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Loading... Eugenic Design: Streamlining America in the 1930sby Christina Cogdell
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In 1939, Vogue magazine invited commercial designer Raymond Loewy and eight of his contemporaries--including Walter Dorwin Teague, Egmont Arens, and Henry Dreyfuss--to design a dress for the "Woman of the Future" as part of its special issue promoting the New York World's Fair and its theme, "The World of Tomorrow." While focusing primarily on her clothing and accessories, many commented as well on the future woman's physique, predicting that her body and mind would be perfected through the implementation of eugenics. Industrial designers' fascination with eugenics--especially that of Norman Bel Geddes--began during the previous decade, and its principles permeated their theories of the modern design style known as "streamlining." In Eugenic Design, Christina Cogdell charts new territory in the history of industrial design, popular science, and American culture in the 1930s by uncovering the links between streamline design and eugenics, the pseudoscientific belief that the best human traits could--and should--be cultivated through selective breeding. Streamline designers approached products the same way eugenicists approached bodies. Both considered themselves to be reformers advancing evolutionary progress through increased efficiency, hygiene and the creation of a utopian "ideal type." Cogdell reconsiders the popular streamline style in U.S. industrial design and proposes that in theory, rhetoric, and context the style served as a material embodiment of eugenic ideology. With careful analysis and abundant illustrations, Eugenic Design is an ambitious reinterpretation of one of America's most significant and popular design forms, ultimately grappling with the question of how ideology influences design. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)363.9Social sciences Social problems and services; associations Other social problems and services Population problemsLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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Further, this is one of those times when the woman's touch is particularly to be appreciated, as Cogdell is very alert to the objectification of women implicit in all these programs; not that these drives were deeply hidden.
If you want to have a particular issue with Cogdell it's that much of her evidence of the interaction between the designers who created the Streamline style and the enthusiasts of the eugenics movement is rather circumstantial; probably more so than she hoped, seeing as Cogdell did make use of the personal archives of Norman Bel Geddes, Raymond Loewy, and the like. You actually get rather more about how the new decorative culture impacted on the marketing of eugenics to the American general public.
Also, if the main result of the designers and the eugenicists was to call for the creation of a population and physical environment friendly to the mass-marketing machine of American big business, there probably should have been more of an examination of the response of the CEO class to these social movements. Perhaps that is another book though. ( )