Streamliner: Raymond Loewy and Image-Making in the Age of American Industrial Design by John Wall (review)

John Wall's 2018 book is the latest in a stream of studies of Loewy that includes, for example, The Designs of Raymond Loewy (1975); Angela Schonberger, Raymond Loewy: Pioneer of American Industrial Design (1990); and Glenn Porter, Raymond Loewy: Designs for a Consumer Culture (2002). What does Wall's book offer that is new?

Wall draws on his professional experience as a syndicated movie critic and public relations professional to analyse Loewy's image-making, branding and "editorial strength" (p. 5). Loewy's 1951 book, Never Leave Well Enough Alone, is described by Wall as the origin story of an unreliable narrator. For Wall, that is an invitation, rather than a dismissal:

By claiming to be the first to model in clay, the first to research products, the first to design for gas mileage—messages delivered in witty stories rather than lengthy lectures on aesthetics—Loewy gains journalistic legitimacy because the anecdotes are entertaining and easy to recall. The quotable quality of the stories practically ensured that reporters researching a profile would use the anecdotes again and again.

(p. 61)

While Wall relies heavily on Loewy's own account, he also critiques Loewy's autobiographical hero story and makes this construction his focus.

The book's structure is chronological, beginning with Loewy's childhood in France through Loewy's retrospective descriptions of it. He quotes Loewy's gushing descriptions of cars (p. 16), which bring to this reviewer's mind the Futurist Manifesto, and refers to his experiments with plane and boat design. He was decorated for bravery on the Western Front before moving to the United States and switching from engineering to social engineering, we are told. Chapters 2–4 chart Loewy's successive shifts from engineering to fashion illustration and advertising to industrial design, and from his first carapace for Gestetner's duplicating machine to automotive design, via designing the trash cans for Pennsylvania Station. Chapters 5–7 trace the consolidation of Loewy's career and persona as a founding industrial designer. Chapters 8–10 focus on Loewy's automotive design work for Studebaker. Chapter 11, "Becoming a Businessman: Building an Industry," sees Loewy before the fall described in chapters 12 and 13. The final chapter reflects positively on his legacy: "By the 1990s, Raymond Loewy's reputation for incessantly grabbing the spotlight began to seem less like rampant egotism than a roadmap for the construction of a personal brand" (p. 7).

Yet we knew already that Loewy was a showman, as were several of his contemporaries who also popularized the figure of the consultant designer (see, for example, Nicolas P. Maffei, Norman Bel Geddes: American Design Visionary, 2018; Penny Sparke, Consultant Design, 1983; and Jeffrey L. Meikle, Twentieth Century Limited, 1979). Wall's book differs from the academic studies of Loewy and his contemporaries in its writing style and the way the underpinning research is used. The book's main theme—that Loewy designed his image as much as the products with which he is associated—is well worn, and by relying on Loewy's own accounts and largely familiar sources, Wall runs the risk of repeating what we know. The book's chronological structure might fruitfully have been rejigged to foreground a thesis other than the biographical story arc of rise, fall, and legacy. Unlike an academic study, Wall's expansive, conversational chapters are free of subheadings and other signposts to the structure and argument; it is a long read rather than a reference. The research is worn lightly in the main text, while the endnotes are prefaced with a paragraph for each chapter (except the last) characterizing the sources used. These are repetitive and rather limited, usually including Loewy's aptly named Never Leave Well Enough Alone, a small range of secondary sources such as Raymond Loewy, by Paul Jodard (1991), and design history survey texts by Adrian Forty and Stephen Bayley...