Art deco, as F Scott Fitzgerald realised, signalled the dawn of a new consumer paradise when everyday objects assumed an exotic elegance. Michael Bracewell mourns an era of lost optimism and romance

''Art Deco: 1910-1939", a stunning new exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, celebrates the way in which art and design throughout the 1920s and 1930s elevated simple, everyday objects and spaces - a cigarette lighter, a railway waiting room - into speed-lined fantasies of exotic elegance. Art deco marked the point in popular taste where a vision of the future hit fantasies of the past; where space and light met vibrant, often joyously discordant colour and design. The movement - aggressively modern and an expression of youthfulness and romance - reversed the sombre, imperial weight of much late-Victorian design, which would have seemed patriarchal to the sun children of the 1920s.

Who better than F Scott Fitzgerald, that Dante of the Jazz Age, to record the mass consumerism and modern luxury with which art deco became synonymous in the 1920s? Fitzgerald described the roots of this glittering, erotic modernity as a reaction against everything old - be that the worn-out Yellow Book "decadence" of the 1890s, or the immediate past of America's involvement in the First World War. In one of his finest short stories, "May Day", published in early 1920, Fitzgerald begins with what reads like the overture and chorus for the city (in this case New York) as it will be reborn for art deco:

"So gaily and noisily were the peace and prosperity impending hymned by the scribes and poets of the conquering people that more and more spenders had gathered from the provinces to drink the wine of excitement, and faster and faster did the merchants dispose of their trinkets and slippers until they sent up a mighty cry for more trinkets and more slippers in order that they might give in barter what was demanded of them."

Fitzgerald's mock-Arabian introduction to his story establishes the central importance of exoticism to the art deco age, delivering fantasies of opulence for an era fixated on high romance - be that travelling back in time to ancient Egypt in the design of a frieze, or travelling for real on the new high-speed trains, or both. His merchants are more Cartier than kasbah, and confirm the historian Tag Gronberg's pronouncement in her catalogue essay for the exhibition, that ". . . the luxury boutique, characterised by its diminutive scale and the ephemerality of its fashionable goods, has become almost as important an icon of modernity as the Eiffel Tower".

The triumph of art deco - the high festival of which was the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs, held in Paris - was atomised like an audacious new scent through nearly every walk of life and every artistic medium. A guest staying at Oliver Hill's extravagant art deco LMS Midland Hotel in the Lancashire seaside resort of Morecambe - where Hill, a prototype Philippe Starck, had designed everything from the spherical, India rubber bath plugs to the seasonal outfits of the staff - summed up the spirit of art deco in a one-line postcard: "Almost everything here is equally modern."

This jaunty observation (you can picture the correspondent going off to the pleasure gardens of neighbouring Happy Mount Park or the town's Super Swimming Stadium) captures the way that art deco's founding principles were less the product of a manifesto than a sudden convergence of mood and attitude. What strikes the contemporary viewer as most seductive about art deco is the heady expression of alluring romance in all its art and design. The viewer becomes part of a fully realised world of bright potential and febrile mysteries, combining the decorative influence of ancient and exotic civilisations (Egypt in particular) with a more abstract notion of a glamorous modernity - part jazz robot, part the call of the Nile. What results is an intoxicating articulation of modernity, making a drama and elegance out of life in the new consumer paradise - as though the world had become a monolithic film set, and everyone in it Cleopatra or the Sheikh of Araby.

You might compare the ethos of art deco to Quentin Crisp's definition of style - "find out who you are, and do it like mad". In its use of precious materials and exotic influences, art deco was born with a strong sense of its own identity. There is a mock-heroic quality, too, in that it often makes its grandest gestures in functional spaces and through ordinary objects, such as a writing desk designed by Sir Edward Maufe in 1925, made of camphor wood and gilded with white gold, or Enoch Boulton's "Jazz" ginger jar, with its lavender-blue lightning bolts of colour across a tangerine glaze.

Similarly, art deco's influence spread throughout the new "people's palaces" - public spaces, cinemas, office blocks - bringing glamour to the thoroughfares of ordinary life. Its effect filtered through the classes and could be found everywhere from millionaires' mansions to boarding houses, seen in the sunset designs in the front-door glass of a million red-brick semis, or the frieze and counter in a seaside ice-cream parlour. Art deco's aesthetic luxuries were democratic: it left its influence in ordinary homes as much as grand hotels. When we stumble upon domestic art deco today, we still experience - in its linear elegance and clashing, jazz chord angles - that sense of having come across something rare and enlivening.

As the V&A's new exhibition shows, it is not just the breadth of art deco's influence but the intensity of its exoticism that makes it so powerful. It is ironic that even with our contemporary fluency in image and lifestyle, we can still be left speechless by the sophistication of interiors and objects created nearly 80 years ago. An Egyptian sarcophagus vanity case, made by Cartier in 1925, clearly illustrates the daring revolution in style that characterised art deco's philosophy of luxury. Even the catalogue caption for the vanity case reads like a fantasy by Firbank, so extravagant is the imagery: "Gold, platinum, carved bone, sapphires, emeralds, diamonds, onyxes and enamel; interior with folding mirror, tortoiseshell comb, lipstick holder and cigarette compartment."

Similarly, in art deco posters for travel by train or ocean liner - in a graphic style with perspective lines that seem to race on ahead to a glittering horizon and a romantic destination - you face an era at the dawn of cultural materialism, a kind of prelapsarian idyll of commodified lifestyle. Art deco's theatricality and style is apparent throughout, as seen, for example, in the lobby of Miller & Pflueger's Medical-Dental Building in San Francisco, or even in a brass and Bakelite electric clock designed by Kem Weber. An anonymous narrative pervades the era, which might be summarised as "another time, another place".

For those of us who were teenagers in the 1970s, raised on Jack Clayton's sumptuous movie adaptation of The Great Gatsby and Roxy Music's early, colour clashing soundscapes of la vie de luxe, the heady style and ambience of art deco was absorbed as though by osmosis. Its high temple was Biba, located in the former Derry & Toms art deco building on Kensington High Street.

But if this was too expensive, you could still participate in the new pop appropriation of art deco with charity shop dinner suits and junk store cigarette cases. More often than not, half the audience at a Roxy Music concert would resemble a 1920s picture come to life, with boys in tuxedos and slicked-back hair, and girls smoking cocktail Sobranie cigarettes in impossibly long holders. What connected them to a fantasy of the past was that shared credo of "another time, another place" - a nostalgia for archaic visions of the future.

Art deco was a resounding affirmation of modernity, the elegance of which we are still living through in contemporary ideas of affordable glamour: the chic of a Conran restaurant or an Ian Schrager hotel. But, as 21st-century consumers, we live in the transmitted effect of past styles, frequently filtered through irony or pastiche. Confronted with the full force of art deco in this exhibition - the resonance of its objects, interiors and artefacts - the clamour of Fitzgerald's Jazz Age seems all but deafening again, yet filled with an exuberance and optimism we have maybe lost for ever.

"Art Deco: 1910-1939" is at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London SW7 (0870 906 3883) until 20 July

Michael Bracewell's latest book is The Nineties: when surface was depth (Flamingo, £7.99)

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