European craftsmanship and expertise. Notable participants included the Historic Monuments service, the Heritage Foundation, the National Furniture Collection, Gohard Workshops, the Manufacture de Sèvres, École Boulle, and numerous companies labeled as Living Heritage Enterprises.
The 2025 edition will continue this momentum by welcoming new players in built heritage, art restoration, and interior design. Visitors will discover innovations from prestigious companies including Maisons Pariente, Saint-Gobain, Degaine Patrimoine, and the renowned Loire Workshops, famous for their exceptional stained glass work. The fair positions itself as a dialogue space between tradition and innovation, where craftspeople work alongside architects, engineers, curators, and restorers.
The four-day event will feature a rich program of conferences, live demonstrations, award ceremonies, and thematic exhibitions. The fair particularly highlights traditional crafts that actively participate in the preservation and restoration of cultural heritage, including cabinetmakers, ironworkers, master glassmakers, mosaic artists, gilders, stone carvers, and textile restorers. These craftspeople perpetuate techniques that were central to the Art Deco movement in the 1920s, when the dialogue between technique, beauty, and functionality carried art toward new horizons.
Born just before World War I and gaining momentum during the post-war period, Art Deco embodied the meeting point between art, industry, and modernity. Unlike Art Nouveau with its curves and naturalism, Art Deco promoted order, symmetry, geometry, and purity of lines. Artists of this movement sought to unite the elegance of French luxury with the rationality of the modern world.
Among the major figures of the movement, Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann established himself as the master of exceptional furniture, Jean Dunand as the great lacquer artist of Art Deco, René Lalique as the poet of glass and crystal, and Pierre Chareau as a talented architect. These great artists gave birth to magnificent works including the ocean liner Normandie, Auguste Perret's Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, and the Palais de la Porte Dorée. All represent fragments of this innovative style that transformed decorative arts.
The 2025 Heritage Fair also celebrates the centennial of the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, inaugurated in Paris on April 28, 1925. This colossal event, once installed between Les Invalides, the Grand Palais, and the Seine quays, brought together thousands of exhibitors from twenty-one countries and attracted nearly sixteen million visitors. Its ambition was to demonstrate the supremacy of French taste and craftsmanship in a rapidly modernizing world.
The pavilions competed in creativity during the 1925 exhibition. Ruhlmann's Collector's Pavilion embodied decorative perfection, while Le Corbusier's Pavilion of the New Spirit proclaimed the advent of new architecture. These contrasting approaches highlighted the rich diversity within the Art Deco movement, from luxurious craftsmanship to industrial modernism.
A century later, the 2025 Heritage Fair takes up this torch, reminding visitors that the expertise of 1925 - marquetry, lacquer work, engraved glass, and wrought metal - continues to influence contemporary creation. Today's craftspeople, inheritors of this excellence, work to restore the decorative elements of a world emerging from the horror of World War I. Their dedication ensures that traditional techniques survive and evolve in the modern era.
The 2025 Heritage Fair represents more than just a retrospective; it celebrates transmission, innovation, and the permanence of beauty. Through this prestigious event, Paris reaffirms its role as the global showcase for excellence in craftsmanship and living heritage, bridging the gap between historical tradition and contemporary creativity.
