It wasn’t long before a new profession sprang up specifically to “style” merchandise. Once only luxury goods were crafted to appeal to the eye; by 1937 even Electrolux vacuum cleaners looked like speeding locomotives. Industrial designers, as men like Deskey were now called, had propelled modern design from Fifth Avenue to living rooms and kitchens-across the country. With “Packaging the New: Design and the American Consumer 1925-1975,” the new exhibit at the Cooper-Hewitt, Davidson suggests that the rapid pace of redesign and packaging was itself designed to stimulate appetite, a process she calls “style obsolescence.” The technology of toasting bread, she explains, hasn’t changed much over the years, but the toasters have. With only superficial redesigns-Art Deco details added in the ’20s, joyous postwar colors for the ’50s-industrialists, and the designers they hired, created constant updates on last year’s model.
As marriages of convenience go, the designer-manufacturer union produced extraordinary offspring. Success tended to reward those most perceptive of shifts in public mood, like Norman Bel Geddes, whose 1939-1940 radio inspired by the Stars and Stripes was a best seller during America’s heady prewar buildup. Streamlining, a popular 1930s industrial style turned domestic by Deskey and others, gave forward-ho enthusiasm to a wide range of household objects at a time of economic standstill. But other Depression gambits misfired, sometimes spectacularly. In 1930 Eastman Kodak introduced Coquette, a multicolored enameled camera sold with matching compact and lipstick. Market research, itself in its infancy, had identified the woman of the house as the family’s primary photographer. She may well have taken the pictures, but she didn’t buy the camera.
By stressing product design’s slavish subservience to the bottom line, critics paint a dark side of the industry that many who work in it reject. A good product, says veteran designer Don Dailey, accommodates esthetics, technology and marketing. In 1969 Duracell hired him to perform a facelift on his original 1964 design for the company’s alkaline battery. Dailey switched the gold band around the top for copper, a color he associated with good electrical conductors. The Duracell Copper Top became the country’s best-selling battery and looks the same 25 years later. “That wasn’t a conspiracy to defraud anyone,” he says. “[The design] implied what was true: that this was a better battery” Even Davidson admits that constant restyling is “less pernicious” than techniques of planned obsolescence developed by Detroit carmakers in the 1950s to speed car sales.
“Packaging the New” ends abruptly at 1975, a pity since America’s love affair with consumer novelty gallops on. “Clear” beers crowd the supermarket, and “green” packaging trumpets itself from the shelves. There’s even a vogue for “classic” kitchen appliances, among them comforting, sturdy postwar toasters like those at the Cooper-Hewitt. It’s proof that consumers do like what’s old-as long as it’s packaged anew.
