Streamliner: Raymond Loewy and Image-making in the Age of American Industrial Design

by John Wall

The true story of Raymond Loewy, whose designs are still celebrated for their unerring ability to advance American consumer taste. Born in Paris in 1893 and trained as an engineer, Raymond Loewy revolutionized twentieth-century American industrial design. Combining salesmanship and media savvy, he created bright, smooth, and colorful logos for major corporations that included Greyhound, Exxon, and Nabisco. His designs for Studebaker automobiles, Sears Coldspot refrigerators, Lucky Strike cigarette packs, and Pennsylvania Railroad locomotives are iconic. Beyond his timeless designs, Loewy carefully built an international reputation through the assiduous courting of journalists and tastemakers to become the face of both a new profession and a consumer-driven vision of the American dream. In Streamliner , John Wall traces the evolution of an industry through the lens of Loewy's eclectic life, distinctive work, and invented persona. How, he asks, did Loewy build a business while transforming himself into a national brand a half century before "branding" became relevant? Placing Loewy in context with the emerging consumer culture of the latter half of the twentieth century, Wall explores how his approach to business complemented―or differed from―that of his well-known contemporaries, including industrial designers Henry Dreyfuss, Walter Teague, and Norman Bel Geddes. Wall also reveals how Loewy tailored his lifestyle to cement the image of "designer" in the public imagination and why the self-promotion that drove Loewy to the top of his profession began to work against him at the end of his career. Streamliner is an important and engaging work on one of the longest-lived careers in industrial design.

344 pages, Hardcover

Published August 15, 2018

Reviews

[Shrike58 · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Most advanced, yet acceptable" is the catchphrase that Raymond Loewy used to describe his design philosophy, but what does that really mean? In this biography John Wall seeks to get to the bottom of what Loewy and, for that matter, what the great industrial designers of 20th-century America were really about. The irony with Loewy is that he was celebrated as a designer, but he really couldn't free draw a lick. Wall is very interested in the ironies relating to Loewy and his peers, and concludes that if they succeeded, it's really because they were aware that image could make a difference. Loewy was also the bearer of some key design principles, mostly the best use of the best materials and processes available whenever possible, that gave his version of marketing some backbone. This is not to mention that, besides his salesmanship, Loewy also seems to have been a very good project manager.

Still, much of this book can be described as a case study of the long-term survival and ultimate fall of Studebaker as a car manufacturer. Had the firm from South Bend systemically followed Loewy's recommendations in a timely fashion, they might well have remained a player. However, that firm had a corporate culture made of equal parts self-satisfied indifference and a willingness to settle, punctuated by spasms of desperate grasping for commercial viability. Considering the broad sweep of the history of the American car industry, where even the mightiest can fall flat on their face, adaptability might be the ultimate ability; Loewy would have no issue with that concept.

In the end, Wall concludes that while the aesthetics of Loewy, and his competitors and peers, might have been derided by academicians more impressed by the supposedly purer design impulses of the so-called "International" style, there is no argument that the collective body of work is impressive, and that these men (with a lot of help backstage), were successful form givers that did create emotion, which is the basis of meaning.