Art Deco opulence packs in crowds

A third of a million people are likely to see the V&A's blockbuster Art Deco show before it closes in the summer, breaking all records for the museum.

The staggering success of the show, which had more than 100,000 visitors in its first five weeks, is all the more remarkable given that London's other galleries are also on a high, with Titian-mania at the National Gallery, the new Saatchi Gallery adding to the Tate Modern throng on the South Bank, and the Royal Academy dusting itself down after the hordes descended on it for the Aztecs show, when 7,000 queued on its last day to the see most comprehensive exhibition staged outside Mexico.

None, however, is quite matching the numbers paying to see the early 20th-century treasures assembled in South Kensington as the V&A puts on the Ritz.

Like the museum's previous record-breaking show three years ago, Art Nouveau, the sheer glamour and the opulence of the fashion, furniture and design of the period are proving a big draw for the crowds.

Having had their consumerist appetites whetted by early Chanel dresses and Cartier jewellery, visitors are heading for the museum shop, where spending is a record £20 a head on average.

A V&A compilation of Harlem jazz and Josephine Baker songs - a film of whose notorious "banana dance" is one of the show's most novel draws - is selling fast enough to make the top 40 of the album compilations charts alongside The Best of R&B and Ministry of Sound remixes.

The V&A was banking on a quarter of a million visitors, 20,000 more than Art Nouveau, but the show's runaway success was beyond its expectations.The museum's director Mark Jones said: "People love the glamour of Art Deco and they feel familiar with it through hotels, cinemas, fashion and Hollywood films of the period, like the ones in the exhibition. It was arguably the most popular style of the 20th century."

But even that does not explain the wider V&A success story. Two thousand people paid to see the controversial French fashion photographer Guy Bourdin's lush if unsettling crime-scene and Surrealist-inspired images of models playing dead in fields, or splayed across couches, in its first four days. The Adventures of Hamza, a show of 68 action paintings produced for the court of the 16th-century Mughal emperor Akbar telling the story of a mythical character based partly on the uncle of the Prophet Mohammed, has also been a success.

The V&A has always been a temple to fashion, but the recent Versace show has brought the fashionistas back in droves, with even Donatella Versace emerging blinking through the mock tunnel of paparazzi at the end to buy from the exhibition shop.

For a museum that was being written off as a fusty, rambling relic which had ministers seriously worried when admissions plummeted to only 1.22m four years ago, the V&A is undergoing an extraordinary renaissance.

Only two years ago, weighed down with admission charges which halved visitor numbers overnight, the National Audit Office wondered aloud whether even major investment could draw the crowds back.

Last year, after 18 months of steady recovery, numbers rose from 1.86m to 2.54m after free admission was introduced. It recorded the sharpest rise of any of the big galleries.

But the turnaround cannot be explained by cost alone. The new £31m British Galleries, which tell the story of British design and decorative art from 1500 to 1900, appear to have given the V&A its belief back.

They also provide a template for it to get a grip on its vast and confusingly laid-out collections of decorative arts, the biggest in the world, although many say it will take Daniel Liebeskind's£80m Spiral extension to ever make sense of the warren of galleries.

Although tickets for Art Deco are limited to 3,000 a day, organisers are bracing themselves for a surge over the last four weekends, when the galleries will stay open until 10pm.

Highlights of the show

· The Grand Salon from the Home of A Collector, one of the most luxurious and exotic displays from the legendary 1925 Paris Exhibition. It has been partially recreated, reuniting a series of pieces dreamt up by Jacques-Emile Ruhlmann, one of the greatest art deco designers

· The stunning glass and mirror foyer of the Strand Palace Hotel in London, saved by the V&A in the 1960s when the building was gutted, is reassembled for the first time

· The silver marriage bed with skyscraper-style pillars made for Umaid Bhawan, the fantastical Indian art deco mansion built by the Maharajah of Jodphur, where the style had its final flowering

· The Auburn "Boat Tail" Speedster car was the ultimate streamlined car of the 1930s, and the most desirable in Hollywood during its golden years. Designed by Gordon Miller Buehrig, its boot was shaped like the bow of a boat