Listicle: 10 things that turn 100 in 2025

You’ve probably seen an Art Deco building without realising it. Think streamlined shapes, little geometric motifs, curved edges, colourful facades. A 1925 exhibition held in Paris is credited with making the style popular the world over – a refreshing change from heavy, overdecorated stone architecture. A century on, the style has echoes in every major city, and represents a once-modern optimism, a new language for a world healing from the First World War.

Adolf Hitler wrote his controversial autobiography-slash-political-manifesto in prison, after a failed 1923 coup to overthrow the German government. A hundred years on, it is every narcissist’s wet dream. Hitler compared Jews to maggots, called for their bloody massacre, and championed propaganda as a tool for converting the masses. A bestseller in many countries (including India), it’s a sign that we’re no closer to stamping out hate.

Scottish engineer John Logie Baird used a tea chest, a perforated cardboard disc, and a large convex lens to beam an image of a ventriloquist’s dummy on to a screen. When the first faint outlines of the dummy appeared on the screen, Baird got an office boy to come upstairs to his laboratory so he could test his “televisor” on a human. RIP, Baird. You’d have loved smartphones.

That colleague you can’t stand. That classmate that’s extra stupid. That one relative who just doesn’t get the point. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first appearance of twerp was in the glossary Soldier and Sailor Words and Phrases. JRR Tolkien famously used the word in a letter, referring to a former classmate as “TW Earp, the original twerp.” Also from 1925: Kitsch, bobby pin, slumber party, and zucchini.

A hundred years from now, someone will think the beer was named after the virus. But the name and brand logo are inspired by the corona, or crown, of a Mother Mary statue that sits in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mexico. Fun fact: Notice how the characters in Fast and Furious are always drinking Corona? It’s not an ad. It’s supposed to be a quirk of Vin Diesel’s character Dom.

Agha Hasan Amanat’s tale of a romance between a prince and a fairy is the first completed Urdu stage play. It got its first screen adaptation 100 years ago as Manilal Joshi’s silent film. The film laid out the blueprint for a 1932 remake that more than made up for the silence of the first. It had 72 songs, a record that remains unbeaten a century later.

The master of Bollywood’s golden age was born in July 1925. Dutt made films that were broody, melodramatic, and used lighting to play up emotion and mood. He discovered Waheeda Rehman, who became his muse, and later his lover. It’s in his films that song-and-dance numbers began to be used to push the story forward, rather than to act as interludes.

The mask is at least 3,000 years old. But it lay sealed in the Pharoah’s tomb until it was discovered by archaeologist Howard Carter and his team in 1925. The mask is gold, the eyes are obsidian and quartz, the brows and lids are inlaid with lapis lazuli. It’s our first view of what a royal from Ancient Egypt would have looked like. Carter said the king seemed “sad but tranquil”. It remains, 100 years on, the best-known example of the civilisation’s artistic talents.

This year marks a century of the first global regulation of the herb. It means, for 100 years, we’ve been trying to keep people away from it and mostly failing. Over the decades, lawmakers have tried to classify it as medicine, recreational drug, painkiller and antidepressant. Countries have gone back and forth with criminalising it, penalising people for it, legalising it and capitalising on it. It’s the most trafficked substance. Roll back the rules, dude.

Adele and Edoardo Fendi established their designer house in Rome at a time when the world had little money to splurge on plush leather bags. Their five daughters took over, then Karl Lagerfield joined as creative director, stayed on for a record 50 years, and turned the family business into a posh, coveted brand. The FF logo is too loud to be quiet luxury, but that hasn’t stopped the rich from lusting after it.