The French-born Loewy also applied the tenets of cleanlining—reducing the look of a product to its essence, without frills or needless detail—to build his own uniquely American persona. Reinvention is a recurring theme in American literature and legend, and like the products he re-envisioned, Loewy, too, managed his public image from the moment he immigrated to the United States, continually editing and polishing his biography over more than a half-century as he worked as a designer and artist. He built one of the most successful design firms in history, and positioned himself as “America’s designer” through society connections, media, and the advertising methods now known as branding.

His achievements took place in a rapidly expanding consumer culture. In the decades after World War I—stretching through the Great Depression, another world war and into the 1960s—American consumer products transformed. Touring cars metamorphosed from boxy, front-heavy behemoths to vehicles with balanced proportions. Tractors, formerly hulking machines studded with belts and gears, became compact workhorses with ergonomic seats, maneuverable rubber tires, and protected engine components. The proliferation of stylish consumer goods inspired a spending spree among the expanding middle class who wanted new products, appliances, and experiences with designs to match their own optimism. The nation’s gross domestic product jumped from $228 billion in 1945 to more than $1.7 trillion in 1975.

The transformation was driven by a new American discipline: industrial design. Industrial designers mined principles they had learned in theater, architecture, advertising, and art to create irresistible products. Norman Bel Geddes, designer of the “Futurama” exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair, was a bombastic theater designer who wrote Horizons, an influential book filled with illustrations of streamlined planes, trains, and automobiles. Walter Teague, best known for Kodak’s Brownie cameras with their black and yellow packaging, had a background in advertising illustration. Henry Dreyfuss, creator of the Honeywell round thermostat and the modern AT&T handset telephone, transformed himself from a theater designer into a specialist in ergonomic design.

But Loewy was the most influential American industrial designer of them all. He was born into privilege in Paris in 1893, the son of a business journalist father and a driven mother whose mantra was “it is better to be envied than pitied.” Loewy studied engineering at Ecole de Lanneau, France’s preeminent technological university, and was drafted into the French army as a private during World War I. He fought along the Western Front, and was awarded the Croix de Guerre for crawling into no-man’s-land to repair communication lines. He eventually rose to the rank of captain.

After the armistice, Loewy came back home. His parents had both died in the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. France itself had been devastated by war, and Loewy soon decided to join his brother, who had moved to New York City. In 1919, during his ocean voyage to the U.S., Loewy entered a sketch into a shipboard talent contest. The drawing caught the eye of fellow passenger Sir Henry Armstrong, the British consul in New York, who promised to introduce the young captain to potential employers. Loewy hit the streets armed with Armstrong’s letter of recommendation and a portfolio of drawings.

By 1920, Loewy had carved out a solid niche as a fashion illustrator, establishing a nationwide reputation for his art deco-inspired fashion ads and catalogues, as well as travel ads featuring sleek ships for the White Star Line. He was very successful, making upwards of $30,000 a year (about $381,000 in today’s dollars). But by 1929 Loewy was growing unsatisfied with life as an illustrator, and he began to think he could make a bigger impact by transforming American products themselves. “Financially, I was successful but I was intellectually frustrated,” he told the New York Times late in his life. “Prosperity was at its peak but America was turning out mountains of ugly, sleazy junk. I was offended my adopted country was swamping the world with so much junk.”

He dove into design. His first project was revamping a Gestetner duplicator, an early version of an office mimeograph machine, by creating a streamlined shell to hide most of the machine’s unsightly moving parts. Sigmund Gestetner, the London-based businessman who made the copier, accepted Loewy’s design in 1929, paying $2,000 (about $28,000 today), which Loewy used to launch his firm. He hired designers and a business manager, but in the midst of the Great Depression clients were scarce. Loewy needed something beyond talent. He needed an image.

He settled on a mix of old-fashioned American pushiness and Euro-suavity—sporting a dapper mustache and wearing the latest French fashions—and hit the road to sell his vision to Midwestern manufacturing executives. His pitch was simple and emblazoned on his business cards: “Between two products equal in price, function and quality, the better looking will outsell the other.” Throughout his career, Loewy made all major client pitches and presentations and then turned account service over to subordinates.

Companies fell hard for Loewy’s charm. Sears asked him to design a refrigerator, and he produced the 1934 Coldspot, a gleaming white shrine to streamlined purity that increased sales from 15,000 to 275,000 units in five years. Loewy convinced the Pennsylvania Railroad to let him design a garbage can for New York’s Penn Station, producing a bin that incorporated art deco designs with the Egyptian motifs popular after the 1922 discovery of King Tut’s tomb. Delighted, the railroad went on to commission the PRR GG-1, an electric locomotive with swooping curves, and the PRR S-1, a streamlined locomotive resembling a speeding bullet. The S-1 was the largest steam locomotive ever built—and so distinctive that critics and high society considered it a work of art when it was exhibited at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. The engine, which chugged in place on a treadmill, drew thousands of visitors per day and was considered the star of the fair.

By the 1940s Loewy was designing for Greyhound, International Harvester, American Tobacco, and Coca-Cola, but he became best known as the main automotive designer for the Studebaker Automobile Company. Loewy’s European background set him apart from the U.S.-born car designers in the design studios for General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler. The innovative 1947 Commander, for instance, had a unified body, equally balanced in the front and the back, with sleek trim meant to mimic the fighter planes of World War II. The car was a hit with consumers, vaulting Studebaker to fourth place in sales behind GM, Ford, and Chrysler. Praised by auto writers as “forward leaning,” the Commander led the way to the company’s best sales years. By 1950, when it moved 268,229 cars out of showrooms, Studebaker owned 4 percent of the domestic car market.

The 1953 Starliner coupe was Loewy’s first legitimately revolutionary car design. The Big Three automakers designed cars for American highways, with front seats like sofas and cushiony suspensions that barely registered when drivers ran over debris. Loewy and his team saw a need for a smaller car that emphasized gas mileage and a superior road feel. The Starliner sat low to the road, had minimal chrome, and a de-emphasized grille; its aerodynamic beauty presaged such “personal” cars as the Corvette, the Thunderbird, the Mustang, and the Buick Riviera. Car designers would not make a similar great leap forward until Ford redesigned the Thunderbird and Taurus in the 1980s.

Loewy’s crowning automotive achievement was 1963’s Avanti. The fiberglass-bodied sports car featured razor-like fenders sweeping into a raised rear end, a wedge-shaped front end, and safety features including a roll bar, disc brakes, and a padded interior. The interior, a direct steal from airliners, featured an overhead console and controls that resembled jet throttles. The overall effect was a startling silhouette, unequaled to this day.

Loewy’s commissions grew with the explosive postwar economy, and so did his reputation. He hired a staff of junior designers, took on several partners in packaging and retail space design, and most importantly, hired Betty Reese as his press agent. Loewy and Reese established the modern standard for creating a brand. Reese taught Loewy to turn every product design debut into a Hollywood production. She counseled him to shove his way into a photo if he saw a press photographer. He learned where to stand in photographs—front row, far left, because editors identify people in photos from left to right. He customized existing car models and drove his one-off designs to public events. His homes were intended less as residences than as advertisements for himself: the New York apartment stuffed with art and Loewy-designed products, the house in Palm Springs featuring a pool that extended into the living room.

Everything was in service to Loewy’s image—and soon enough, his name and photograph were featured in publications across the country. Loewy came to personify the term “designer” and journalists sought him out to comment on everything from GM cars (“jukeboxes on wheels”) to eggs (“the perfect design”). The culmination of his branding triumph came in 1949, when he was the subject of a cover story in Time magazine and of an extensive feature in Life. He followed up with Never Leave Well Enough Alone, an “autobiography” that eschewed biographical detail for a litany of his design triumphs, all conveyed in his singular, charming voice. One critic called it “a 100,000-word after-dinner speech.” The book, which remains in print today, represented the culmination of Loewy’s image-making.

In his later years, Loewy would create more iconic designs: Air Force One; logos for Exxon, Trans World Airlines, and the U.S. Postal Service; and the interior of the Concorde supersonic airliner. He worked relentlessly until he sold his company in 1979.

Shortly thereafter Loewy’s aura diminished. In a sense, his longevity had worked against his legacy, because he was rarely offstage long enough to inspire a revival of his influence. Today, Loewy’s influence is still hotly debated by design historians and art critics. One camp admires his genius for popular design influence while the other side insists he was primarily a businessman who took credit for his employees’ designs.

What is clear is that his vision succeeded wildly in the marketplace and remains influential. His logo for International Harvester—a black “H,” which represents the oversized tractor wheels, interlocked with a red dotted “i” that signifies the tractor body and the farmer or driver—is still seen today on trucker hats, T-shirts, and bumper stickers—33 years after the company went out of business.

Just as significantly, the template Raymond Loewy created to make himself a nationally known personality has morphed into the modern science of branding. If he were designing toasters and cars today there is no doubt—with apologies to other compulsive American communicators—that he would be the king of all media.

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In dozens of photographs assembled in the self-published Looking Backward: America’s Love Affair With the Station Wagon, Southern California-based co-authors John Jordan and Will Bodine recall the days when wagons were targeted mainly to the wealthy (the Buick Special Estate Wagon of 1941 had interior woodwork “worthy of a classic Gar Wood or Chris Craft” yacht, Bodine writes), and the times they borrowed their styling from chic sports cars (witness the trim on 1957’s “dramatic” Buick Century Caballero Estate Wagon). There are also rarities, like the 1958 Packard Clipper Wagon, with only 159 sold. But these were outliers, as the station wagon evolved to be the car of the modern family, a tool to help mothers shuttle children between suburban locations in style. The new arrangement of American homes and families was reflected in the very name of the 1961 Plymouth Custom Suburban, the car driven by the Cleavers of Leave it to Beaver.

Designed for ease—equipped with early automatic starters and automatic transmissions—these vehicles didn’t always handle with precision. Their big bench seats, with rudimentary seat belts, could flexibly accommodate a large number of children, while their window arrangements gave even the littlest kids a view of the road. Even though these cars often used innovative technology and design, they are remembered fondly because of the families they carried and the memories Americans created in them.

The station wagon’s greatest contribution to American life might be the unique perspective it offered its youngest riders: the pleasures and promise of the retreating open road. “There is an entire generation of adults that grew up in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s that saw America ‘backward,’” photographer Jordan writes in the book’s introduction; “By that I mean facing rearwards in the third seat of the station wagon.” In Jordan’s family, as with many others of the time, the family jockeyed for seats in the front, the middle, or the “wayback,” establishing a hierarchy for family trips. “In my family the front seat was the only one that mattered and all else was for second-class passengers or luggage. In other families it was the opposite. The third seat was a place to go to fool around and be out of reach of adult supervision. Making faces at the cars that followed was considered great fun.”

Car companies are making their SUVs more car-like every year, so it may just be a matter of time before a new generation of American kids forges its own station wagon memories, Jordan muses. But it’ll never be exactly the same again.

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1.

Home is where most Angelenos wanted to live when World War II ended, in a house where “the new” might be acquired as Better Things for Better Living, just as the slogan from DuPont put it. The question then was, which new things? In what kind of house? And would any of these new things actually make living better?

The GI Roundtable booklets included discussions of urban planning and new technologies in home construction.

Surprisingly, the U.S. government had urged GIs to ask those questions even as the war wound down in Europe and the Pacific. In 1944, a series of pamphlets distributed to soldiers in the field urged them to discuss their post-war home, its cost and design, and if their arrangements for domestic life would be different from those their parents had known.

The questions contained biases about what the future should look like–small town America seemed to be the ideal–but the questions were thoughtful and broadly open-ended.

Home is where war-weary GIs wanted to be. But what kind of home?

When the answers came in the decade after 1945, they highlighted fractures through mid-century America that were real dividing lines between working-class and middle-class aspiration, between “high brow” taste and popular culture, and between conflicting authorities on living in a modern way.

Ultimately, the answer to the question “how to be new” in the 1950s affected all the things we use today, the habits of our everyday life, the look of our homes, and even our politics and beliefs.

2.
America after the war was heading somewhere–to the future, most of us hoped–with an almost erotic attachment to all the shiny stuff of “the new” (although, even then, desire was mixed with uncertainty about the things we wanted and what those things might make of us).

America after the war was heading to the future with an almost erotic attachment to all the shiny stuff of “the new.”

But in order to desire “the new” and to project our lives into it, we needed to see it. We needed to see what the home of tomorrow should look like, what furnishings it should contain, and how living there–with “the new” all around–would definitely be better.

Mid-century “shelter magazines” supplied those defining images of desire.

And the consensus in them was that the post-war home should hold things that are practical, well-made, and unfussy; that these things–indeed the entire house–should be designed to make life more convivial, informal, and unpretentious; and that lives in that kind of home would be securely private, utterly self-possessed, and yet paradoxically more open to nature.

House Beautiful pictured a “domesticated modernity” through practical solutions to everyday problems.

The preferred way of life–free, informal, and private–might be found anywhere, but the magazines insisted that life was fullest only among wide suburban lawns, patio decks, and outdoor grills. If “the new” was both shelter and sunshine, both privacy and liberation, then there was one place where “the new” was permanently at home. You only had to go to one of Southern California’s ranch house suburbs and see for yourself what educated taste in architecture and interior design could do with a newly bulldozed orange grove.

In glossy spreads of color photographs, the magazines (perhaps too well) presented the beaches, valleys, and foothills from San Diego to Berkeley as the ideal places for liberating manners. Southern California became the mecca for those aspiring to fully embrace “the new,” and cast off the cumbersome past.

3.
Maynard L. Parker took many of those photographs in and around Los Angeles. Parker was a prolific supplier of images to the editors of House and Garden, The Ladies Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, and Sunset Magazine. (The Huntington is preparing a comprehensive survey of Parker’s work, edited by Curator of Photography Jennifer A. Watts. The book will include over 200 of Parker’s photographs, as well as essays covering his photographic practice and his role in popularizing Southern California’s homes and lifestyle. You can explore the Parker collection at the Huntington’s website.)

Glossy magazine spreads of homes in Southern California supplied the defining images of mid-century desire: comfort, informality, and privacy.

By the early 1950s, Parker had firmly hitched his career to Elizabeth Gordon, the controversial editor of House Beautiful. Gordon thought that the values of Modernism–timelessness, objectivity, and purity–offered little room for the intimacies of ordinary American life or the particularities of American places. Gordon told her readers to adopt an alternative modernity, one that married a taste for “better things” with a lively informality. And to illustrate what she meant, Gordon turned to Parker, who had a knack for idealizing in his photographs of suave living rooms and sunny pool decks what Gordon called (at various times) Better Living, The Station Wagon Way of Life, and American Style.

For Gordon and Parker, suburban Southern California provided the physical space, the spirit of experimentation, and the emphasis on youth and freedom that would ultimately repackage domesticated modernity as tract house suburbs for the rest of the nation.

The “the new” for middle-class Americans was a safe and attainable suburban beauty.

In defending her American Style, Gordon antagonized the fraternity of European émigré architects and their students by claiming–quite wrongly–that the International Style they championed was un-American, both aesthetically and politically. In the April 1953 edition of House Beautiful, Gordon famously ordered her readers to choose sides between her solution for the problem of being new and their Modernism.

Both sides of the argument were grounded on a questionable ideology–that aesthetic values equaled moral values–but the rivalry was really about something else. It was about Gordon’s gender, her Midwest background, and her self-creation as an arbiter of modern living.

4.
A massive collaboration of editors, interior designers, manufacturers, merchandisers, architects, and developers shaped the desires and habits of millions of readers through images like those that Parker took for Elizabeth Gordon and House Beautiful. They all shared the belief that the much-handled things we live with have a shaping power over our lives. They believed that places matter. And if that’s so, many Americans through the 1950s and 1960s purchased houses, living room sets, bedroom furniture, and even kitchen appliances to resemble life in Southern California.

(You can follow a timeline of California’s impact on everyday living from the 1930s through the 1960s at California Design, 1930-1965: “Living in a Modern Way,” now showing at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as part of Pacific Standard Time.)

We rightly celebrate Steve Jobs’ passion for design excellence–exactly the same passion for the useful and the beautiful that motivated much of the industrial design in the immediate post-war period. Consumer demand, greater real purchasing power, and expectations that “the new” would be liberating propelled the manufacture of a range of household products that were well-made, functional, and fun.

5.
By situating assemblages of well-made décor within a sheltering architectural frame and by expanding that frame outward to includes sun-filled patios and gardens, photographs of houses in an around Los Angeles in the mid-1950s projected an image of the “better living” Americans were urged to adopt.

Living in a modern way was going to be unfussy, convivial, and unpretentious.

Critics–pointing to photographs of these homes and their furnishings–dismissed this expression of “the new” as pretty, even romantic. Of course, that’s exactly its unthreatening promise: that “the new,” stripped of Modernism’s zealotry, might deliver the egalitarian, ahistorical, and optimistic fabrication that Californians thought the future should be.

It was a comfortable, safe, and attainable suburban beauty. And young husbands and wives fell in love with that image of “the new” and wanted to buy more and more in order to possess it.

Southern California was the place where “the new” made even the ordinary seem exceptional.

Some still bitterly regret that the image was so beguiling or the selling was so successful or that the Station Wagon Way of Life lacked warnings, but, for 50 years at least, middle-class Americans looked at photographs like those in House Beautiful and saw their image of home.

They were dreams of a new kind of domesticity, but with familiar symbols of safety, privacy, and stable family roles. They were dreams of liberation from the recent past. They were dreams of living in a modern way.

D. J. Waldie is the author of Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir and Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles. He is a contributing editor for the Los Angeles Times.

*Photos courtesy of (from top to bottom): American Historical Assocation (Shall I Build a House after the War?, GI Roundtable EM32, page 22, 1944); American Historical Assocation (Shall I Build a House after the War?, GI Roundtable EM32, cover, 1944); The Huntington Library, San Marino, California (Maynard L. Parker, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Trowbridge residence, Beverly Hills, California, ca. 1944. Allen Siple, architect; Edward Huntsman-Trout, landscape architect); author’s collection (Rothschild Photo, Model Kitchen, Lakewood Park, California, ca. 1950); The Huntington Library, San Marino, California (Maynard L. Parker, Lloyd and Marva Shearer residence, Culver City, California, ca. 1947); The Huntington Library, San Marino, California (Maynard L. Parker, Thomas H. Crawford residence, Los Angeles, California, undated; Cliff May, architect; Thomas Dolliver Church, landscape architect); The Huntington Library, San Marino, California (Gira Residence, Malibu, California, undated; George Erb, interior designer); author’s collection (Rothschild Photo, Model Home, Lakewood Park, California, ca. 1950); Hody’s Lakewood, concept drawing, ca. 1950. Wayne McAllister, architect.

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