Design History Beyond the Canon

i
 In memory of our mentor and friend, David Raizman.

ii
Design History Beyond the Canon

Edited by
Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler, Victoria Rose Pass, and
Christopher S. Wilson

iii
 BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS
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iv
 Contents

List of figures vii

Foreword: A pre- and post-history of “Teaching the History of
Modern Design: The Canon and Beyond”
Carma Gorman and David Raizman xii
Acknowledgments xxiv

Introduction Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler, Victoria Rose Pass,

and Christopher S. Wilson 1

Section 1 Users/Consumers
Kul’ttovary: Bringing culture into the Soviet home Yelena McLane 17
Diversionary tactics at work: Making meaning through misuse
Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler 35
Everything old is new again: Modernization, historic preservation,
and the American home, 1920–1966 Emily Wolf 49

Section 2 Intermediaries
Representing modern architecture in The Rockford Files,
1974–1980 Christopher S. Wilson 71
CLOTHES CLOTHES CLOTHES PUNK PUNK PUNK WOMEN
WOMEN WOMEN Maria Elena Buszek 87
Using digital tools to work around the canon Matthew Bird 111

Section 3 Designers
Confronting racial stereotypes in graphic design history
Karen L. Carter 129
The Mangbetu coiffure: A story of cars, hats, branding,
and appropriation Victoria Rose Pass 145
Adventure play in physical and virtual spaces Gayle L. Goudy 171
The case of William Pahlmann: Challenging the canon of modern
design Marianne Eggler, Erica Morawski, and Sara
Desvernine Reed 189

v
vi Contents

“I was not a woman designer . . . I was a designer who happened

to be a woman” Russell Flinchum 209

Epilogue: Beyond the canon—building the case for and cases

for interdisciplinary design history Stephanie E. Vasko 227

Notes on the contributors 235

Index 239
 Figures

1.1 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer institute

small group discussion, 2015 xix
1.2 NEH Summer institute visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2015 xix
1.3 NEH Summer institute visit to the Fashion Institute of Technology, 2015 xx
1.4 NEH Summer institute visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2015 xx
2.1 Notebook sketch by Brockett Horne, 2015. Used with permission of
the artist 2
2.2 Visual representation of the book by Brockett Horne, 2018. Used with
permission of the artist 4
3.1 Kul’ttovary store, c. 1960 18
3.2 A loudspeaker and a “Moskvich” single-channel radio. Photo by
Becki Rutta 23
3.3 Alexey Lavrov’s “Buy the Moskivich” poster, 1950 24
3.4 Fotokor–1 camera, 1930. Photo by Becki Rutta 26
3.5 Various sports and games equipment. Photo by Becki Rutta 28
3.6 “Nevalyashka” roly-poly doll. Photo by Becki Rutta 30
3.7 Alexsandr Laktionov, Moving to a New Apartment, 1952. Donetsk
Art Museum, Ukraine 31
4.1 Don’s Boss Page, 1998. Used with permission from Don Pavlish 41
4.2 “Sabotage” image from Processed World 5, 1982. Used with permission
from Chris Carlsson 43
5.1 Image from Philip Carey Company trade catalog, “Modern Home
Building: Dependable Modern Building Materials,” 1939 50
5.2 Page from Weatherbest Stained Shingle Company trade catalog,
“Making Old Houses into Charming Homes,” c. 1925 53
5.3 Montgomery Ward trade catalog cover, “Complete Catalog of
Plumbing, Heating, Building Materials,” 1935 55
5.4 Page from Johns-Manville Corporation trade catalog, “101 Practical
Suggestions for Home Improvements,” 1934 59
5.5 Page from United States Gypsum Company home building and
home improvement guide, “Popular Home’s Ideas Galore: How to
Build, Buy, Modernize and Decorate,” 1946 60
5.6 Page from Celotex Corporation trade catalog, “Home Improvement
Pictorial,” 1961 62
6.1 The Rockford Files, Charles R. Runkin Building, Season 2, Episode 14
© Roy Huggins Public Arts Productions/Cherokee Productions/
Universal Television 1974–1980 74

vii
viii Figures

6.2 The Rockford Files, Charles R. Runkin Building, Season 2, Episode 14

© Roy Huggins Public Arts Productions/Cherokee Productions/
Universal Television 1974–1980 75
6.3 The Rockford Files, Santa Monica County Building, Season 5, Episode 3
© Roy Huggins Public Arts Productions/Cherokee Productions/
Universal Television 1974–1980 76
6.4 The Rockford Files, parking lot, Season 5, Episode 3 © Roy Huggins
Public Arts Productions/Cherokee Productions/Universal Television
1974–1980 76
6.5 The Rockford Files, LAX airport, Season 3, Episode 1 © Roy Huggins
Public Arts Productions/Cherokee Productions/Universal Television
1974–1980 77
6.6 The Rockford Files, Jim Rockford, Season 2, Episode 1 © Roy Huggins
Public Arts Productions/Cherokee Productions/Universal Television
1974–1980 77
6.7 The Rockford Files, Los Angeles freeway, opening credits © Roy Huggins
Public Arts Productions/Cherokee Productions/Universal Television
1974–1980 79
6.8 The Rockford Files, motel in Season 1, Episode 10 © Roy Huggins Public
Arts Productions/Cherokee Productions/Universal Television 1974–1980 80
6.9 The Rockford Files, fast-food stand in Season 4, Episode 16 © Roy
Huggins Public Arts Productions/Cherokee Productions/Universal
Television 1974–1980 80
6.10 The Rockford Files, concrete parking garage in Season 5, Episode 14
© Roy Huggins Public Arts Productions/Cherokee Productions/Universal
Television 1974–1980 81
6.11 The Rockford Files, hotel in Season 5, Episode 8 © Roy Huggins
Public Arts Productions/Cherokee Productions/Universal
Television 1974–1980 82
6.12 The Rockford Files, university in Season 4, Episode 13 © Roy Huggins
Public Arts Productions/Cherokee Productions/Universal Television
1974–1980 82
6.13 The Rockford Files, federal building in Season 2, Episode 15 © Roy Huggins
Public Arts Productions/Cherokee Productions/Universal Television
1974–1980 83
6.14 The Rockford Files, museum in Season 5, Episode 20 © Roy Huggins
Public Arts Productions/Cherokee Productions/Universal Television
1974–1980 83
7.1 Detail of Viv Albertine’s “corrected” introductory label, Punk 1976–78
© British Library Board, 2016. Used with permission. 88
7.2 Photograph of “You’re gonna wake up” T-shirt, 1976. Stolper Wilson
Collection, London 92
7.3 Photograph of “Tits” T-shirt, 1976. Stolper Wilson Collection, London 95
7.4 Jane England, Vivienne Westwood and Jordan, Seditionaries, London, 1977 96
 Figures ix

7.5 Photograph of Punks at The Roxy, 1977. Photo by PYMCA/UIG via

Getty Images 98
7.6 Photograph of Poly Styrene, 1977. Photo by Daily Mirror/Mirrorpix/
Peter Stone 100
7.7 Photograph of Vivien Goldman and Neneh Cherry, 1970s. Photo by
Caroline Coon via Camera Press 101
7.8 Photograph of Alex Michon, 1976. Photo by Alex Michon/Rocco Redondo,
courtesy Alex Michon Archives 103
7.9 Photograph of Alex Michon, 1980–1981. Photo by Krystyna Kolowska,
courtesy Alex Michon Archives 104
7.10 Photograph of Caroline Coon, 1978. Photo by Daily Mirror/ Mirrorpix/
Mike Maloney 104
7.11 Cover of 1981 Best magazine Courtesy of the author 106
8.1 Futurama lipstick case Revlon, collection of the author 115
8.2 Futurama lipstick patent, 1956 Revlon 116
8.3 Futurama lipstick advertisement, 1957 © Photographer commissioned
by Revlon 117
8.4 3M DD–1 advertisement, 1947 © 1947 3M Co. Used with permission 118
8.5 3M DD–1 desk tape dispenser. Collection of the author 121
8.6 Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., What Is Modern Design?, 1950 Digital image
© The Museum of Modern Art/licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY 123
9.1 Paul Colin, La Revue Négre, 1925, courtesy of Posters Please, Inc.
© 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris 135
9.2 Paul Colin, “Josephine Baker, Banana Skirt,” 1927, courtesy of
Posters Please, Inc. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York/ADAGP, Paris 136
9.3 Emile Lévy (printer), “Ambassadeurs Les Jolly Koon’ess,” 1885
© Bibliothèque nationale de France, n.d., Cabinet des Estampes,
ENT DN–1 (LEVY, Emile)-FT6, W001101. 138
10.1 Image of Nobosodru, 1925. Manbetu woman Nobosodru, wife of
Mangbetu King Touba, Niangra, Belgian Congo [femme d’un chef
Mangbetu (Congo Belque)] photograph by Léon Poirier and Georges
Specht, 1925, photogravure. Published by La Croisière Noire, c. 1926,
EEPA postcard collection CG-20-76, Eliot Elisofon Photographic
Archives, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution 146
10.2 Poster for La Croisière Noire film, 1926 © Musée du Quai
Branly-Jacques Chirac, dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY 153
10.3 Josephine Baker modeling a hat, 1926 157
10.4 Baron Adolph de Meyer, a hat by Agnés from Harpers Bazaar, 1926 159
10.5 Alexandre Iacovleff, image of Madame Agnés from Vogue, 1926 160
10.6 Beyoncé in Lemonade, 2016. Beyoncé in Lemonade, directed by Kahlil
Joseph, Beyoncé Knowles Carter, Melina Matsoukas, Todd Tourso,
Dikayl Rimmasch, Jonas Åkerlund, and Mark Romanek, 2016. New York,
NY: Parkwood Entertainment 163
x Figures

10.7 Photograph of Josephine Baker, c. 1925. Getty Images/Keystone France/

Contributor 164
11.1 Bob Cassilly, City Museum. Photo by Rick Kupferer III 173
11.2 Bob Cassilly, City Museum. Photo by Rick Kupferer III 174
11.3 Toshiko Horiuchi MacAdam, “Kaleidoscape,” 2013. Photos provided
by the Children’s Museum of Winston-Salem, North Carolina 175
11.4 Toshiko Horiuchi MacAdam, “Takino Rainbow Nest,” 2000. Photos by
Masaki Koizumi provided by NetPlayWorks and Charles MacAdam 176
11.5 Antoni Gaudí’s inverted catenary arch model Rüdiger Marmulla/
Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) 177
11.6 Tile work, Shah Mosque, Isfahan, Iran, 1611–1629. Photo by
Amir Sarabadani 178
11.7 Toshiko Horiuchi MacAdam, “Gothic Arches, Romanesque Church,”
1976. Courtesy of NetPlayWorks and Charles MacAdam 178
11.8 Nest of the Baya Weaver. Photo by J. M. Garg 180
11.9 Windosill computer game, 2009 182
11.10 Journey computer game, 2012 183
11.11 Imagination Playground, 2011. Photo courtesy of Imagination
Playground 185
12.1 Calvert whiskey’s “Man of Distinction” advertisement, 1949. Courtesy
of Hagley Museum and Library, Series 9, Box 11, Book 4, William
Pahlmann Papers (Accession 2388), Manuscripts and Archives
Department, Wilmington, DE 19807 190
12.2 William Pahlmann book plate. Courtesy of Hagley Museum and Library,
William Pahlmann Papers (Accession 2388), Manuscripts and Archives
Department, Wilmington, DE 19807 192
12.3 Interior of the Forum of the Twelve Caesars restaurant, 1957. Courtesy
of Hagley Museum and Library, Hagley ID 2388_09172012_24,
Series IX, Box OS 7, Folder Public Interiors, Book 16, William Pahlmann
Papers (Accession 2388), Manuscripts and Archives Department,
Wilmington, DE 19807 196
12.4 “Pahlmann Peruvian” model room, 1941. Courtesy of Hagley Museum
and Library, Series 9, Box 1, Book 1, William Pahlmann Papers (Accession
2388), Manuscripts and Archives Department, Wilmington, DE 19807 199
12.5 Living room designed for Pahlmann Previews, 1954. Courtesy of
Hagley Museum and Library, Series 9, Box 6, Book 13, William
Pahlmann Papers (Accession 2388), Manuscripts and Archives
Department, Wilmington, DE 19807 201
13.1 Publicity photograph of MaryEllen Dohrs, 1951. Collection of
Russell Flinchum 210
13.2 MaryEllen Dohrs, General Motors, 1950. Courtesy of MaryEllen Dohrs 211
13.3 MaryEllen Dohrs, Water Wagon, 1958. Courtesy of MaryEllen Dohrs 212
13.4 Alexander Kostellow at Pratt, 1950. Courtesy of MaryEllen Dohrs 215
13.5 MaryEllen Dohrs, sketch of modular kitchen with female figure.
Courtesy of MaryEllen Dohrs 216
 Figures xi

13.6 MaryEllen Dohrs, Food Mill for Landers, Frary Clark, 1953–1956.
Courtesy of MaryEllen Dohrs 217
13.7 Advertisement for “Kid-Size” table and chairs. Courtesy of
MaryEllen Dohrs 218
13.8 MaryEllen Dohrs, “Medallion” luggage for Samsonite. Courtesy of
MaryEllen Dohrs 219
13.9 Advertisement for Packard Caribbean, 1955. Courtesy of
MaryEllen Dohrs 220
13.10 MaryEllen Dohrs, interior scheme for Packard, 1954.
Courtesy of MaryEllen Dohrs 221
13.11 MaryEllen Dohrs, jukebox for Seeberg, 1955. Courtesy of
MaryEllen Dohrs 222
13.12 MaryEllen Dohrs, sketch of modular kitchen. Courtesy of
MaryEllen Dohrs 222
13.13 Harley Earl and MaryEllen Dohrs, 1950. Courtesy of
MaryEllen Dohrs 223
 Foreword
A pre- and post-history of “Teaching the History
of Modern Design: The Canon and Beyond”
Carma Gorman and David Raizman

All of the authors and editors of this book were participants in a four-week National
Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Institute called “Teaching the History
of Modern Design: The Canon and Beyond” that we offered at Drexel University in July
2015. These authors and editors might never have met one another, nor we them, had
it not been for the month we shared together in Philadelphia. Because this book is
ultimately a product of the institute, the editors have kindly invited us to preface it by
presenting our goals for the institute and our perceptions of its impact.
Three factors shaped our aims for the institute. The first was our parallel experiences
in the 1990s as instructors new to teaching design history, in a country that lacked
many of the infrastructures typical of a scholarly discipline. The second was our shared
“instrumentalist” bent as instructors, a perspective shaped by our many years of
teaching design history to undergraduate design majors, and especially by our recent
experiences as faculty appointed to and/or housed in design programs. The third factor
was our realization in the early 2010s that many, if not most, of the (still relatively few
and mostly survey-level) design history courses being offered in US universities and
art schools were being taught by faculty who had trained as designers or art historians,
and who had in many cases, like us, had little or no formal instruction in design history
themselves.
Although we are sixteen years apart in age, attended different undergraduate and
graduate programs, and came to design history from different directions, our journeys
were in many respects remarkably parallel. We were both trained as art historians:
David as a medievalist, Carma as an Americanist. Though like many people in our
respective fields, we both had an interest in material culture, neither of us ever had an
opportunity to take a survey of the history of industrial or graphic design—as opposed
to a survey of art history or architectural history—during our undergraduate or
graduate studies. Nonetheless, after realizing that a survey of design history was listed
in Drexel University’s College of Design Arts course catalog but was not being regularly
offered, David volunteered to teach it, and at the request of the design faculty, began
doing so regularly in 1992. This “combined” survey course addressed graphic and
industrial design along with the decorative arts. In the mid-1990s, he also began
teaching a new required course for graphic design majors entitled “History of 20th-
Century Graphic Design and Beyond.” Carma, in contrast, was hired in 1998 at

xii
 Foreword xiii

Southern Illinois University Carbondale specifically to teach—as part of an otherwise

fairly conventional art historical teaching load—one section per year of the history of
industrial design. In 2001, at the request of the communication design faculty, she also
began teaching a separate survey of the history of graphic design that until that date
had been taught by a member of the design faculty.
Both of us faced very steep learning curves in preparing to teach these courses, not
only because we had had no formal training in design history ourselves, but also
because the infrastructure of the field of design history was at a very different stage of
development in the USA in the 1990s than it was in the UK. In Britain, a number of
institutions already offered master’s and doctoral degrees in the history of design,
which provided even British institutions that lacked design history degree programs of
their own with a pipeline of qualified instructors. Moreover, the UK-based Design
History Society, established in 1977, sponsored annual conferences that allowed those
teaching and doing scholarship in the field to learn from one another, and in 1988
began publishing the peer-reviewed Journal of Design History in conjunction with
Oxford University Press. In contrast, prior to the establishment of the Bard Graduate
Center’s master’s and doctoral programs in design, decorative arts, and material culture
in 1993, the US had no doctoral programs specifically dedicated to design history.
A notable MA program in the field was the Winterthur Program in Early American
Culture (established by the University of Delaware and the Winterthur Museum in
1952), but like Yale’s art history doctoral program, which also offered coursework in the
decorative arts, its focus was until recently on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
(the program did change its name to the “Winterthur Program in American Material
Culture” in 2007 to reflect that its emphasis was no longer exclusively on “early”
American material culture).
Although it is difficult to estimate the percentage of US universities and art schools
that regularly offered design history courses, anecdotal information suggests that at
many institutions a member of the design faculty taught at most a one- or two-
semester-long survey course tailored to majors in a specific design field such as fashion,
interior, or graphic design. Very few American institutions could claim at that time to
regularly offer upper-division or graduate-level courses in design history. Moreover,
there were no professional organizations dedicated to the history of design in the USA,
nor any annual conferences devoted to research or teaching in the field. (Design Forum,
an affiliated society of the College Art Association that was established in 1983, had
ceased sponsoring conference sessions at the CAA annual conference by the mid–
1990s.) In the USA of the late 1990s, there was therefore no ready means by which new
entrants to the field could network with established teacher-scholars, nor even any easy
way of reviewing syllabi from design history courses at other institutions.
Fortunately, even in those early days of dial-up modem connections to the primarily
text-based internet—that is, prior to the existence of what have since become essential
design-historical resources, including Google Images (2001), YouTube (2005), Google
Patents (2006), Pinterest (2010), and Instagram (2010)—we were not entirely lacking
in resources. We were both lucky enough to be teaching at research institutions whose
libraries owned or were willing to purchase what were then the essential texts in the
field, and that also subscribed to Winterthur Portfolio (Winterthur Museum/University
xiv Foreword

of Chicago Press, 1964–present), Design Issues (MIT press, 1984–present), Journal of

Design History (Design History Society/Oxford University Press, 1988–present), and
Studies in the Decorative Arts (now West 86th Street, Bard Graduate Center/University
of Chicago Press, 1993–present). Even so, Jstor, begun in 1995, did not provide access
to even the most prominent journals in art history until at least the year 2000, and
did not add major design history journals such as Design Issues and Journal of
Design History until later in the decade. Thus, we both labored mightily to gather clean
originals of readings for photocopied course packs and to create (35mm film!) slides
that suited the courses and the students we were teaching.
The problem with most of the design historical literature that was available at the
time, however, was that it was either too scholarly or not scholarly enough for our
teaching needs. Although we found Clive Dilnot’s and John Walker’s literature reviews
(1984 and 1989, respectively) illuminating, and benefited greatly from the meticulously
researched essays on specialized topics in Design Issues and the Journal of Design
History, the vast majority of the undergraduate design majors enrolled in our courses
could not be compelled to read lengthy, heavily footnoted research articles, many of
which were written in what our students deemed to be impenetrable academese.1
Even students who gave it their best shot seldom had enough prior knowledge of
design history to fully follow the journal articles’ arguments. Much of the “serious”
academic literature that was available at the time was simply too long, too specialized,
too poorly illustrated, and/or too theoretical for the needs of most of our design
students, who entered our classes with virtually no prior knowledge of design history
and only fuzzy recollections of the art history surveys they had taken a year or two
earlier.2
Conversely, students had less difficulty comprehending the survey texts that were
available on the US market in the late 1990s, but many ended their narratives too early
in the twentieth century (Giedion, Pevsner, Ferebee, Pulos, Heskett, Forty, Conway,
Frank); others focused only on the twentieth century (Dormer, Hiesinger and Marcus,
Woodham, Fiell); some were too sparsely illustrated to meet the needs of students
unfamiliar with the works being discussed (Sparke); and many others focused on a
single style or a limited span of time (Duncan, Meikle, Smith, Collins, and most
exhibition catalogs). Hollis’s and Meggs’s graphic design survey texts were among the
only affordable books on the market that provided undergraduates who were unfamiliar
with the fixtures of the design historical canon with well-illustrated chronological and
stylistic narratives of sufficiently broad temporal range to be useful for our needs.3
We were of course both well aware of the drawbacks of survey texts, which—by
focusing on “greatest hits” and “things well-educated designers are expected to know”—
perpetuated a canon favoring museum-quality works of “good design” over “ordinary”
and “merely commercial” works, and works by named, individual, white, male, European
or American consultant/freelance designers over works designed by women, people of
color, in-house designers, design teams, and uncredited/unknown individuals or teams.
However, one must start somewhere, and we both started in the early 2000s by
publishing the textbooks that we wished had been available when we first began
teaching design history: namely, books that covered a wide span of historical time,
including the recent past, in what were to us at the time familiar art historical ways. Like
 Foreword xv

most primary-source readers and survey texts in art history, then, our books focused on
the West, were organized chronologically, and favored the writings and works of named,
white, male designers. Carma’s The Industrial Design Reader (2003) featured short,
chronologically organized selections of canonical writings, most (but not all) of which
were written by famous white, male, European or American designers. David’s History
of Modern Design (first edition, 2004) was a chronological introduction to the canonical
designers, works, and styles of industrial design, graphic design, and the decorative arts
(primarily but not exclusively) in Europe and the USA. Both of these books, like their
predecessors, then, were essentially attempts to define a canon of works, designers, and
styles that we suspected our students’ employers and clients would expect them to
know, and to provide new instructors of design history courses with a basic road-map
to a terrain with which they were likely not entirely familiar.
When the two of us first met in February 2004 at the College Art Association (CAA)
annual conference in Seattle, shortly after the publication of our books, enrollment in
undergraduate design degree programs had been rising steadily for at least a decade,
and the barriers to teaching design history were becoming significantly less daunting.
Carma had revived the CAA-affiliated society Design Forum in 2001 and created an
email announcement list for the group, and under the new name Design Studies
Forum, it began sponsoring one or two sessions and a business meeting each year at the
CAA annual conference. Moreover, Berg’s (now Bloomsbury’s) decision to publish
books and journals in the field of design history resulted in a welcome increase in the
number of design history textbooks and readers on the market in the early 2000s,
which certainly improved matters. In addition, more resources were becoming available
on the internet (though fewer than one might at first recall: both of us were still
teaching with slide projectors, since only a few of our classrooms at that time were
equipped with digital projectors, and because locating high-quality digital images
online was still a challenge).
These new developments, though very welcome, were still not sufficient to rectify
the underlying structural problem: that American universities still offered few upper-
division and graduate courses in design history, and were turning out at most a handful
or two of PhD students each year who were well prepared to teach design history to
students of design. Although we agree with design historian Kjetil Fallan that design
history should not be construed solely as a service discipline, we nonetheless share the
perhaps unfashionably instrumentalist view that one of design history’s most important
functions is to help inform the ways in which designers think.4 From our experiences
teaching undergraduate design majors, we had both come to believe that designers-in-
training—who will quite literally determine the shape of things to come—need and
deserve instruction that presents the past as a useful and actionable repository of
insights into contemporary practice.
It is admittedly challenging to teach and write design history in ways that are useful
to both design historians and designers. However, we shared a conviction that
embracing—rather than distancing—design practice and design practitioners was not
only key to establishing the field of design history on firmer footing in the USA, but
also to developing research methods that are specific to the history of design. The vast
majority of design historians have been content to employ the research methods and
xvi Foreword

critical approaches that literary critics, cultural historians, and art historians developed
decades ago for use in their own fields. But design has different aims, and operates
under fundamentally different assumptions and constraints, from art, literature, film,
architecture, and other creative fields. It therefore seems logical to expect that those
design historians who are the most knowledgeable about both contemporary and
historical design practices—and in particular about the economic, legal, material, and
political constraints that have conditioned the activities of most designers and their
clients—will also be among the scholars best positioned to develop research methods
that are appropriate specifically to the study of design.
By the late 2000s, at a moment when design majors outnumbered art majors in
most US schools of art and design, we had both become confident enough in our
design historical scholarship and teaching to begin introducing ourselves professionally
as design historians rather than art historians. We also became increasingly evangelical.
We shared the belief that design majors deserved at very least a one- or two-semester
survey of design history, as well as a suite of advanced history/theory/criticism course
offerings comparable in scope to those that students of art and architecture had long
enjoyed. But we also knew that if design programs continued expanding at their recent
pace, the scarcity of doctoral programs in design history in the USA would make
staffing the current (scanty) design history course offerings even more challenging
than it already was.
In hopes of encouraging US institutions to bolster their design history course
offerings, and perhaps to develop master’s and doctoral degree programs in design
history as well, David proposed and Carma agreed to help organize sessions about the
teaching of design history at the National Association of Schools of Art and Design
(NASAD) annual meetings in 2010 and 2011 (NASAD then invited us back to run a
half-day pre-conference workshop on the same subject in 2012 in Milwaukee).
Feedback we received from participants in these very well-attended sessions suggested
that the vast majority of people who were teaching design history in US colleges had
had little to no training in design history themselves: design history had not been
offered when and where they had attended school, just as it had not been when we were
in school. Moreover, informal polls conducted at these sessions suggested that roughly
fifty to sixty percent of the faculty who were teaching undergraduate design history
surveys had been trained as designers. Art and architectural historians constituted the
next-largest group at approximately thirty to forty percent, followed by a small minority
of instructors (at most, five percent each) who indicated that they had been trained
either in the fine arts or in a humanistic or social science field such as history,
anthropology, sociology, or communications. Most of these faculty had to pick up what
knowledge they had about design history on their own, as best they could. We knew
from experience what a stressful way this was to prepare to teach a new course.
Admittedly, the internet, digital projectors, and the flurry of new textbooks and readers
that had recently appeared on the market made the task far less daunting than it had
been even five or six years earlier. Nonetheless, it seemed clear to us that the only way
to meet even the current demand for qualified design history instructors was to find
ways to make it easier for art historians and design faculty who were interested in
teaching design history to do so successfully.
 Foreword xvii

The large numbers of attendees at the NASAD sessions, and their evident interest in
learning about design history and in talking about the pleasures and pitfalls of teaching
it, sparked David to begin working on a proposal for a 2013 NEH summer institute that
would focus—somewhat unusually for the NEH—on college-level teaching of, rather
than on research into, design history. David invited Carma to participate in the
development of the institute, and as co-directors, we submitted our first NEH proposal
in early 2012. Although it was among the seventy-five percent of that year’s proposals
that were not funded, with encouragement from Deborah Hurtt, Senior Program
Officer with the NEH’s Division of Education Programs, we submitted a revised
proposal in February 2014 for a summer 2015 institute, this time with David as project
director, and Carma—who had just relocated to UT Austin and was wary of assuming
additional responsibilities—as project faculty. Taking into consideration peer reviewers’
and NEH staff comments from the 2012 submission, and cognizant of the results of
our informal NASAD polls about the backgrounds of the people who were actually
teaching design history courses in the USA, our new proposal was for a thematically
organized institute of four weeks’ duration called “Teaching the History of Design: The
Canon and Beyond.”
This proposal—one of seventeen funded from a field of forty-six—hinged on the
notion that the scholarship and teaching of design history, and in particular the canon
promoted by most survey textbooks, depended far too heavily upon art historical
paradigms that privileged expensive, rare objects found in museum collections over
inexpensive, ubiquitous ones; objects that hewed to modernist notions of “good design”
over objects whose appearance was “commercially motivated” or dictated by other
priorities; works by named, individual (usually white male), “star” consultant/freelance
designers over the works of women, designers of color, in-house designers, design
teams, and unknown designers; and works from Europe and the USA over works by
people elsewhere in the world. We hoped that by addressing the biases embedded in
the design historical canon head-on, we might help participants to envision design
history, and design itself, as a field with aims, values, and methods distinct from those
of art history and the fine arts. To that end, we chose to dedicate one week of the
summer institute to each of three themes—taste and popular culture; women as
consumers and producers of design; and political and global interpretations of design
after World War II—that we believed were sufficiently flexible to allow us both to
acknowledge the canon (for the benefit of participants who were not already wholly
familiar with it) and to challenge it. We reserved the final (fourth) week for presentations
by teams of the Summer Scholars, whom we charged with designing a lesson plan for
a single day’s class meeting of an undergraduate survey course that would engage with
one or more of the institute’s three themes and also require students to actively engage
with either a local collection or an online archival resource (such as patent drawings
and descriptions from PatFT, Google Patents, or Espacenet; scans of manufacturers’
catalogs or other primary sources from archive.org, HathiTrust, or Google Books;
images of objects and ephemera from eBay, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.).
Our proposal was therefore an atypical one for NEH to fund, not only because it
focused more explicitly on teaching than on research, but also because it welcomed
participants who held or were working toward degrees other than the PhD, including
xviii Foreword

the MFA, MA, and BFA. With the assistance of external reviewer Daniel Huppatz of
Swinburne University of Technology (Melbourne), we ultimately selected from a pool
of nearly seventy applicants a mix of twenty-five graphic designers, interior designers,
historians of modern art, architectural historians, fashion historians, a historian of
Asian art, and a chemist. We prioritized applicants who were already teaching, or who
were imminently scheduled to teach, design history, and sought to strike a balance
among designers, art historians, and faculty from other fields that approximately
echoed the percentages we had observed in our NASAD sessions. Our rationale for this
decision was twofold. First, many US institutions of higher learning grant “degree
equivalency” to design professionals who can demonstrate professional expertise,
experience, and/or renown commensurate with that of terminal degree-holders in
their field, but these faculty have typically had even fewer opportunities than most to
take courses in the history of design. Second, we reasoned that in a field in which the
country’s only graduate programs were small and of recent vintage, applicants’
demonstrated interest in design history was a far more germane selection criterion
than their academic credentials. Anyone convinced enough of the value of design
history to undertake teaching it at the college level—even/especially in the absence of
any prior training in the field—was exactly the kind of person we were most interested
in working with, and also the kind of person who seemed likely to derive the greatest
benefit from participating.
During the four weeks of the institute, the group heard from a distinguished group
of visiting scholars about those themes, including Regina Lee Blaszczyk, University of
Leeds; Maria Elena Buszek, University of Denver; Vladimir Kulic, Florida Atlantic
University; Catharine Rossi, Kingston University; and Sarah Teasley, Royal College of
Art. Professor Blaszczyk, in fact, did not just visit one day but played an ongoing role in
the institute. Because she writes from a business-history perspective, and has argued
(most notably in her book Imagining Consumers) that design historians have overplayed
the significance of consultant designers and underestimated the contributions of
manufacturers and other intermediaries in shaping style, she was particularly well-
suited to contribute to a summer institute that challenged the design historical canon.
For example, Blaszczyk led a lively session in which she asked small groups of
participants to analyze manufacturers’ catalogs and other ephemera she had purchased
inexpensively on eBay, demonstrating that even faculty at institutions without
significant archival holdings could engage students in primary-source research. In
addition, Blaszczyk accompanied the group on its field trip to the Hagley Museum and
Library in Delaware, where we viewed archival materials not only from the Raymond
Loewy and William Pahlmann collections, but also color cards and ephemera from the
Textile Color Card Association (which, as Blaszczyk discusses in her book The Color
Revolution, guided many early twentieth-century manufacturers’ design choices).
Blaszczyk also accompanied the group to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where we
spent a considerable amount of time in the American pressed glass collection,
discussing the ways in which instructors can make use of local collections of objects
that are non-canonical in medium or style to help students understand the criteria of
“quality” that undergird the canon. (Namely, the canon tends to reflect the biases of
collectors and curators whose art and decorative arts collections favor objects that
 Foreword xix

Figure 1.1 Participants of the “Teaching the History of Modern Design: The Canon
and Beyond” NEH Summer Institute responding to a discussion question about
intellectual property, Drexel University, Philadelphia, July 2015.

Figure 1.2 Participants of the “Teaching the History of Modern Design: The Canon
and Beyond” NEH Summer Institute visit “Northern Lights: Scandinavian Design” at
the Philadelphia Museum of Art, July 2015.
xx Foreword

Figure 1.3 Participants of the “Teaching the History of Modern Design: The Canon
and Beyond” NEH Summer Institute visit the Study Collection at the Museum of the
Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, July 2015.

Figure 1.4 Participants of the “Teaching the History of Modern Design: The Canon
and Beyond” NEH Summer Institute examining objects in the Costume and Textile
Study Room, Philadelphia Museum of Art, July 2015.
 Foreword xxi

were rare and expensive over those that were ordinary and affordable.) Similarly, in
introducing architecture, tourism, and fashion initiatives from the former Yugoslavia,
Professor Kulic moved “beyond the canon” geographically, challenging the usual
monolithic narratives about design from the eastern side of the Iron Curtain. Kulic’s
presentation spurred fruitful discussions about the ways in which canonical narratives
position some regions of the world as “centers” and others as “peripheries.”
However one chooses to measure it, the institute’s impact exceeded our expectations.
First, the institute seems to have spurred many of the participants to begin speaking
about and publishing more of their own scholarship in design history. We were pleased
to see participants organize and present a session at the 2016 NASAD annual meeting,
and show up in force to present papers and chair sessions at the Popular Culture
Association/American Culture Association conference in 2016, the Southeastern
College Art Conference (SECAC) in 2016, and the College Art Association conferences
in 2017 (New York) and 2018 (Los Angeles). Individually and collectively—as the
chapters in this book attest—they have been remarkably productive in expanding the
canon of modern design by addressing a wide range of subject matter and, in some
cases, devising novel research methods.
Second, one of our hopes was that the institute would provide a career boost to
those who participated in it, and indeed, many participants have advanced quite rapidly
in the profession since mid–2015. Two participants have returned to graduate school
to pursue additional advanced degrees; three participants have moved to new full-time
positions; those working as part-time and adjunct instructors have in many cases
secured more favorable contracts in their current positions; one full-time faculty
member has become head of her program; and another has just earned tenure.
Third, many participants are now engaging in significant professional service in the
field. One Summer Scholar became the first design/decorative arts reviews editor for
CAA; another continues to serve as reviews editor and managing editor of Design and
Culture, and as a workshop leader for Design Incubation; another was elected president
of Design Studies Forum in 2017; and she and another participant also serve as
members of the College Art Association’s newly formed Committee on Design.
Fourth, David had expressed a hope in one of his initial emails to Carma in 2011
that the institute “could create a network of people that will have had the experience
of learning material and then implementing it and perhaps staying in touch, and
then building further with more networking at NASAD and elsewhere.” That goal,
too, has certainly been met. Like most scholarly groups, the “NEHbors” share useful
news, announcements, and resources via an email list and Facebook group. But the
real power of what one participant colorfully described as our “hive mind” is that it
is friendly. Asking research and teaching questions of strangers on larger, more
contentious design research lists is not always productive; doing so on the NEHbors
list usually is. As one participant observed, “I’m delighted to leave [the institute] with a
stronger sense of a DH-oriented intellectual community. My scholarship [will] be
better now that I have the perspectives and knowledge of the seminar’s members at my
fingertips.”
Fifth, in the evaluations that participants anonymously submitted to the NEH, a
surprising number described the institute’s effects on their teaching and/or their
xxii Foreword

scholarship with words such as transformative or life-changing. We felt the same way.
The institute re-energized us professionally, particularly as teachers. We learned a great
deal from the teaching methods and experiences of the participants, and in particular
from those who were experienced at teaching online and at incorporating social media
tools into the classroom. Last but not least, we made a lot of new friends, many of
whom have proven to be helpful interlocutors and advisors on our own research and
teaching.
In sum, we remain incredibly grateful to the NEH for funding “The Canon and
Beyond,” which we both consider a high point in our careers. We have been surprised
and delighted by its positive impacts, many of which—including this book—we did
not anticipate. Although we both remain convinced that in the long term it is important
to increase the number of universities in the United States that offer master’s and
doctoral degrees in design history, the institute reassured us that there are other,
arguably more expedient, means of building the nation’s design historical teaching and
research capacity. We are pleased and proud to see so many of the participants from the
institute working together to bring this volume to fruition, and—more broadly—
working together to continue building the field of design history in the USA.

Notes
1 Clive Dilnot, “The State of Design History, Part I: Mapping the Field,” Design Issues,
1(1) (Spring, 1984): 4–23; Clive Dilnot, “The State of Design History, Part II: Problems
and Possibilities,” Design Issues, 1(2) (Autumn, 1984): 3–20; John Walker, Design History
and the History of Design (London: Pluto Press, 1989).
2 Two of the earliest readers in design history were composed of reprints of articles on
design historical topics that had previously been published in Design Issues: Victor
Margolin, ed., Design Discourse: History, Theory, Criticism (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1989); Dennis Doordan, ed., Design History: An Anthology
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
3 The works referred to in this paragraph by authors’ last names are, in order of
appearance, Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to
Anonymous History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948); Nikolaus Pevsner,
Pioneers of Modern Design (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960); Ann Ferebee, A History
of Design from the Victorian Era to the Present: A Survey of the Modern Style in
Architecture, Interior Design, Industrial Design, Graphic Design, and Photography (New
York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1970); Arthur Pulos, The American Design Ethic
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983) and The American Design Adventure (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1990); John Heskett, Industrial Design (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1980); Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire: Design and Society since 1750 (London:
Thames & Hudson, 1986); Hazel Conway, Design History: A Student’s Handbook
(London: Allen & Unwin, 1987); Isabelle Frank, ed., The Theory of Decorative Art: An
Anthology of European and American Writings 1750–1940 (New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 2000); Peter Dormer, Design since 1945 (New York and London:
Thames & Hudson, 1993); Kathryn Hiesinger and George Marcus, Landmarks of
Twentieth-Century Design: An Illustrated Handbook (New York: Abbeville Press, 1993);
Jonathan M. Woodham, Twentieth-Century Design (Oxford and New York: Oxford
 Foreword xxiii

University Press, 1997); Charlotte and Peter Fiell, Design of the 20th Century (Cologne:
Taschen, 2000); Penny Sparke, An Introduction to Design and Culture in the Twentieth
Century (New York: Abbeville Press, 1988); Alastair Duncan, Art Deco (London:
Thames & Hudson, 1988); Alastair Duncan, Art Nouveau (London: Thames & Hudson,
1994); Jeffrey Meikle, Twentieth-Century Limited: Industrial Design in America,
1925–1939 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979; revised 2001); Terry Smith,
Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1993); Michael Collins and Andreas Papadakis, Post-
Modern Design (New York: Rizzoli, 1989); Richard Hollis, Graphic Design: A Concise
History (London: Thames & Hudson; revised 2002); Philip Meggs, History of Graphic
Design (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 1982; 6th edn. revised 2016 by Alston
Purvis).
4 Kjetil Fallan, “De-Tooling Design History: To What Purpose and For Whom Do We
Write?” Design and Culture, 5(1) (2013): 13–20.
 Acknowledgments

The editors of this volume wish to acknowledge all of the scholars and faculty who
participated in the NEH Summer Institute “Teaching the History of Modern Design:
The Canon and Beyond.” The conversations we have sought to capture and continue in
this volume were created by this group, and without each voice these discussions would
have been far less rich. As you will see in this volume, for many of us who participated
in this Summer Institute, the experience altered our perspectives, as only spending a
month living in a college dormitory and learning alongside twenty-four other scholars
can do. The interdisciplinary nature of this group, evidenced in the scholarly and
design work in this volume, helped to shape the points of view of the editors.
For that we are grateful to the support of the National Endowment for the
Humanities. Without the support of the NEH, this group would never have been
brought together, most of the included essays never written, and many of our teaching
practices would not be nearly as rich as they are now. We are also indebted to David
Raizman and Carma Gorman who shaped this unlikely community through the
planning and facilitation of this institute, with an eye towards developing the field of
design history in the US. We are grateful for their generosity and warmth and their
continued efforts to help us stay connected. Thanks also to Drexel University for
hosting the institute. We, as the editors, also owe our sincere appreciation to our
families (and friend families) who have supported us as we have brought this project to
fruition.

The NEH Summer Scholars:

Nancy Bernardo
Mark Biddle
Matthew Bird
Karen L. Carter
Marianne Eggler
Mark Fetkewicz
Russell Flinchum
Gayle Goudy
Keith Holz
Brockett Horne
Karla Huebner
Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler
Kristopher Kersey
Anya Kurennaya

xxiv
 Acknowledgments xxv

Yelena McLane
Erica Morawski
Sara Reed
Victoria Rose Pass
Kim Sels
Gunnar Swanson
Maggie Taft
Harry Turfle
Stephanie E. Vasko
Christopher S. Wilson
Emily Wolf

The Institute Faculty:

David Raizman, Director

Carma Gorman, Project Faculty
Regina Lee Blaszczyk, Visiting Scholar
Maria Elena Buszek, Visiting Scholar
Catharine Rossi, Visiting Scholar
Vladimir Kulic, Visiting Scholar
Sarah Teasley, Visiting Scholar

We are also indebted to the museums and collections we visited as a part of the Summer
Institute and their excellent curators, librarians, archivists, and other staff members
(only some of whom are named here):
The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia (Elisabeth Agro and Christine Haugland)
The Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington
The Fox Historic Costume Collection, Drexel University, Philadelphia (Clare Sauro)
The Gladys Marcus Library at the Fashion Institute of Technology: Special Collections
and College Archives, New York (Karen Trivette and April Calahan)
The Study Collection at the Museum at FIT, New York
The Museum of Art & Design, New York (Glenn Adamson and Jennifer Scanlan)
Fox and Lewalski Polish Poster Collection at Drexel University, Philadelphia (Mark
Willie and Kim Coulter)
Shofuso, Japanese House and Garden, Fairmount Park, Philadelphia
 In Memory

In 2021 we lost our dear friend and mentor David Raizman. Without David this book
would quite simply not exist. As noted in their preface, he and Carma Gorman brought
us together in the summer of 2015. David was an exceptionally generous person and
he supported so many of us with his feedback, his encouragement, and his curiosity.
Though David was a renowned scholar in design history, he was not a gatekeeper in the
field, but rather invited others to join the conversation. He built communities and this
book is a document of one of them. David’s work was not about finishing a conversation,
but rather about starting one, and inviting others to see themselves as having a place in
that conversation. We hope this book serves as a testament to David’s influence on the
field and an invitation to continue to do the work of expanding the objects we study,
the voices we hear, and the stories we tell in design history.

xxvi
 Introduction
Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler, Victoria Rose Pass, and Christopher S. Wilson

This book comes out of a National Endowment of the Humanities Summer Institute,
“Teaching the History of Modern Design: The Canon and Beyond,” held in July 2015 at
Drexel University. As Carma Gorman and David Raizman detail in their Foreword,
the institute brought together scholars and designers from a variety of institutions
in the United States who are all tasked with teaching the history of design to design
students. For those of us who participated in the intensive and immersive experience
of the institute, the creation of a network of colleagues teaching the history of
design in the United States has been one of the most valuable results.1 For many of us,
it was also a transformative experience in terms of our careers, research interests, and
teaching.
During our four weeks at Drexel, our group spent significant time asking questions
about the future of the field, the structure of the discipline and the bounds of design.
What would an established design history field look like in the US? Do any easily
defined boundaries exist between design, art, and craft (illustrated in a page from
Brockett Horne’s notes, Figure 2.1)? What are the methods of design history? What are
the materials of design history? The subjects? The objects? Whose stories are we telling,
and who is telling those stories? Is design a profession, or an act, or a material? The
discussions that started over the course of those four weeks have continued. We have
brought them into our classrooms, we have continued talking via email and social
media, and these issues have also found their way into our research. This collection of
essays is an effort to invite others into those conversations.
The canon was a spectral presence throughout the institute; it appeared in our
discussions of iconic objects housed in museum collections like MoMA and the
Philadelphia Museum of Art, famous designers such as Russel Wright and Eero
Saarinen, illustrious companies such as Knoll, and landmark events like world
exhibitions and the Milan triennials. These are the kinds of topics that are included in
standard design historical textbooks like David Raizman’s History of Modern Design,
Carma Gorman’s The Industrial Design Reader, Philip Meggs’s History of Graphic
Design, Jeffrey Meikle’s Design in the USA, and Jonathan Woodham’s Twentieth-Century
Design (to name just a few).2 While these texts provide a valuable overview of the
history of design for students, the canonical focus of these various design texts often
betrays an underlying bias in favor of famous (overwhelmingly European or American,
white, and male) designers, important objects, and so forth. They often neglect lesser

1
2 Design History Beyond the Canon

Figure 2.1 A notebook page with a sketch by Brockett Horne, one of the Summer
Scholars, made during our discussion about the boundaries between craft and design,
2015.

known designers and objects, sideline users and intermediaries, and only superficially
address social and environmental justice issues such as labor, globalization,
sustainability, race, and disability. Exhibition catalogs as well as popular coffee-table
books have similarly lionized “big-name” designers, often in concert with, or even
sponsored by, the very brands that are their subject. More broadly, these kinds of biases
against certain classes of objects and certain groups of designers and consumers have
canonized notions of “good taste” and “good design,” and marginalized alternative
narratives and perspectives.
There is already a large body of scholarship that has challenged this canonical
approach, expanded the boundaries of the field, and offered new ways to engage in
design historical research. This disciplinary turn away from canonical figures and
objects began more than three decades ago with the work of Adrian Forty, Penny
Sparke, Daniel Miller, Pat Kirkham, Judy Attfield, Thomas Hine, John Heskett,
Christopher Breward, and Lou Taylor, among others whose research laid a foundation
for transforming the intellectual landscape and legacy of design history.3 In recent
years, many scholars in the field have considered issues around gender and sexuality,
sustainability, accessibility, labor, social class and taste, the problems of race, issues of
 Introduction 3

structural inequality, and have also offered a richer and more nuanced exploration of
globalization and global interactions.4 Finding ways of integrating this rich scholarship
into the teaching of introductory courses in design history and the development of
new upper-level curriculum for design students was one of the critical tasks of the
institute, and we continue that effort in this volume. This book builds on this prior
research in the field and provides scholarship that is rigorous, but also accessible to the
design students whom many US design historians are teaching.
This collection brings together a variety of design disciplines and approaches that
reflect the intellectual diversity of the scholars who participated in the Summer
Institute. For a number of us, that diversity was both inspiring and challenging;
for example, in her Epilogue to this volume, “Building the case for and cases for
interdisciplinary design history,” Stephanie Vasko describes how the NEH Summer
Institute opened up new sets of questions for her research and made her identify more
strongly with design history, even though she was formally trained as a chemist. Her
essay argues for the productivity of broadening the boundaries of design research and
incorporating diverse perspectives, disciplines, and methodologies. By thus continuing
to expand the discipline of design history, new voices with different kinds of expertise
can be added to the conversation, and new ways of looking at design can open up
entirely new sets of questions and new avenues of research as well as new ways of
teaching the history of design.
Creating a more diverse design history in the classroom is becoming increasingly
important as design becomes a more popular and prominent part of art schools and art
departments across the country. Not only are students flocking to design programs in
higher education, they are consuming design through television shows (Antiques
Roadshow, American Pickers, Project Runway, HGTV, etc.) and social media platforms
like Instagram. Meanwhile, “Design Thinking” has become a buzzword in everything
from business to the self-help industry.5 Yet the growing interest in design within
popular culture only reinforces students’ tendency to fetishize design without any
analytical criticism.
What is the role of design history in this changing cultural and academic landscape?
Most accrediting bodies, such as the National Association of Schools of Art and Design
(NASAD), require some amount of design history for design students.6 As design
historians, how do we understand the purpose of this history for our students? In the
US context, we are generally not teaching future design historians, but rather teaching
future designers. What is it that we are teaching them? Some of our studio colleagues
may imagine that we offer our students a parade of chairs and styles, with stacks of
flashcards with names and dates to memorize, but the rich literature in the field of
design history illustrates how flawed that image is.
Engaging deeply with larger questions is even more critical for teaching diverse
cohorts of design students to engage with an increasingly complex and nuanced global
landscape. We not only need our students to see themselves (and their diverse identities)
in the history of design, but also to look more critically at design as a field, seeing both
the possibilities of design and its failures. As these essays reflect, we see our teaching as
moving beyond a history of images and styles towards histories of the problems and
4 Design History Beyond the Canon

possibilities of design. By engaging students in a critical questioning of the histories of

design, we hope they will see the problems of the past, and recognize how those
problems are reflected and often reproduced in the present. We encourage our students
to use this criticality to be self-conscious of their role in either maintaining these
systems or intervening to challenge them. To accomplish this, engaging students in
more active forms of analysis, particularly using diverse primary sources and objects,
gives them the tools they need to craft their own understanding of design history and
find their place within it.
This collection of essays strives to engage with primary sources, ask critical questions,
and situate design in an interdisciplinary way. These case studies not only provide
students a model for design historical research, they also serve as interventions into
conventional narratives. By organizing this book in terms of people’s roles in design, we
are foregrounding a kind of social history of design, as opposed to one that might focus
on disciplinary categories or materials (Figure 2.2). The book is organized into three
main sections: Users/Consumers, Intermediaries, and Designers. Each section features
a collection of essays that consider alternative stories, offer unusual approaches, or
challenge conventional design-historical narratives. The overall structure of this volume
echoes what Grace Lees-Maffei has termed the “production-consumption-mediation
paradigm” of design history, which she argues reflects the evolution of research in the
field of design history since its formal emergence in the UK in the 1970s.7 There are also
interconnections across these sections that form alternative thematic narratives around

Figure 2.2 A visual representation of the conceptual framework of the book created
by Brockett Horne, 2018.
 Introduction 5

diverse identities, business history as a lens of analysis, and recognizing multiple

expressions of modernity.

Users/Consumers

This first section features a group of essays that foreground consumers and users of
design. All three essays explore the role of design in the everyday and examine the
relationship between people and things. Numerous scholars have examined design
through the lens of consumerism and consumer culture. For example, Adrian Forty,
Regina Lee Blaszczyk, Ann Smart Martin, Judy Attfield, and Penny Sparke have
highlighted the roles of consumers in their research.8 Much of this research has relied on
trade literature, catalogs, advertisements, and other media and commercial spaces that
were originally produced to speak to consumers. It is much harder to find the voices of
consumers themselves. Furthermore, users, who are often distinct from consumers, are
even more difficult to locate in an historical context. Design historians must be creative
in cobbling together evidence for understanding users from a variety of sources, and in
many cases, it is primarily anecdotal evidence that helps to reveal the story of the uses
and lives of designs in the everyday context. The story of your grandmother’s coffee table
or a hand-me-down dress might tell us just as much as the official history of a company
or their publicly available advertisements. While anecdotes are often marginalized
within historical narratives, their very granularity, in fact, can offer a specificity that is
lacking when we treat users and consumers as an undifferentiated mass.
Users are thus a challenge to study in the history of design, but while the evidence of
use is sometimes elusive and incomplete, foregrounding users opens up new questions,
new avenues of research, and new ways of looking at design. For example, in Yelena
McLane’s essay, “Kul’ttovary: Bringing culture into the Soviet home,” users are evoked
through a close analysis of the objects that serve as a gateway into the everyday lives of
Soviet people. McLane reveals the complex meanings of these cultural goods that reflected
the ideal Soviet citizen as imagined by the Soviet state, but also a potential means of
challenging that ideal for users. In Emily Wolf’s essay, “Everything old is new again:
Modernization, historic preservation, and the American home, 1920–1966,” the author
uses Federal Housing Administration data alongside trade catalogs to reveal the efforts of
homeowners to modernize and update their older houses during the early to mid-
twentieth century. Wolf argues that pieces of domestic architecture are not static,
unchanging spaces, but rather that they are sites of continuous change and reinvention in
response to changing needs, ideals, and expectations of homeowners. Wolf’s essay
illustrates the long life of designed spaces and objects means that there may be many
generations of users whose needs, preferences, and uses are different and even contradictory.
Finally, Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler’s “Diversionary tactics at work: Making meaning
through misuse” considers the covert behaviors of office workers using the spaces and
objects of the office as a means of escape. Kaufmann-Buhler’s research demonstrates how
evidence of use and misuse often hides in the margins and edges of other kinds of research.
6 Design History Beyond the Canon

Intermediaries

The second section of this book looks at the role of intermediaries in design. Regina Lee
Blaszczyk, in her book Imagining Consumers, argues for a centering of design history on
what she calls “fashion intermediaries” as a way of capturing a more complex story that
looks beyond the narrative of heroic designers to understand design as a system populated
by a variety of different people, businesses, and institutions.9 Blaszczyk identifies everyone
from shopkeepers and salesmen to advertising experts and home economists within the
category of fashion intermediaries. For Blaszczyk, these intermediaries are part of a
system of fashion predicting consumer taste and therefore forecasting future trends
through the careful study of consumers. Here, we are borrowing and expanding the term
“intermediary” to capture the ways in which a diverse array of people (critics, curators,
engineers, advertisers), media (magazines, newspapers, film, television), and institutions
(museums, businesses, governments) construct meaning through design.
Looking beyond the fashion system to think about the production of meaning
expands the concept of the “intermediary” and reveals the limits of the designer and
the ways in which meaning is made within a network. Each of the essays in this section
demonstrates how unconventional archives can be used to explore the ways in which
design was produced and given meaning. These archives—oral histories, personal
photographic archives, a popular television show, and online search engines and
marketplaces—allow design historians to trace alternative narratives about well-
trodden historical moments, uncovering the work of previously unknown figures or
other kinds of readings of familiar designed objects. These very different essays show
the importance of looking at intermediaries not only as a source of style, but also a
source of insight into the design process.
Maria Elena Buszek’s chapter,“CLOTHES CLOTHES CLOTHES PUNK PUNK PUNK
WOMEN WOMEN WOMEN,” draws out the role of intermediaries in Punk fashion,
showing how the entire subculture was significantly shaped by figures who are often
considered marginal to its canonical history. Using the story of Vivien Westwood and
Malcolm McLaren’s famous Punk boutique, Sex, and foregrounding the role of shopworker
Jordan, Buszek reveals the complex circulation of style from the street to the shop, and
from the shop to the bands and back again, which produced a chaotic network of taste and
countercultural style. Most revealingly, Buszek proposes and proves that Punk Fashion
begat Punk Music—not the other way around, as is customarily thought and taught.
In Christopher S. Wilson’s chapter, “Representing modern architecture in The
Rockford Files, 1974–1980,” a television show about the escapades of a private detective
becomes a window into the “vernacular modern” aesthetics of Los Angeles. Shot almost
entirely on location in various places around the city, The Rockford Files constructs an
idealized vision of a modern city as compared to contemporaneous representations of
modern architecture as inhuman, cold or brutal. For Wilson, this particular television
show is a media intermediary promoting a more quotidian experience of modern
design and architecture, exposing the topic on a weekly basis to far more people than
any book or museum exhibition could.
Matthew Bird’s “Using digital tools to work around the canon” showcases the role of
publicly accessible online archives to uncover information about little-known figures
 Introduction 7

and objects in design history. Using sources such as ebay, Google Patents, auction house
websites, and personal blogs, Bird’s digital sleuthing illustrates how unconventional and
obscure designers, unknown intermediary figures, and unidentified objects can actually
be found, and therefore exposed. His creative appropriation of commercial tools for
academic research reveals the ways in which these digital repositories can provide
alternative narratives and literally expand the canon of design history.

Designers

The third section of the book highlights designers and the design process. In
conventional design-historical narratives, designers are often at the center of analysis.
Pioneers in the field such as Nikolaus Pevsner, Philip Meggs, Reyner Banham, and
Jeffrey Meikle have relied on an art-historical model of research that focused on a
biographical understanding of a single named designer.10 These studies often position
a designer within a network of influences that shaped their own development, as well
as examining the influence of the designer’s work on their students and other successors.
However, there are limits to this approach: this focus on individual designers tends to
overlook figures whose work, personality, or identities place them outside of
conventional narratives. It also overlooks designers whose lives and work are less well
documented and also ignore the collaborative nature of design. The chapters in this
section explore alternative models for examining designers and the labor of design.
Victoria Rose Pass subverts this conventional designer narrative by tracing the
source, use, and reuse of an iconic image of a Mangbetu woman taken in 1924 on the
Croisière Noire. “The Mangbetu coiffure: A story of cars, hats, branding, and appropriation”
examines the use of this single image by multiple designers through various contexts,
uses, and time periods. Pass offers a critical analysis of the appropriation and stereotypical
representation of this iconic silhouette in 1920s and 1930s design practice.
In their chapter “The case of William Pahlmann: Challenging the canon of modern
design,” Marianne Eggler, Erica Morawski, and Sara Reed use the story of interior
designer William Pahlmann to reveal how a stylistic outlier such as Pahlmann is often
left out of conventional designer narratives. In the case of Pahlmann, his eclectic taste
and his commercial popularity meant that he was not taken seriously as a designer, and
instead has been historically maligned by conventional design narratives as an “interior
decorator.” In a similar fashion, Russell Flinchum’s essay, “ ‘I was not a woman designer
. . . I was a designer who happened to be a woman,’ ” uncovers the story of MaryEllen
Dohrs, an industrial designer who worked for General Motors and Sundberg-Ferar in
the post-World War II period. Though a highly successful designer, Dohrs’s is story
animates the structural elements of sexism in the workplace that created barriers to
entry and advancement in the industrial design field that excluded all but the most
talented and tenacious female designers.
Gayle L. Goudy’s chapter, “Adventure play in physical and virtual spaces,” recasts the
nature of design labor through an exploration of real and virtual spaces for recreation.
Drawing together design, craft, architecture, and gaming software, Goudy’s chapter
examines the ways in which users can be empowered to explore and experiment
8 Design History Beyond the Canon

through play. The designers and artists she highlights allow the users of their real—as
well as virtual—playgrounds to have a hand in their design and use.
In addition to telling the story of lesser-known designers, the work of canonical
designers can also be critically re-examined. This is precisely how Karen L. Carter
approaches Art Deco graphic designer Paul Colin in her chapter, “Confronting racial
stereotypes in graphic design history.” Using a pedagogical case study of Colin’s posters
of the Revue nègre, featuring Josephine Baker and her entourage, Carter examines how
these images reproduced racist stereotypes of the time. By shifting the focus from
designer to subject—Baker—Carter argues for a re-contextualizing of these images as
part of a wider system of racist representations in visual culture. For Carter, using
representations of Josephine Baker as an example is part of a broader effort to engage
her students in a discussion about racist representations in design practice, not only
historically but also in present-day advertising.

Thematic re-readings

Looking across the various sections of this collection, there are also broader thematic links
that highlight important questions and problems in the study of design history: social
identity and its construction; business as a lens of research and analysis; and recognizing
diverse expressions of modernity. These themes represent critical interventions into the
history of design, and the essays presented here offer new ways of integrating these issues
into the design history classroom.
For designers, consumers, and users, design often plays an important role in the
construction and performance of identity. The example of interior designer William
Pahlmann in Eggler, Morawski, and Reed’s chapter demonstrates the ways in which
designers had to produce a public persona that conformed to expected social norms of
gender and sexuality. Design as a field also structurally excludes certain categories of
people both from roles of designers and consumers. In Russell Flinchum’s chapter, the
story of a female industrial designer in the postwar period reveals the ways in which
women have been systematically excluded from the field of industrial design. As a
consequence, certain voices are left out of the conversation and design is yet another
space in which privilege and the inequity are reproduced. Yet, individuals can also
consume and use design in ways that transgress the boundaries imagined by the designers
and producers. For example, Maria Elena Buszek’s chapter shows how people can use
design to subvert normative gendered assumptions. By its very quotidian nature, design
is ripe for being used, repurposed, and recycled in order to challenge those norms.
These designed objects and spaces also carry within them the identities, biases, and
cultural assumptions of the designers and other figures who produced them. For
instance, as Karen L. Carter’s chapter shows, celebrated images of Josephine Baker by
designer Paul Colin reproduced racial stereotypes. Her pedagogical examples
demonstrate how a design history course can be a setting in which students can
critically interrogate stereotypes of the past and—more importantly—find ways of
undermining them in the present. One conventional strategy for achieving inclusion in
design history has been to foreground producers and users of color. While this is a step
 Introduction 9

in the right direction, it proves inadequate to fully address the role of race in design
history. As vernacular architectural scholar Dianne Harris has shown, this tendency to
treat racial identity as “othered” normalizes and obscures whiteness.11 Every subject is
racialized and design too is never neutral; it must also be considered through the lens
of race. Further, racial identities are inherently fluid and complex, and design plays a
crucial role in their continuous construction, reproduction, and transgression. In this
collection, Pass’s essay captures these tensions and contradictions through her analysis
of the Mangbetu coiffure, an African woman’s hairstyle which she argues became a
cipher for a number of different ideas and expressions including modernity, technology,
and sexuality. Pass illustrates how this iconic image of black beauty was used to
construct white femininity through the early twentieth century, and how the same
hairstyle has been reclaimed in contemporary culture by women in the African
Diaspora as a symbol of black beauty and power.
These essays provide only a partial view of the ways in which identity can be
understood through design history. It is vital to draw attention to issues of identity in
order for design students to look more critically at their own assumptions about
identity and how their own identities and privileges may be reproduced in their design
work. Using the past as a laboratory for exploring issues of gender, race, class, sexuality,
ability, and other kinds of identity allows design students to understand the ways in
which design can be oppressive, expressive, and even transgressive.
Another common theme throughout this book is the role of business in shaping design
practice, as well as the role of design in crafting corporate images and identities. Regina Lee
Blaszczyk’s role as a visiting scholar in the NEH Institute animated the value of business
history in the study of design as well as the potential of trade literature as an archive for
research. If we think in terms of designers, we often push the companies they worked for
to the background, but if we foreground these companies, we can understand their agency
in shaping the kinds of products that are produced and how those products are made and
sold. In fact, businesses act as a constellation of objects, branding, materials, designers,
intermediaries, manufacturers, and consumers; reading through the lens of business
reveals the intersections and interactions of diverse categories of designers, intermediaries,
and objects. The Hagley Library and Archives in Wilmington, Delaware, is an example of
the richness of business archives. Their collection features not only the papers of individual
corporations like RCA and DuPont, but also of individual designers such as William
Pahlmann, Raymond Loewy, Marc Harrison, and Thomas Lamb, as well as intermediary
organizations such as the Color Association of the United States.12 Documents such as
those in the collection of the Hagley shed light on the network of players in the business of
design. Furthermore, as Matthew Bird reveals in his chapter, a digital network of evidence
tied to the commodification of design from the patent stage (GooglePatents) to resale
(ebay) can be accessed and used by anyone with an internet connection.
Several essays in this collection also animate the role of business in design. Stories
about Citroën, General Motors, 3M, and the Soviet Union demonstrate what can
be gained by highlighting the role of corporations and government organizations.
As complex entities with layers of competing interests, goals, and ideals, reading
organizations as actors complicates our understanding of how designed things are
produced. The needs, values, and ideals of organizations structure, contain, and restrict
10 Design History Beyond the Canon

design practice in ways that are lost when we focus exclusively on designers. In addition,
designers play a role in materializing the values, ideals, and expectations of the
companies for which they work. In Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler’s chapter, architects and
designers reproduced organizational power not only by deliberately producing
organizational hierarchy through office design, but also through the design process
itself, which typically afforded greater weight to the goals of management over the
preferences of workers.
Finally, Modernism emerges as a central problem in design history. While
Modernism in design has been canonized through the heroic narratives of white
European and American men, the aesthetics, ideals, and ideologies of Modern design
have overshadowed the complexity of taste and created a hierarchical mode that
enshrines Modern design as “good” design. These were ideas brought to the fore by
Visiting Scholars at the NEH Institute, Sarah Teasley, Vladamir Kulić, and Catherine
Rossi, who all pointed out the need for a more geographically de-centered study of
Modernism. Teasley used MoMA New York’s exhibition of a 1954–1955 Japanese
house based on historical architectural forms to illustrate the ways that Modernists
often found their aesthetics in other cultures, and yet persisted in framing these
cultures as traditional, outside of history, and unchanging. Vladamir Kulić and
Catherine Rossi used case studies of Eastern Bloc and Italian design, respectively, to
unpack the political meanings of Modernism.
Building on these themes, this book explores some of these alternative stories and
multiple expressions of modernity. In recent years, Modernism has been critically re-
examined and recast by design historians and other scholars as not one single narrative
or aesthetic but understood as multiple expressions of modernity.13 The mining of
design inspiration from other cultures is a cornerstone of Modernism, as revealed in
the chapters on William Pahlmann and the Mangbetu coiffure. These narratives
highlight the ways in which Modernism constructed Europe and America as progressive,
evolving cultures, while reducing all other cultures to unchanging and uncivilized
pattern books of inspiration. In addition, chapters by Yelena McLane, Christopher S.
Wilson, and Emily Wolf examine the vernacular experience of Modernism. These
ordinary expressions of Modernism reveal the ways in which conventional design-
historical narratives ignore the complex and divergent textures, aesthetics, and nuances
of Modernism. Rather than seeing Modernism only in the work of “starchitects” and
utopian avant-garde projects, these essays reveal the ways in which Modernist aesthetics
and values have been embedded in everyday life. Rather than reinforcing an illusion of
an all-encompassing Modernism, these stories, and others like them, help students to
explore and analyze diverse tastes and aesthetics.

Creating histories of design

All of these themes point to the importance of using diverse perspectives, narratives,
objects, taste cultures, and methodologies in the teaching of design history. Although our
courses are often framed as “The History of Design,” they could be more accurately
framed as “The Histories of Design.” As noted in this book’s Foreword, design history does
 Introduction 11

not have a well-established institutional home or identity in the United States. In fact,
most of the participants in the NEH Institute did not “start out” as design historians,
instead originating from art history or a design discipline such as graphic design, industrial
design, fashion design, or architecture. However, there are a number of disciplines with a
long history of studying objects to understand the world, including, but not limited to:
archeology, anthropology, geography, architectural history, decorative arts, and art history.
The expansion of the US academy to include a large number of interdisciplinary fields has
further expanded the study of physical objects: material culture studies, visual culture
studies, area studies such as American Studies and East Asian studies, history of technology,
gender studies, and disability studies, just to name a few. Design history might serve to
connect the stories told about objects in all of these disciplines. One of the powers of
making explicit the study of design history is that design can refer to the object, the process
of its making, and even an idea not yet fully realized. In this way, design history can draw
together multiple points of view, conflicting meanings, and complex narratives that reflect
both macro-level studies of systems and micro-level stories of individuals.
Yet, while the term “design” seems to be an inclusive one, theoretically encompassing
a wide array of activities, objects, and disciplines, it is often used in ways that police and
maintain disciplinary boundaries among the various types of design practice. For
example, commonly used design history textbooks and readers rarely include fashion
in a substantive way. In the introduction to their new book The Story of Design,
Charlotte and Peter Fiell define the history of design “as the story of how all man-made
things came into being,” but they choose to “not discuss fashion design which has its
own history.”14 While this statement acknowledges the existence of rich scholarship in
the field of fashion history, the deliberate exclusion of that history from the narrative
of “how all man-made things came into being” illustrates how, outside of the blockbuster
design shows at major museums like the V&A, it is rather rare to encounter scholarship
that puts fashion into meaningful dialogue with other kinds of design.15 This tendency
to exclude fashion from discussions of design has a long history; Lou Taylor, for
example, has documented the historic exclusion of fashion from “Industrial Art”
collections in the nineteenth century, explaining that it was “an exclusion that was
mired within an undercurrent of gendered prejudice.”16
In design programs in the United States, it is not uncommon for the histories of
industrial design, graphic design, interior design, and fashion design to be taught as
entirely distinct and separate disciplines and narratives. While this is useful in allowing
students to receive very targeted historical content that is directly related to their own
focus, this tendency to silo the various design disciplines from each other ignores the
ways in which design students cross disciplinary boundaries all the time in their studio
classes. Industrial design students are regularly asked to design fashion items such as
sneakers; interior designers are sometimes encouraged to create graphic materials like
signage; and graphic design students are periodically tasked with designing three-
dimensional environments. A more integrated approach to teaching an interdisciplinary
history of design gives students the background they need to not just dabble in other
areas of design, but to work with a depth and understanding as a practicing designer.
The essays in this volume demonstrate what a more integrated approach to a history
of design might look like. They suggest the ways in which various design disciplines
12 Design History Beyond the Canon

can speak to one another, and how research and teaching can be enriched by examining
design across the disciplines. In continuing to build a design history field in the United
States, we would be wise to learn from the example of dynamically interdisciplinary
designers such as Mariano Fortuny, Alphonse Mucha, Dorothy Leibes, Lucienne and
Robin Day, or Frieda Diamond. The diversity of their work makes a strong case for
developing design history curricula that draw together various design disciplines and
consider them holistically, perhaps through more thematic questions.
The very open nature of the act and study of design and design history is in fact a
potential strength. Design history’s fluidity means that we can refuse to draw boundaries
that would inherently and structurally exclude the work and experience of women,
people of color, LGBTQ people, people with disabilities, and other marginalized
groups. In addition, we should be cautious about privileging professional design
activities while marginalizing more informal or everyday acts of design: the home-
sewn dress, the selection and arrangement of furniture by non-professionals, hacking
IKEA furniture, or even organizing a desk drawer or computer desktop. Recognizing
design as an ordinary activity helps us resist re-inscribing structural hierarchies in our
research and our teaching. Thus, rather than discipline the field, working between
disciplines can allow us to constantly question the definition of design, what might
count as design, and also the methods we can use to interrogate it.
This collection of essays offers a series of questions and provocations about the
possibilities and potentials of the study and teaching of design history. Our larger
pedagogical goal is to give our students the tools and curiosity to learn more—not the
illusion that they or we know everything. We must construct a diverse community of
design historians and create a rich and ongoing conversation about the multiple
histories of design. We need diversity not only in the disciplines from which we hail,
and the disciplines that we engage with, but also in the experiences and identities we
bring with us. By not attempting to tell a continuous story of the history of design, and
not attempting to silo the various kinds of design from one another, we free ourselves
up to ask more complicated questions and tell more nuanced stories.

Notes
1 The history of design is a well-established field in the UK and Europe, where there are
numerous dedicated degree programs, a prominent journal, and a professional
organization that has celebrated its fortieth anniversary. The field is much smaller and
less well established in the US.
2 David Raizman, History of Modern Design, 2nd edition (Upper Saddle River: Pearson
Prentice Hall, [2004] 2011). Carma Gorman, The Industrial Design Reader (New York:
Allworth Press, 2003). Philip Meggs and Alston W. Purvis, Meggs’ History of Graphic
Design (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, [1983] 2016). Jeffrey Meikle, Design in the USA
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). Jonathan Woodham, Twentieth Century
Design (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
3 Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire: Design and Society from Wedgwood to IBM (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1986). Penny Sparke, An Introduction to Design and Culture in the
Twentieth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1986). Daniel Miller, Why Some Things
 Introduction 13

Matter (London: Routledge, 1997). Pat Kirkham, Women Designers in the USA,
1900–2000: Diversity and Difference (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). Judy
Attfield, Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg, 2000).
Thomas Hine, Populuxe (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1986). John Heskett, Toothpicks and
Logos: Design in Everyday Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Christopher
Breward, The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and City Life 1860–1914
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). Lou Taylor, The Study of Dress
History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002).
4 For issues of taste, social class, and gender, see, for example, Penny Sparke, As Long as
It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste (Halifax: The Press of Nova Scotia College of Art
and Design, 2010); Kristina Wilson, Livable Modernism: Interior Decorating and Design
during the Great Depression (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); Monica Penick,
Tastemaker: Elizabeth Gordon, House Beautiful, and the Postwar American Home (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). For labor issues, see, for example: David Brody,
Housekeeping by Design: Hotels and Labor (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2016);
Allison Mathews David, Fashion Victims: The Dangers of Dress Past and Present (New
York: Bloomsbury, 2015). For disability and accessibility, see, for example: Elizabeth
Guffy, Designing Disability: Symbols, Space and Society (London: Bloomsbury, 2018);
Bess Williamson, Accessible America: A History of Disability and Design (New York:
New York University Press, 2019); Amie Hamraie, Building Access: Universal Design and
the Politics of Accessibility (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). For
issues of sexuality and queer theory, see, for example: John Potvin, Bachelors of a
Different Sort: Queer Aesthetics, Material Culture and the Modern Interior in Britain
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014). For issues related to globalization,
see, for example: Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural
Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Victor Margolin, World
History of Design (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); Glenn Adamson, Giorgio Riello, and
Sarah Teasley, Global Design History (New York: Routledge, 2011); Kjetil Fallan and
Grace Lees-Maffei, Designing Worlds: National Design Histories in the Age of
Globalization (New York: Berghahn, 2018). On sustainability and design, see, for
example: Jennifer Farley Gordon and Colleen Hill, Sustainable Fashion: Past, Present,
and Future (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); Tony Fry and Anne-Marie Willis, Steel: A
Design, Cultural, and Ecological History (London: Bloomsbury, 2014); Jeffrey L. Meikle,
American Plastic: A Cultural History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995).
On race, see Tanisha Ford, Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global
Politics of Soul (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Elizabeth Guffy,
“Knowing their Space: Signs of Jim Crow in the Segregated South,” Design Issues, 28(2)
(2012): 41–60.
5 Lee Vinsel, “Design Thinking is Kind of Like Syphilis: Its Contagious and Rots Your
Brain,” Medium, December 6, 2017, https://medium.com/@sts_news/design-thinking-
is-kind-of-like-syphilis-its-contagious-and-rots-your-brains-842ed078af29 accessed on
July 11, 2018.
6 NASAD Handbook, 2017–2018 https://nasad.arts-accredit.org/wp-content/uploads/
sites/3/2017/12/AD-Handbook-2017–2018.pdf
7 Grace Lees-Maffei, “The Production—Consumption—Mediation Paradigm,” Journal of
Design History, 22(4) (2009): 351–76.
8 Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire: Design and Society from Wedgwood to IBM (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1986); Regina Lee Blaszczyk, Imagining Consumers: Design and
Innovation from Wedgewood to Corning (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2000);
14 Design History Beyond the Canon

Ann Smart Martin, “Makers, Buyers, and Users: Consumerism as a Material Culture
Framework,” Winterthur Portfolio, 28(2) (1993): 141–57; Judy Attfield, Wild Things: The
Material Culture of Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg, 2000); Penny Sparke, As Long as It’s
Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste (Halifax: The Press of Nova Scotia College of Art and
Design, 2010).
9 Regina Lee Blaszczyk, Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgewood
to Corning (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2000), p. 12.
10 Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius
(New Haven: Yale University Press, [1936] 2005); Philip Meggs and Alston W. Purvis,
Meggs’ History of Graphic Design (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, [1983] 2016); Reyner
Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, 2nd edition (Cambridge: MIT
Press, [1960] 1980); Jeffrey Meikle, Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial Design in
America 1925–1939 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979).
11 Dianne Harris, Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in
America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
12 Eggler, Morawski, and Reed make extensive use of the “William Pahlmann papers”
at the Hagley Museum and Library in their chapter.
13 For example: Wilson, Livable Modernism; Wendy Kaplan, Design in California and
Mexico, 1915–1985: Found in Translation (New York: Prestel, 2017); Wendy Kaplan,
California Design, 1930–1965 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011); Pat Kirkham,
“Humanizing Modernism: The Crafts, ‘Functioning Decoration’ and the Eameses,”
Journal of Design History, 11(1) (1998): 15–29.
14 Charlotte and Peter Fiell, The Story of Design: From the Paleolithic to the Present (New
York: The Monacelli Press, 2016), p. 7.
15 For just a few examples of recent fashion histories that go beyond designer-focused
books, or books focused on high fashion, see: Daniel James Cole and Nancy Deihl, The
History of Modern Fashion (London: Lawrence King, 2015); Shaun Cole, Don We Now
Our Gay Apparel: Gay Men’s Dress in the Twentieth Century (London: Berg, 2000);
Djurdja Bartlett’s Fashion East: The Spectre that Haunted Socialism (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2010); Carol Tulloch, The Birth of Cool: Style Narratives of the African
Diaspora (London: Bloomsbury, 2016); Gordon and Hill, Sustainable Fashion; Deirdre
Clemente, Dress Casual: How College Students Redefined American Style (Chapel Hill:
The University of North Carolina Press, 2014). Excellent cross-disciplinary V&A
catalogs include: Glenn Adamson and Jane Pavitt, Postmodernism: Style and Subversion,
1970–1990 (London: V&A Publications, 2011); Charlotte Benton, Tim Benton, and
Ghislaine Wood, eds., Art Deco: 1910–1939 (London: V&A Publications, 2003);
Stephen Calloway and Lynn Federle Orr, eds., The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic
Movement 1860–1900 (London: V&A Publishing, 2011).
16 Taylor also documents that the “the large part of those involved seriously in the study
of artefacts of dress from the late nineteenth century were and are women, whether
based in theater wardrobe departments, museums, schools, universities, or collecting
privately.” Lou Taylor, Establishing Dress History (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2004), p. 2.
 Section 1

Users/Consumers

15
16
 Kul’ttovary: Bringing culture into the Soviet home
Yelena McLane

The Russian term kul’ttovary translates roughly as “cultural goods.” The concept of
cultural goods was well known in the Soviet Union, and, for decades, each city, town, or
village had at least one store called “Kul’ttovary.” The premise behind the concept, and
associated consumer goods, was that specified items, broadly available for purchase at
affordable prices, would bring culture into workers’ and collective farmers’ homes. The
range of “cultural goods” visible in Figure 3.1—musical instruments, radios, televisions,
record players, decorative clocks, drawing and photography supplies, and reproductions
of works of art—was typical for these state-owned retailers. The kul’ttovary phenomenon
was widespread in Russia from the late 1920s into the 1960s, at which point the
previously ubiquitous Kul’ttovary stores yielded to shops with narrower specializations,
consistent with broader changes in the Soviet retail industry.
Soviet product design, along with accompanying commercial propaganda specifically
in the context of kul’ttovary, is a topic that is virtually unexplored outside of Russia.
The marketing and retail strategies for these products were component to a much
broader undercurrent of state-sanctioned “consumerism” as a means of implementing
the government’s political, social, and cultural policies.1 This story runs counter to the
prevailing narrative of the Soviet Union as a country at odds with the more materialist
impulses of the capitalist West.2 Recent scholarship reiterates the true, but incomplete
notion that consumer-oriented manufacture addressed material necessities and, to a
lesser extent, individual tastes and habits for personal effects like clothing and accessories.3
Kul’ttovary objects are, of course, only a small part of Soviet design history, but the details
of how and why and for whom these products were made, how they were used, and how
these uses contributed to the formation of a common Soviet national identity illustrate a
range of socialist ideologies aimed at promoting culture—literary, musical, and physical—
planning for a cultured citizenry, and effectively distributing material goods within
the USSR.
Aside from the now canonical experiments of revolution-era avant-gardists,
Moscow Metro decoration, and the apotheosis of Art Deco under Stalin (the latter
termed “Soviet Classicism”), Soviet design has, by and large, been supposed in
contemporary scholarship as of little import—inferior replicas and pallid adaptations
of Western styles.4 Soviet-era “two-balls” sneakers mimicked the more fashionable
brand with the “three stripes,” and “Tonika” electric guitars (Russia’s answer to the
Fender Stratocaster) were notoriously un-tuneable. It is, nonetheless, worth observing

17
18 Design History Beyond the Canon

Figure 3.1 An attendant assists customers shopping for accordions in a Kul’ttovary

store in the town of Balakovo, Saratov Region, circa 1960.

(albeit briefly) the origins of Soviet consumer product design, the political and
socioeconomic contexts that shaped its development, and the stories of a few
representative examples of kul’ttovary, if only to test that supposition. What emerges is
a teleological counterpoint to the established, style-driven account of twentieth-
century design history, worthy of inclusion in the canon as an alternative milieu for
exploring the purpose (rather than the function or the aesthetic) of designed goods.

Creating the “cultured man”

From the early 1920s, the Bolshevik government recognized the importance of literacy
and culture in building the new Soviet state. Vladimir Lenin emphasized that an
increased “cultural level of the masses” was integral to the task of reorganizing society.
Involving the population in artistic and cultural activities would inspire volunteerism,
swell the ranks of local government offices and agencies that managed the new Soviet
economy, and teach accountability among the legions of state workers needed to
manage the wholesale transformation of society.5 The range of individual pursuits
provided for through kul’ttovary would offer each citizen a means by which to embrace
and enjoy the fruits of the October Revolution.
The realities of life—“byt”—were changing rapidly. The concept of a private,
domestic life spent amongst family and friends, surrounded by an assortment of
 Kul’ttovary: Bringing culture into the Soviet home 19

personal possessions signifying one’s status in society, was at first dismissed by

revolutionaries as archaic, dying echoes of the petty bourgeois lifestyle. The new
socialist “byt” would be marked by communal living, egalitarian workplaces where
men and women labored side by side, and group recreation (gymnasiums), sanitation
(bathhouses), education (reading rooms), and consumption (cafeterias). Comradery,
not family in the traditional sense, was the socialist future, culminating on that eventual
bright day in the harmonious reconciliation of the public–private dichotomy. In the
words of the revolutionary-era writer, journalist, and period historian Marietta
Shaginyan: “This does not mean to ‘get rid of the individual,’ but to develop a new,
restless, richness of individuality (yet undiscovered by art) in the sphere of public
service.”6 In short, for a person to be enculturated into a life of collaboration, the person
must, through education, overcome the impulse to self-centeredness through
engagement with outward-looking arts, sports, and recreation. Party leaders, artists,
writers, architects, and musicians strove through their speeches, essays, paintings, and
compositions to exemplify this ideal. The reality of implementing this vision for the
future was, of course, quite different from the soaring ideals described by leaders, far
less pretty than imagined by artists and writers, and far more complicated to enact.
Through the 1920s, tens of millions of peasants moved from rural villages into cities
to be conscripted into vast crews at the sites of new urban and industrial building
projects. These were “peasants by origin and workers by occupation.”7 Much of this
workforce lived in barracks and dormitories. As traditional mechanisms for social
control, such as the church and patriarchal family and village structures, fell away
under the new socialist regime, epidemics of violence, vandalism, rape, alcoholism, and
hooliganism spread.8 Corporal punishment or imprisonment against numberless
restless youths could not be implemented on a mass scale, and such measures were
unlikely to be effective as long-term solutions. Instead, the Soviet government opted to
adopt (at least officially) an array of positive, non-violent methods to restore discipline
and order. The people were to be “civilized” and “cultured.”9
In 1927, the Communist Party’s first five-year plan set forth the twin goals of
increasing the “cultural level” of urban and rural populations and connecting “cultural
construction” (“kul’turnoye stroitelstvo”) with industrialization as mutually dependent
foundations upon which to build the socialist state and create a new “cultured man”
(“kul’turniy chelovek”).10 Again, in the interest of squaring the aspirational with the
harsh reality of Soviet statism, it must be said, as Vadim Volkov emphasized in his 2000
essay, that as loftily as the rhetoric soared, the cultured man was, “dissapointedly,
nothing new and nothing more than a Stalinist variation on the theme of the individual,
a modern ‘society man’ externally civilized but internally committed to that society’s
values.”11 In short, the cultured man’s protean precursor (or unfledged counterpart)
was a society man, a man who exists to serve the state, and the first step to a culture of
cultured men was a society of society men: “neat and accurately dressed” with “good
moral character,” “hard working,” who “spoke without swearing” and had “mastered the
government’s Marxist-Leninist doctrines that embody Bolshevik consciousness.”12
First among the priorities in creating this cultural transformation were two key
public health issues: personal hygiene, and clean and considerate housing. Posters
detailed the proper methods of washing one’s hair and body. Sleek advertisements for
20 Design History Beyond the Canon

razor blades reflected the state’s campaign against old-believer-style beards. Curtains
and partitions were promoted to provide for individual and family privacy in
communal settings. Learning initiatives followed, with the goal of universal adult
literacy in the Soviet Union by 1930.13 But being able to read, keep clean, and maintain
sanitary living conditions would not be enough to emerge from the post-revolutionary
tumult and transform oneself. In 1929, Anatoliy Lunacharskiy, the first People’s
Commissar of Education and Culture, wrote:

We must build a new “byt.” This new “byt” presupposes new material surroundings.
These material surroundings—even if purely utilitarian—in human and cultural
environments strives to identify aesthetic forms that bring joy to man. It is
especially important in material environments that man creates for himself, which,
in essence, must be both rational and joyous.14

But what exactly were the rational and joyous habits that would affix this culturedness
into one’s sense of self? Which material things did the cultured person need in order to
maintain this culturedness? Consensus formed around a rather urbane lifestyle far
removed from the country folkways, sheltered domesticity, and general illiteracy of the
peasant stock from which cultured man was meant to emerge.15 The cultured man read
edifying books. He went to theaters and cinemas. He took up hobbies that engaged the
mind, like chess, watercolor painting, and photography. He listened to music and played
at least one musical instrument. He participated in sports and exercised with his peers
at gymnasiums and in parks. For each of these pursuits, the cultured man would need
cultural supplies—the right assortment of personal possessions—and with such
supplies, his life would be beautiful. As Anton Chekhov wrote, “In a man everything
should be beautiful: his face, his clothes, his spirit, and his thoughts” (Uncle Vanya, Act
II). Kul’ttovary would be the means of developing and cultivating this beauty of thought
and body, and their distribution was widespread through catalogs and through the
specialized, soon to be ubiquitous, stores marked with signs that read only “Kul’ttovary.”

Kul’ttovary and “design” in the Soviet Union

Kul’ttovary first appeared in the mid–1930s, and the word itself is a product of its time.
After the October Revolution, the renunciation of the old world manifested not only in
social and cultural structures, but in the way the Russian language was spoken. An
explosion of complex abbreviated words became, according to linguist Lev Scherba,
“symbols of the revolution.”16 Kul’ttovary is a portmanteau of kultur (culture) and
tovary (products or goods). According to Soviet-era guidelines for retail industry
managers, kul’ttovary was a group of goods that “primarily satisfies the cultural needs
of the population.”17 These were office supplies, art and drawing supplies, radios and
televisions, records and record players, musical instruments, sports equipment, cameras
and photography equipment, and toys. Each of these products would need to be
designed, manufactured, marketed, and delivered to stores in quantities sufficient to
meet the growing demand for self-edification through kul’ttovary.
 Kul’ttovary: Bringing culture into the Soviet home 21

The idea of design as we know it today did not exist in the Soviet Union. The word
dizain (design) did not appear in official documents or publications until the late
1960s. As Vladimir Paperny noted in 1978, “nowadays many of us know what design
is … However, in 1964.. . nobody could properly explain what it was, though this
foreign word was alluring.”18 There were, however, two rather cumbersome word
combinations that expressed the idea of design: tekhnicheskaia estetika (technical
aesthetics) and hudozhestvennoe konstrutirovanie (artistic form rendering). These
workman-like terms reflect the length of the shadow that mechanical engineering as a
visionary vocation cast over art practice during the 1920s at both avant-garde centers
like Vkhutemas (Higher Art and Technical Studios) and the more traditional Moscow
Institute for the Decorative and Applied Arts and Moscow Architectural Institute, at
which students’ portfolios swelled with geometric abstraction, machine drawings, and
elevations of unbuildable structures.19 By the 1930s, however, Soviet design as state-
sanctioned experiment had effectively ended. To the extent that designers continued to
design in the Western sense, they were isolated enthusiasts working in scattered
polytechnic institutions on unrealized “paper” projects.
At present, post-avant-garde Soviet light industry and product design practices
await serious scholarly investigation. From the 1930s through the 1960s, most mass-
produced products were copied from the West. Early designers, who staffed plants and
factories under centralized management structures and with very limited material
resources, were unable to work on anything beyond basic products to meet consumers’
basic needs—cookware, electric lights, plumbing fixtures.20 During the Second World
War, virtually all industrial lines were either destroyed or adapted for war. In the
aftermath, the equipment that survived was outdated. Postwar designers were tasked
with building new industrial manufacturing lines and not with enhancing quality. The
goals were inexpensiveness and ease of manufacture.21
It is difficult to trace the authors of most products; the socialist system did not
recognize the role of an individual designer. Rather, they were members of a larger
engineering or technical department within a factory who performed their assigned
roles: detailing material components, drafting schematics, and specifying the substances
needed to make a product. The Soviet patent system was rudimentary at best, and in
any case commenced only in 1965. Interestingly, but hardly representative of the Soviet
patent system as a whole, the first eight patents were issued for a suite of lamps designed
in Latvia. Very few designers or designer groups were willing to go through the
cumbersome paperwork necessary to get a patent. Moreover, the premise that a
designer (held in virtually no esteem) should get more social recognition than an
engineer (held in the highest esteem) was unthinkable.22 It naturally followed that the
earliest examples of mass-produced kul’ttovary were the plainest and most serviceable
iterations imaginable: bare pads of drawing paper, undecorated snow skis, boxy radios
with a single knob pre-set to a state channel, each stamped only with the name of the
manufacturing plant and the price in rubles or kopeks. Although these kul’ttovary
objects would seldom evidence the sort of originality of purpose or style that we
commonly associate with “great design,” each of the seven broad categories reflected
deliberate ideological, cultural, and design perspectives consistent with their educative
raisons d’être.
22 Design History Beyond the Canon

Radios

Foremost among kul’ttovary were consumer-scale radios, which were available in

primitive kit-forms in limited quantities as early as the 1920s, and mass-manufactured
and marketed to everyday people under various Soviet brand names beginning in the
1950s. The Soviet government had long recognized radio as a powerful propaganda
and educational tool. Vladimir Lenin called it “a newspaper without the paper.”23 The
centrality of radio to the bright technological future promised to the new Soviet
citizenry cannot be overstated.
The first Soviet radio station, the largest in the world at the time, opened in Moscow
in 1922. From a news bulletin prepared by TASS (Telegraph News Agency of USSR) in
1932, we read that radio “on collective farms, on socialist farms, on manufacturing
plants, and at railroad junctures” should serve to increase the cultural development of
the masses and be a propagandist and organizer of socialist life. Radio was a “distant
teacher;” a means of systematically dispersing information and professional
development opportunities to hundreds of thousands of people scattered over the vast
territory of the USSR. Prior to World War II, listening was, above all, “a collective
activity”24 that “made a lack of other comforts easier to bear.”25 It occurred “in village
reading rooms in workers’ clubs, in army barracks, or in city streets and squares.”26
Workers spoke of radio’s role in introducing them to literature and classical music, and
as an “educational accompaniment to household chores.”27 Television was predicted
eventually to play a supporting role in this effort by offering visual illustrations to
accompany distance learning through the transmission of plans, construction drawings,
schematics, and diagrams.28
Pre-recorded music and news made up the majority of the programming, although
weekends featured special “children’s hours” and live broadcasts of operas and theatrical
performances. For rural audiences, radio was an auditory window to the city, with its
soundtrack of classical music and announcers whose measured speech differed
markedly from country dialects. Perhaps most tellingly, the urbanity and “civilizing”
impulse of radio was reflected in the “morning gymnastics” program, which emphasized
the importance of physical movement to a presumed audience of otherwise sedentary
office workers, ignoring the many millions of Soviet citizens who spent their days
toiling in the fields.
The aesthetics of radios as appliances also changed with the times. In the 1920s, it
was prestigious to have a receiver that showcased its technical function through
exposed lamps, levers, tubes, and hand-spun wiring. By the 1930s, the radio set was an
attractive piece designed to be in harmony with room furnishings and ready for use
right out of the box.29 Polished wood and bakelite were common case materials, in
streamlined styles that echoed the Art Deco classicism popular through the 1950s. As
shown in Figure 3.2, basic “loudspeaker” models were pre-tuned to the primary local
broadcaster (users could only adjust the volume), while more deluxe models like the
“Moskvich” (designed and first produced at the Moskovsky Radiozavod [Moscow Radio
Plant] in 1949, and the subject of an impressive advertising campaign [Figure 3.3])
offered a range of frequencies, enabling users to choose between music, news, or sports,
at various times of day.
 Kul’ttovary: Bringing culture into the Soviet home 23

Figure 3.2 A single-channel hard-wired gromkogovoritel (loudspeaker) (1959) [right]

and a “Moskvich” radio (1949) [left].

In her 1958 essay on the Brussels World’s Fair, Marietta Shaginyan wrote:

There is in our simple and dear reality one hybrid word. This word is kul’ttovary. It
is often seen on store signs. And this not very elegant word includes radio
receivers—attributes of culture in an apartment, a means of connection with the
country, with the humanity; a peaceful opportunity to listen to music, and to await
to the latest news. Our plants are trying to improve this kul’ttovar, to make it
sturdier, cheaper, better, improve its sound, soften its noises. I am not sure about
you, but my heart trembles with tenderness towards our hybrid Soviet word and
our simple and unpretentious radio receiver. It has so many markings of our Soviet
culture: to be available to everyone, to be accessible to everyone, to become mass-
produced, to bring culture to the masses.30

Record players

Second perhaps only to the radio, with the range of news, musical, and cultural
programming that it brought into the home, gramophones and record players were
among the most sought after recreational appliances. Designs for these units tracked
24 Design History Beyond the Canon

Figure 3.3 Alexey Lavrov’s “Buy the Moskvich Three-Tube Radio” lithograph poster
(1950) instructs that the “Moskvich” may be purchased for 212 rubles at all
GLAVELECTROSVYAZBYT (Main Domestic Electric Communication) factory
stores, department stores, and kul’ttovary stores.
 Kul’ttovary: Bringing culture into the Soviet home 25

prevailing Western tastes (portable player boxes with chromed locking latches and
swivel corner drawers for spare needles, “suitcase”-style electric models in teal vinyl
with white piping), but with some years of lag time; the hand-cranked portable model
remained in mass production at Leningrad’s Molot (Hammer) factory well into the
1960s.
In contrast to programming on the radio which was strictly regulated, record
players subverted government control by affording people access to records whose
message and aesthetics were in opposition to socialist ideology. Although there was
consensus that record players were worthy kul’ttovary, the sorts of records brought to
market could be contentious. In a resolution from June 26, 1958, addressing the content
of musical records, the Central Committee emphasized the importance of “records use
in the ideological and artistic upbringing and cultural development of the Soviet
people.”31 Criticism was directed at the questionable artistic quality of musical
compositions, and, even worse, some recordings were found to be sympathetic to “alien
ideas.” There were “too few recordings of USSR’s ethnic and folk music, revolutionary
songs, symphonic, opera and ballet music, and the best songs of Soviet composers and
composers from abroad.”32 Even in the Soviet Union, customers wanted what they
wanted. Despite the more traditional leanings of the music pedants nominally in
charge of selecting the tracks that would be pressed into vinyl, factories followed the
market and minted records of popular songs by the thousands. As official missives
advised purchase agents and managers of Kul’ttovary stores to “stop chasing profits”
and “stop distributing vast numbers of records that satisfy only lowbrow tastes,” pop
record sales grew year upon year.33

Photography

Photography was also recognized early on as a powerful propaganda tool, and was
featured prominently in posters and newspapers. The party supported the manufacture
and mass distribution of photographic equipment as a means of documenting the
revolution. By a special decree of the People’s Commissariat for Education (Narkompros)
in 1919, photography studios and development labs were elevated to a status equal to
painting studios, which protected these locations from being transformed into living
spaces. Trained photographers were exempt from mandatory labor, an extraordinary
privilege in times of civil war and worker shortages.34
By the late 1920s, demand for photography equipment and severe trade inequities
between the Soviet Union and Western technology manufacturers led to the
establishment of an independent Soviet photo industry with the goal of mass
production of modern cameras, photo development chemicals, and darkroom supplies.
In July 1930, the State Optical and Mechanical Plant (Gosularstvennyi Optiko-
Mekhanicheskii Zavod, or GOMZ) in Leningrad released the first hundred Soviet-made
cameras (the “Fotokor–1”) just in time for the opening of the 15th Congress of the
All-Union Communist Party (Figure 3.4). The Fotokor–1 imitated the standard folding
bed-plate cameras manufactured in Europe by such well-known firms as Busch,
Voightlander, and Zeiss-Ikon since the late 1800s. For the Soviet market, newness was
26 Design History Beyond the Canon

Figure 3.4 The Fotokor-1 (1930) Gosudarstvennyi Optiko-Mekhanicheskii Zavod

(State Optical and Mechanical Plant).

subordinate to standardization, interchangeable parts, and the prospect of making lots

of them. With fewer available models, instruction materials were universal and geared
towards amateurs. By 1941, more than one million Fotokor–1s were in circulation.
Photography as an extracurricular pastime was widespread. Magazines like
Sovetskoye Foto (Soviet Photo) were brisk sellers, as were books like Nedzvesky and
Chibisov’s General Course of Photography (1930), “a most comprehensive photography
manual in three volumes.” Historian Yuri Slezkine has described photography as the
“most popular form of home entertainment” for men in the 1930s.35 Technical journals
specified the steps needed to convert (temporarily) communal bath spaces into
darkrooms. Through “featured artists” and photo competitions, periodicals touted the
state of amateur photography among factory workers and collective farmers,
emphasizing how photography could (and should) be used to document and highlight
developing industries and the organization of “productive labor” (udarnichestkogo
truda) on a national scale.36

Musical instruments

The centrality of music and musicianship in the Soviet Union prompted countless writers
to employ surprisingly sincere language to describe the national culture that grew out of
 Kul’ttovary: Bringing culture into the Soviet home 27

the proliferation of this class of kul’ttovary. There were pianos, violins, accordions,
balalaikas, mandolins, xylophones, and brass instruments in numbers sufficient to
blanket the world in the sonorous stylings of Prokofiev, Dunayevsky, or Listov. Accounts
of the import of these kul’ttovary are hard to read without a dose of irony, but, setting
aside the ideological undertones, there is a certain beauty to the intended message:

The Soviet Union is the country with the most developed musical culture. Music
no longer belongs to loners (dostoyaniye odinochek). It has entered the daily lives
of ordinary people for good. Our Party and the Soviet State have created conditions
for studying and listening to music for millions of Soviet people. Radio broadcasts,
concerts, and lectures give people opportunities to familiarize themselves with
classical and Soviet music. In our country, there is a large group of talented
composers and performers. The mass character of Soviet musical culture tasks our
industry to produce musical instruments in huge quantities, with ever growing
demand. In the Soviet Union, where music belongs to the people, and material
well-being of the population is increasing every year, a musical instrument
becomes a necessity in every household, and for every family.37

Opportunities for musical education were prevalent throughout the Soviet Union:
in grade schools, in special music schools, and in extracurricular music programs
hosted by the regional “Pioneer Palaces.” Trade unions across many industrial sectors
sponsored “music circles” in the local high schools—where students received more
rigorous training in ensemble and symphonic techniques—and associated bands often
performed on holidays and at community events.38 The goal was not, however, concert-
level ability for everyone. As recounted by Russian composer Dmitry Kabalevsky, the
mother of a seven-year-old girl once asked her music teacher whether it was worthwhile
instructing the little girl in music when she had shown no talent for it. The teacher
asked if the mother had questioned the physics, geography, or history teachers about
her daughter’s ability to assimilate those disciplines. “It does not seem to surprise you,”
the teacher said, “that she will study all that at school even though she may very well
never become a historian, a geographer, or a physicist.”39

Sports equipment

The kul’ttovary phenomenon also encompassed physical culture through mass

production and marketing of individual and group sports equipment and games. As
detailed in James Riordan’s comprehensive Sport in Soviet Society, sport was for “achieving
better health and physical fitness; character formation, as part of general education in
producing a harmonious personality; military training, the identification of individuals
with groups (the party, the regional Soviets, trade unions) and their encouragement to be
active socially and politically.”40 Youth and athleticism were revered by Stalin and other
party leaders who were manifestly (and pathologically) frightened of their own deaths,
and who perpetuated through propaganda the vision of a Soviet Union in perpetual
springtime, nearly (but never quite fully) achieved.41 From the outset, sports were an
28 Design History Beyond the Canon

Figure 3.5 An assortment of sports kul’ttovary, including an archetypal folding chess

set, “Yantar” (Amber) analogue tournament chess clock, hockey skates, a “Yunost”
(Youth) tennis racket, and a box of “Leningrad” brand tennis balls.

integral part of the Soviet social curriculum, and schools, clubs, and unions managed
vast inventories of standardized soccer and volleyballs, skates, hockey sticks, rackets,
shuttlecocks and portable badminton nets—for fitness of body—together with
innumerable chess boards and pieces—for honing the tactical mind (Figure 3.5).
In 1951, T. S. Ostanovsky authored a comprehensive treatment of the kul’ttovary
industry and market aimed at retail professionals in the Soviet Union, which was issued
in several editions over more than a decade with ever expanding inventory from year to
year. On the matter of sport, he wrote, “The development of physical culture and sport
leads to the need for large amounts and varieties of sports equipment across a range of
standards, requirements and regulations. The equipment is manufactured in state-run
factories and plants, including in the factories of the Committee on Physical Culture and
Sport under the Council of Ministers of the USSR, by cooperative manufacturers, and
others.”42 The sports equipment could be classified based on the area of sport it is intended
for: sports games (including soccer, basketball, volleyball, water polo, tennis, croquet,
chess, and checkers), track and field, weightlifting, boxing, fencing, winter sports, and
gymnastics equipment, including fishing and hunting goods. At the time, the Soviet
Union rightly viewed itself as a powerhouse in a broad range of competitive sports at
which Russia had historically excelled, and a committed aspirant in those to which great
powers excelled, and sports kul’ttovary tracked closely the specifications common to
 Kul’ttovary: Bringing culture into the Soviet home 29

international regulatory bodies. The Soviet Union made its first appearance in the
Olympic Games in 1952, and topped the medal count in six of the eight Summer Olympics
in which it competed, a testament, in some part, to the impact of sports kul’ttovary.

Toys
Toys were also considered kul’ttovary. In 1958, state officials proudly announced that
mass production would render these once rare prestige items as affordable as another
former luxury reserved only for privileged tables: “We need toys so inexpensive that
they cost no more than a good candy.”43 Traditional Russian toys were made of wood
and hand painted. Such methods could not get close to satisfying the demand of
millions of customers. Beginning in the 1950s, developments in the state chemical
industry enabled for the first time the domestic mass manufacture of toys from plastics
and synthetics. Quantities went up, and prices came down, but this did not address
another key concern: what should the toys be about? In the past, toys had, for the most
part, reflected agrarian domestic life—animal carvings and rag dolls.
In the Soviet Union, most children spent time in daycares, kindergartens, pioneer
camps, or after-school programs, and there arose a need for different kinds of toys, toys
that supported social development, formation of friendship, and, most importantly, the
idea of shared property.44 With demand for toys greatly outstripping supply, kindergartens
received delivery of new or replacement toys before stores, and educational administrators
prioritized toys with didactic value, like blocks and puzzles. At its best, Soviet toy
development and design were driven by the idea of gaining knowledge: “a child develops
and learns not only by sitting at the school desk, but through play. Often it is in the
process of play that his interests and capabilities get revealed, and often his future
profession (opredelena) is chosen.”45 Maxim Gorky wrote that toys should be entertaining
and they should engage and surprise, because the road to knowledge starts with
surprise.46
Notwithstanding these lofty goals, there is ample room for criticism. At the retail
level, most Soviet toys were quasi-realistic, artistically dull, and not particularly
entertaining: unarticulated rubbery figurines, and extruded plastic cars and trucks.
Contemporary Soviet scholarship focuses exclusively on the limited educational value
that these “commercial” toys provided, and addresses neither the significance of play
nor the role of imagination. The now iconic “Nevalyashka” (Untopplely) doll
(Figure 3.6)—geometrically satisfying, cheerful, and surprising in its smooth bottom-
weighted motion and hidden chime—marked the high point of Soviet style and
ingenuity in toy design, but other stimulating, hands-on toys (like play kitchens, doll
houses, and erector sets) were hard to find. Their assorted parts made them difficult to
produce on existing equipment without costly adjustments or re-engineering, and
many required complex assembly, discouraging to purchasers who were conditioned to
expect that key elements would be missing from the package. Simply put, technical
disincentives and lack of consumer discernment (i.e., with material shortages, most
toys sold out regardless of their inferiority) led most manufacturers not to bother
producing more elaborate toys.
30 Design History Beyond the Canon

Figure 3.6 Exemplary among Soviet toys is the “Nevalyashka” roly-poly doll.

School supplies

Last among the categories of kul’ttovary were school supplies—pencils, pens, rulers, and
paper. Simple sheet pads (plain, ruled, or graph) were “cultural goods” central to the state’s
mission of fostering an educated body politic. According to Ostanovsky, “in our country
illiteracy has been eradicated in its entirety.”47 Students enrolled in elementary, middle,
high schools, and technical centers numbered above 37 million in 1957, with another 1.2
million in institutions of higher learning. In this context, paper acquired a special
importance. As one journalist poetically phrased it, “Paper is a non-rusting metal, on
which great books live. Paper is the finest instrument for shaping our souls. Out of paper
the Soviet people make peace bombs with which to open walls in our enemies’ fortresses,
and virgin land is turned over to make way for the beneficent sprouts of communism.”48

The end(s) of kul’ttovary

Over time, however, even as the availability of cultural goods proliferated, the word
kul’ttovary became a stand-in for hackneyed cultural conventions and petit bourgeois
ambition, appearing in jokes about out-of-step party leaders with no sense of the era in
which they were living: “What is kul’ttovary?—An exhibition of presents to Stalin from
1949” (the occasion of his seventieth birthday).49
 Kul’ttovary: Bringing culture into the Soviet home 31

Figure 3.7 Aleksandr Laktionov, Moving to a New Apartment, oil on canvas, 1952.

Aleksandr Laktionov’s 1952 painting Moving to a New Apartment (Figure 3.7) could
serve as an illustration for this joke. As Oliver Johnson detailed in his 2008 article
“Kul’turnost or Kitsch,” it is a problematic painting for several reasons, but it is a
veritable inventory of kul’ttovary—bringing culture into the Soviet home—under
Stalin’s watchful eye.50 The state has granted this war widow a luxurious apartment, and
she imagines the good times that she and her family will have there. They have toys to
play with, an instrument to make music with, books and a globe to learn about the
world with, a bicycle to ride, and a handsome radio (nearly identical to the radios on
display in the Kul’ttovary store in Balakovo). These are Stalin’s presents back to his
devoted people, the objects that signified the state’s purported investment in the future,
but which, as reflected in period responses to Laktionov’s painting, seep with nostalgia.
32 Design History Beyond the Canon

The instrument is a Ukrainian mandolin, a folk instrument known only by a people

whose survivors were just emerging from twin decades of starvation and war. The
collected writings of the Soviet revolutionary poet Mayakovsky is among the books
stacked on the floor; he had been dead by suicide since 1930.
We, the Western audience, look at these kul’ttovary, these “Soviet antiques,” not,
however, through a lens of nostalgia for what they once represented, but as objects as
far out of time as obsolete goods from a deceased civilization. The chronotopically
adjacent but ideologically remote Soviet Union made these objects—designed and
produced in volumes that implicate widespread use by people who seem to have lived
in a mildly distorted mirror of our world. We recognize the radio, but marvel that it was
pre-tuned to a single broadcaster. The tennis balls and racket are, at a distance,
indistinguishable from our own, but with strangely unsubtle “branding”: “Leningrad”
(the “City of Lenin”), “Youth.”
Scholarly treatments of well-known brands and styles too often reiterate the
canon, with its twin cults of origination and progress. The Soviet Union did not
invent the radio, the photo camera, or tennis balls, and in most cases the quality
of manufacture was regressive (i.e., behind its Western counterparts). Whether the
conceptual end of kul’ttovary—a nation of fit, literate, artistically talented, citizen
musicians—was achieved en masse is debatable. But by inviting the audience to probe
the distinctive “technical aesthetic” of Soviet cultural goods, highly durable, quasi-
functional, irredeemably authorless, they re-encounter the fundamentals of form and
purpose. These ordinary objects take on a qualitatively different life as case studies in
design practice and the conveyance of meaning through design. It is design as social
history rather than through novelty or aesthetics. The objects are treated not as sources
of information on technical innovation, fashion trends, and individual designers’
résumés, but as means and tools for shaping the identity of kul’turniy chelovek, as weft
and weave of the fabric of the material culture of Soviet society—ubiquitous and
unnoticed as things, yet important as bearers of twin political purposes: culturedness
and enculturation.

Notes
1 Amy Randall, The Soviet Dream World of Retail Trade and Consumption in the 1930s
(Basingstoke, England, and New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
2 See, for example, Nicholas Timasheff, The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline of
Communism in Russia (New York, NY: E. P. Dutton, 1972), and Vera Dunham, In Stalin’s
Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Durham and London: Duke University
Press, 1990).
3 See Julie Hessler, A Social History of Soviet Trade: Trade Policy, Retail Practices, and
Consumption, 1917–1953 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
4 See, for example, Aleksandr Lavrentiev and Yuri Nasarov, Russian Design: Traditions
and Experiment, 1920–1990 (London: Academy Editions, 1995), pp. 50, 54–73;
Vladimir Runge, Istoriya dizayna, nauki i techniki, vol. 1 (Moskva: Architectura-C,
2006), pp. 300, 336; Victor Margolin, World History of Design, vol. 2 (London and New
York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), p. 348.
 Kul’ttovary: Bringing culture into the Soviet home 33

5 Ludmila Bulavka, “Sovetskaya Kul’tura kak Ideal’noye SSSR,” in Kul’tura. Vlast’.

Sotsialism. Lunacharskiy i ne tol’ko, ed. Ludmila Alekseyevna Bulavka (Moskva:
LENAND, 2013), p. 106.
6 Marietta Shaginyan, Noviy byt i iskusstvo (Tiflis, 1926), p. 51.
7 Vadim Volkov, “The Concept of ‘Kul’turnost’: Notes on the Stalinist Civilizing
Process,” in Stalinism: New Directions, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (London: Routledge, 2000),
p. 214.
8 Natalia B. Lebina, “Teneviye storony zhizni sovetskogo goroda 20–30-kh godov,”
Voprosy istorii, 2 (1994): 30–42.
9 Volkov, “The Concept of ‘Kul’turnost’,” p. 215.
10 KPSS o Kul’ture, Prosveschenii i Nauke (Moskva: Izdatel’stvo Politicheskoy Literatury,
1963), p. 31.
11 Volkov, “The Concept of ‘Kul’turnost’,” p. 216.
12 Ibid., 225.
13 Charles E. Clark, Uprooting Otherness: The Literacy Campaign in NEP-Era Russia
(Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2000).
14 Anatoliy Lunacharskiy, Sobraniye Sochineniy, vol. 7 (Moskva), quoted in Anatoly I.
Mazayev, Iskusstvo i Bolshevism (Moskva: KomKniga, 2007), p. 123.
15 Moshe Lewin, “Society, State, and Ideology during the First Five-Year Plan,” in Cultural
Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 1978).
16 Lev Scherba, quoted in Galina M. Pospelova, “Moskovskiye vyveski v
poslerevolyutsionnoye vremya,” Russkaya Rech, 5 (2013): 92.
17 M. Veisman and M. Yermolayeva, Organizatsiya I Tehnika Roznichnoy Torgovli
Kul’ttovarami [Organization and Techiques for Trading Kul’ttovary] (Moscow:
Zaochniy Institut Sovetskoy Torgovli Soyuztranstorgpita NKPS, 1937), p. 8.
18 Vladimir Paperniy, “How I was a designer,” Iunost [Youth] (January 1978): 100.
19 Ibid., 101.
20 Yuri Soloviev, “Design na sluzhbe obschestva,” in Design i Gosudarstvennaya Politika
(Moskva: VNIITE, 1975), pp. 1–2.
21 Alena Sokolnikova, “Soviet Design: Crowdsourcing and Anticopyright in the USSR,”
Polit.ru., December 15, 2012, http://polit.ru/article/2012/12/15/soviet-design-museum/
(accessed March 4, 2018).
22 Ibid.
23 T. S. Ostanovsky, Tovarovedeniye Kul’ttovarov (Moskva: Gostorgizdat, 1951), p. 245.
24 Stephen Lovell, Russia in the Microphone Age: A History of Soviet Radio, 1919–1970
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 51.
25 Aleksandr Lavrentiev and Yuri Nasarov , Russian Design, pp. 54–5.
26 Stephen Lovell, Russia in the Microphone Age, pp. 51–2.
27 Ibid., p. 52.
28 Felix Kon, “Sovetskoye Radio – Moschnoye Orudiye Kul’turniy Revolyutsii” Kul’tura I
Byt (Moskva: Telegraph News Agency of the USSR, April 14, 1932), p. 1.
29 V. Legar, “Komfort radiopriyemnogo ustroystva,” Radiofront, 17–18 (1940): 17–18.
30 Marietta Shaginyan, “Lestnitsa Vremeni,” Oktyabr’, September 1958, p. 118.
31 KPSS o Kul’ture, Prosveschenii i Nauke, Moskva: Izdatel’stvo Politicheskoy Literatury,
1963, p. 250.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid.
34 Vladimir Runge, Istoriya dizayna, nauki i techniki, p. 300.
34 Design History Beyond the Canon

35 Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government (Princeton, Woodstock: Princeton University

Press, 2017), p. 510.
36 “Otpusknikam v derevne i praktikantam na predpriyatiyah,” editorial, Sovetskoye Foto,
12 (1930): 353–5.
37 Ostanovsky, Tovarovedeniye Kul’ttovarov, 156.
38 Abraham Schwadron, “Music in Soviet Education,” Music Educators Journal, 53(8)
(1967): 86–93; Maya Pritzker, “The Music Education System in the USSR,” American
Music Teacher, 41 (August–September 1991): 18–20, 62–4.
39 Dmitri Kabalevsky, “Soviet Music Education as Seen by a Soviet Composer,” Music
Educators Journal, 60(1) (1973): 45–6.
40 James Riordan, Sport in Soviet Society (Cambridge, London, New York, Melbourne:
Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 106.
41 Aleksandr I. Morozov, Konets Utopii (Moskva: Galart, 1995), p. 74.
42 Ostanovsky, Tovarovedeniye Kul’ttovarov, p. 58.
43 S. Michalkov and B. Brodsky, “Igrushka – Delo Seryoznoye,” Dekoativnoye Iskusstvo
SSSR, 10 (1958): 2.
44 Ibid., 4.
45 Ibid., 4–5.
46 Maxim Gorky, Pravda, January 1, 1949, quoted in S. Michalkov and B. Brodsky,
“Igrushka – Delo Seryoznoye,” p. 5.
47 Ostanovsky, Tovarovedeniye Kul’ttovarov, p. 9.
48 Leonid Leonov, Literaturnaya Gazeta, January 29, 1949, quoted in T. S. Ostanovsky.
Tovarovedeniye Kul’ttovarov, p. 9.
49 Russian National Corpus, Collection of Anecdotes, “Stalin” (1956–1991).
50 Oliver Johnson, “Kul’turnost’ or Kitsch? Varnishing Reality in the Art of Aleksandr
Laktionov,” Studies in Slavic Cultures, VI, (2007): 82–106.
 Diversionary tactics at work: Making meaning
through misuse
Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler

In the opening sequence of King Vidor’s 1928 film The Crowd, the camera pans over a
large office with rows and rows of identical desks, each with a worker appearing hard
at work. As the camera lands on the protagonist, a single clerical worker within a sea of
clerical workers, it soon becomes apparent that he is not actually working at all, but
rather jotting down slogans on a piece of scrap paper for a newspaper contest to name
a motor fuel. Though the sweeping overhead view implies management’s total
surveillance of the work and the workers, the main character’s non-work is hiding in
plain sight. In contemporary organizational behavior literature, this kind of non-work
is considered “time theft” because the worker is siphoning time and energy away from
their job to engage in non-productive activities.1 This practice has a long history in all
kinds of workplaces, and it is just one of a range of counter-productive behaviors that
are characterized in management literature as “organizational misbehavior.”2 Although
organizations often invest enormous resources in attempting to prevent such
misbehavior, workers in diverse industries, job types, and workplaces have found ways
to undermine those efforts through small and large acts of subversion.3
Using a case study of late twentieth-century American offices, this chapter examines
how organizational culture, power, and prescribed use were encoded into the spaces
and objects of the office through design, and how office workers historically repurposed
those same technologies and spaces of the office for personal use. The late twentieth-
century period is particularly interesting because of the transformation of office space
from a conventional design to the new open plan at that time along with the widespread
adoption of new office technologies, particularly personal computers in the 1980s and
1990s. Together, these changes altered the interior arrangement of offices and the
structure of office work, and simultaneously created new modes of escape for workers.
While organizations of this period would typically consider these types of non-
work behaviors that are described in this chapter as a form of “misuse” of time and
corporate resources, I argue that these covert activities are politically charged actions
that inscribe new meanings into the objects and spaces of work. By reading for misuse,
this research illustrates the need for a more inclusive understanding of the office that
gives greater weight to the experiences, intentions, and meanings constructed by
workers rather than focusing exclusively on the intentions of designers or the

35
36 Design History Beyond the Canon

organizations that employ them. More broadly, drawing on the concept of affordances,
I argue that users of all types have the power to encode new meanings and new uses
into the things and spaces they use every day. Rather than analyzing designed objects
and spaces exclusively through the lens of intended use, this project proposes a history
of design as told through the lens of misuse.

Designing the organization

There is significant research on the ways in which spaces and technologies can reproduce
systems of power in the workplace. Scholars in numerous fields, including architectural
history, design history, labor history, history of technology, sociology, and management,
have examined the ways in which organizations have intentionally leveraged the
material objects, technologies, and spaces of work to support the goals of management.4
This diverse research has demonstrated how managers in many different industries and
workplaces throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries implemented material,
spatial, and technological change intended to increase productivity and efficiency,
organize the work process, and control worker behavior.
From the early twentieth century through the postwar period, for example, offices
were explicitly designed to facilitate and enable managerial control over the work
process; management books from the early twentieth century through the postwar
period championed these kinds of spatial solutions for problems of efficiency, often with
an emphasis on paper-flow, ensuring that desks were arranged to support the circulation
of paper through the office.5 The design of American offices through this period was not
only a means of ordering the workspace and the work process, it was also a means of
surveillance. By arranging workers in the open, supervisors could maintain continuous
watch over them and ensure that they remained productive.6 The objects and spaces of
the workplace are thus not neutral bystanders of organizational power; they are a means
of ensuring organizational control over the process and structure of work. Further, the
spaces, technologies, and objects of the office are deliberate reflections of the priorities,
values, and goals of the organization; reading the material and spatial aspects of the
office is thus a means of reading the organization itself.
Throughout the latter part of the twentieth century, architects and designers played
a vital role in crafting this spatial index of the organization. In the postwar period, that
manifested in a fixation on organizational hierarchy; architects and designers working
in that era sought to create a highly rationalized and standardized office that optimally
expressed organizational status from the top leadership to the lowest-level staff.7 In the
1970s, as the open plan office concept became popular, office design increasingly
became a process of reflecting and reproducing organizational culture by using office
design to spatially and materially embody organizational values and goals. In his 1978
book on office planning, designer John Pile describes how the office facility should
ideally “express the character of the organization,” and described a detailed process for
understanding the culture and priorities of the organization in order to arrive at a
suitable design.8 Pile thus characterized the designer as a kind of corporate ethnographer,
whose primary responsibility was to observe the culture of the organization and
 Diversionary tactics at work: Making meaning through misuse 37

faithfully and honestly translate that culture into office space. This appeared in material
form through the careful selection of appropriate furniture and finishes, the allocation
and design of amenities in the office, and the overall layout of the space itself.
In addition to this cultural translation of the organization into finishes and furniture,
architects and designers were also responsible for ensuring that material and spatial
needs of each position in the organization were met. To accomplish this, architects and
designers surveyed the needs of the various departments and their staff, and translated
those various needs into a suitable office design. Among architects and designers who
championed the open plan from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, a central
priority in the planning process was achieving optimum functionality. The goal was to
design a workplace that met the functional needs of workers as expressed through
their particular jobs, responsibilities, and tasks. In the design process, architects and
designers collected an exhaustive array of data by way of surveys and interviews,
documenting workers’ communication networks, technologies, and tasks.9 This data
was then translated into an optimum combination of desks, chairs, storage elements,
and partitions. While a very practical approach, this process effectively prioritized
workers’ functional roles in the organization over their human or personal needs.
Further, in determining the needs of different positions, architects and designers did
not treat all information equally. Through this process of reading organizations and
designing a suitable workspace to support the organization and its workers, architects and
designers were effectively reproducing the power structure of the organization. In addition
to inscribing organizational status in office space, architects and designers also internalized
power structures in their design process by giving greater weight to the preferences of
leadership over those of lower-level workers. In this way, architects and designers accepted
organizational power as an intrinsic aspect of decision-making, and made choices in their
designs regarding the needs of workers through the prism of organizational power and
authority.10 John Pile, for example, describes how it is “inevitable that managers’ views
should carry weight in rough proportion to their rank in an organization.”11
Through the process of collecting data, architects and designers were thus assessing
the relevance of information received from different individuals within the organization
and reproducing the organizational power structure accordingly, ranking the opinions
and preferences of those in leadership over the perspectives of lower-level workers. In
fact, lower-level workers were rarely consulted at all in the design process. For example,
in his work for Union Carbide architect Kevin Roche and his team interviewed more
than fifty people across the organization as part of the planning process for their
corporate office in the late 1970s. Yet, even as they took several days to conduct interviews,
the majority of the people interviewed were executives and managers; only a handful of
support staff (secretaries and clerical workers) were included.12 In their 1978 study on
office design for office furniture manufacturer Steelcase, opinion research firm Louis
Harris and Associates found that office planning in the United States was largely handled
by top executives, supervisors, or administrators, with only nineteen percent of lower-
level employees indicating some involvement in the planning process.13
Lower-level workers in large organizations were often treated as “interchangeable
units” by architects and designers; low-level administrative and clerical staff were thus
not people so much as components within the organizational machinery.14 By prioritizing
38 Design History Beyond the Canon

the views of management over the preferences of workers, architects and designers
treated the workspace as a tool of management to optimize productivity and efficiency;
each worker only needed the space, technologies, and objects to perform their assigned
role in the organization as defined by management. According to environmental
psychologist Franklin Becker, the desire of management to create “rules, procedures and
environmental supports that emphasize punishment for transgressions” often created an
office environment that served as “a symbol of efficiency and an instrument of power.”15
Further, by internalizing this ideal of efficiency and managerial authority, architects and
designers created offices in which workers were discouraged from engaging in
“discretionary activities.”16 In other words, the workspace was optimized to support work
and restrict, prevent, or limit any acts of non-work, which were treated as a misuse of
time and space. By letting the requirements of the organization drive the process of
allocating space and furniture, architects and designers presumed that the organization
knew what workers needed for their jobs better than the workers themselves, and further
treated workers as controllable widgets whose behavior could be predicted, constrained,
and ultimately redirected towards productivity.17
Office design is just one facet of the power dynamic between management and
workers that was embedded in nearly all aspects of office work in the late twentieth
century. For example, office technologies of that time, including word processors and
computers, were frequently designed in ways that prioritized technical requirements,
productivity, and cost over the safety, comfort, or general well-being of users.18 These
new office technologies organized the work process, managed workers’ time, and
attempted to restrict workers’ behavior by tracking workers’ efficiency, monitoring
their activity, and even actively enforcing certain levels of productivity.19
Reading office space and office technologies through a lens of embedded
functionality reproduces this structural power imbalance and assumes that the task or
activity prescribed by a particular kind of workspace or technology is in fact how that
workspace or technology was used. In other words, a typewriter sitting on a desk
suggests that the person seated at that desk used the typewriter to type, and further that
the typing the worker did on that typewriter was naturally productive. Thus, the
typewriter, by its very existence, implies the productive labor it ostensibly prescribes.
But, what if the worker at that desk did not type at all? Or if the typist, sitting at that
typewriter, was actually writing a novel instead of doing their assigned work? While the
specification of a typewriter for a particular workstation implies an intended use on
the part of management, it does not determine how that typewriter was actually used
nor what that typewriter meant in real terms to the worker who used it.

Diversionary tactics

In fact, the same objects and spaces of the office that formalized power could also
become a mode of escape for workers. Through deliberate misuse, workers could
effectively transform these technologies and spaces into a means of diversion, and even
subversion, of the power structure. Looking at the objects and spaces of work through
the lens of non-work thus tells an alternative story of office work that challenges these
 Diversionary tactics at work: Making meaning through misuse 39

systems of power that were built into office spaces and technologies. Although these
types of transgressive behaviors are common in nearly all workplaces, they are difficult
to see because they deliberately fly below the radar of observation and detection.20
Drawing on research from diverse disciplines and sources, including organizational
behavior, psychology, motivational research, industrial systems engineering, sociology,
business, folklore, popular media, and government reports, I collected stories and other
references to workers misusing, abusing, or otherwise repurposing the spaces and
objects of the office. Individually, these various examples are anecdotal, referenced in
the margins of other seemingly unrelated research, but stitched together they offer a
small glimpse into the ways in which workers regularly repurposed the objects and
spaces of the office to subvert or challenge the organization or the work process.
Historically, workers have hidden non-productive labor in plain sight by using the
space of the office as a stage set, and the objects of the office as props to create an illusion
of productivity. In fact, the objects and spaces of office work not only disguise non-work,
they also become a means of engaging in transgressive behaviors. For example, in 1981
The New York Times reported that employees at the United States General Services
Administration were spending so much time ringing up services such as “dial-a-joke” at
the office that the Federal Government had as much as $3,000 in fees on their phone bill.21
The enormous phone bill reveals the lack of supervision over telephone communications
and illustrates how this kind of subterfuge works. These workers looked as though they
were on business phone calls but were in fact using their workstation telephone as a
means of escape from their work day. In this way, workers were repurposing a familiar
workplace artifact, the telephone, for personal entertainment. Because the object was
associated with an appropriate workplace activity, the use of the phone was an easy act of
subterfuge even in a completely open office where one could conceivably be seen at any
moment by a passing colleague or manager. The telephone represents a tool of the office
and a signifier of productivity while also serving as a means of escape.
Typewriters and photocopiers could also be used as technological disguises and
decoys for engaging in non-productive work. There is significant research in folklore
on the creation and circulation of subversive corporate humor in the form of print
artifacts. In their 1975 book on the subject, folklorists Alan Dundes and Carl Pagter
attempt to categorize these types of humorous and satirical stories and objects that
were commonly produced and circulated in American offices.22 Dundes and Pagter
offer a truly astounding collection of these print objects that they spent many years
collecting, including chain letters, cartoons, satirical office memos, and parody office
forms. Building on their work, folklorist Danielle Roemer analyzes the common
practice of “photocopy lore,” in which workers use the technology of the office to
produce these subversive print objects that are circulated through the organization.23
These subversive objects offer material evidence of counter-productive behaviors at
work. Like the workers using their workstation telephone for calls to dial-a-joke,
workers’ production and circulation of these photocopied objects relies on the
repurposing of office spaces and technologies to engage in acts of non-work. The
number of examples of fake or satirical memos and forms produced by workers is
particularly significant in that it suggests the ways in which workers could utilize office
objects like typewriters and photocopiers to appear busy with real work (typing or
40 Design History Beyond the Canon

copying an office memo or form) when they were in fact engaged in a creative act of
subterfuge (producing a parody of a memo or form).
The increasing presence of personal computers in workstations starting in the late
1970s and early 1980s created new opportunities for disguising non-work as work. In
fact, early personal computers, which pre-dated the widespread use of GUI (graphical
user interface), easily masked non-work through their code-like display. Because the
computer itself was a work-related artifact, just sitting in front of a computer typing or
reading could signify work to a casual observer, even if the text on the screen was not
work-related at all. Although word-processing and data-processing systems often
featured electronic monitoring in which workers’ activity was tracked and reported to
ensure productivity, new personal computers, which were used by a much wider array
of office workers (including managers, executives, professional, technical, and clerical
workers), rarely had any kind of monitoring in place.24
In the mid–1980s, the development and spread of Microsoft Windows created
another mechanism for disguising non-work behavior. Workers could quickly
minimize inappropriate images, games, or other programs, or simply switch to an
appropriate (or at least innocuous) window with the click of a mouse or a stroke of the
keyboard. Microsoft Windows included some simple games and creative programs
(Solitaire, Minesweeper, Paintbrush) that workers could use on their computers. The
covert usage of these built-in programs at work was sufficiently problematic that some
organizations (Ford, Boeing, and Sears) deleted those time-wasting programs from all
company computers in the mid–1990s.25 Other software, like those produced by
FriendlySoft, actually included a “boss key” feature which allowed workers to quickly
exit out of a game to avoid detection at work.26 In 1989, PC Mag reported that game
manufacturer Broderbund similarly had a “boss key” function that would generate a
spreadsheet that was itself a diversion (with user-controllable features creating a game
within the game).27 The presence of a built-in “boss key” in these kinds of software
suggests that some gaming companies anticipated a market of players who were
covertly playing games on their workplace computers.
In contemporary organizational behavior literature, personal use of the internet at
work is called “cyberloafing,” and has been an organizational concern since internet
access first became common on office computers in the 1990s.28 Early office internet
was rarely monitored, and so the main challenge for office workers was to avoid being
seen by a supervisor who might catch a glimpse of personal internet usage on a
computer monitor. In 1995, Don Pavlish, then a student at New York University,
launched his “Don’s Boss Page” website which was dedicated to supporting the unique
needs of illicit office web surfers. Similar to the Broderbund software, the website
featured a decoy excel spreadsheet on the top half of the screen, allowing workers to
quickly disguise their recreational browsing (Figure 4.1). The site later also included a
so-called “personal protector” that would launch in a separate window, providing
workers a quick exit from any unsanctioned browsing. Fans of Don’s Boss Page even
shared their own strategies of digital escape on the site, for example using alt-tab to
quickly shift from non-work-related activities to work applications, hiding the task bar
so that open applications were not visible to passers-by, and using the company website
as a foil for non-work-related internet browsing.29 To this day, mimicking office
 Diversionary tactics at work: Making meaning through misuse 41

software to disguise recreational internet usage remains a common tactic. Since 2006,
the NCAA (National Collegiate Athlete Association) has included a similar feature on
their website for the annual “March Madness” college basketball season, and the website
Reddit has a “skin” that allows readers to disguise the site to look like Microsoft Outlook,
a commonly used office email program.30

Figure 4.1 A screenshot of Don’s Boss Page showing the fake spreadsheet and the
real front page of the website below, as seen on February 4, 1998 from the Wayback
Machine on the Internet Archive.
42 Design History Beyond the Canon

The vast majority of such web browsing in the 1990s was likely fairly innocuous in
terms of content (shopping, news, sports, etc.), but some workers used their workplace
computer for viewing sexually explicit images and websites. An article in The New York
Times from 1996 reported that pornography usage at work had become a significant
problem when workers at a number of major companies, including IBM, Apple, Hewlett
Packard, AT&T, NASA, and Compaq, had been found visiting websites like Penthouse and
other sexually explicit internet sites on their office computers.31 Newsweek similarly
reported in 1999 that Xerox had fired forty employees for spending entire working days
viewing pornography using the Xerox network. Indeed, in some cases, the downloading
of pornographic images and video was so hefty that it actually disrupted the network,
slowing down all other activity.32 In the late 1990s, some offices began implementing early
internet-monitoring software so that management could catch their workers using their
office computer for these kinds of salacious activities. In 1998, one hundred companies in
the US tested software that tracked workers’ activities online, and allowed managers to
catch workers viewing pornography in real time. Yet this type of software was not used
unilaterally on all workers in the office; according to The New York Times, there was often
some reluctance to put top-level executives and administrators in jeopardy by using such
monitoring software on their computers.33 This illustrates how workers of different classes
and positions within the same office could have vastly different opportunities for these
types of activities, and those opportunities were not just tied to their access to technology,
but rather were a reflection of their position within the organization as whole.
Other covert activities could take a more destructive turn, sometimes in the form of
retaliation against the organization for mistreatment or for dehumanizing working
conditions. In organizational behavior literature, such deliberate actions against the
organization were often characterized as “sabotage.”34 In 1981, a group of writers,
artists, and labor activists in San Francisco began producing an underground zine
called Processed World. Filled with humorous stories, satirical art, and an underlying
political message, Processed World gave voice to the frustrations and challenges of
many American office workers in low-level clerical, temporary, and other computer-
based jobs. Sabotage was a recurring theme throughout the history of the zine
(Figure 4.2). In an article from their sixth issue titled “Ten Ways to Wreck a Digital
Video Terminal,” users were encouraged to pour salted coffee on the keyboard, unplug
and re-plug the circuit board with the power on, reverse ribbon cables, damage ribbon
cables with cuticle scissors, dump small objects like paperclips directly into the machine
through cooling slots, blow cigarette smoke into the machine, remove microchips and
put them in backwards, use a magnet around a disc, and deploy a bulk tape eraser.35
Another article in issue eleven of Processed World even provided users specific lines of
code that they could use to disrupt computer systems by making information invisible
or causing deliberate glitches in the hardware.36
Though often treated in the zine in a satirical manner, this kind of sabotage was not
just a worker fantasy; a study conducted in 1993 found that managers had seen a
number of deliberately destructive behaviors in their offices, including clipped word-
processing machine cables; deliberate efforts to crash computer and office systems; and
deleted, altered, or otherwise destroyed data on computers.37 These actions turned
misuse into a form of political subversion and directly challenged the dominance of
 Diversionary tactics at work: Making meaning through misuse 43

Figure 4.2 “Sabotage” image from Processed World 5 (1982), p. 25. Scanned edition
from the Prelinger Library on the Internet Archive.

the organization. By abusing the technologies, objects, and spaces of the office, workers
could express their frustration and reassert their own individuality and autonomy
within the organizational system.
In the field of organizational behavior, all of these examples are considered
organizational misbehavior. By violating formal and informal rules and norms through
small and large acts of subversion, these workers were deliberately undermining the
organization and disrupting the working process. According to sociologist Jan Karlsson,
such behaviors reflect the underlying power dynamics embedded in all types of
industries in which management seeks ways of controlling, ordering, and structuring
work, while workers seek opportunities to reclaim their autonomy, independence, and
dignity from within the work process.38 Yet, the opportunity to engage in any of these
activities is by necessity defined by the organizational and social context. Indeed, an
activity that is against the official policies in one workplace may be standard practice in
another. For example, in some workplaces, leaving one’s workspace during the day for
a coffee, smoking, or bathroom break is not contentious at all, and in others, such
escapes from work might be closely monitored and sharply limited.39 The opportunities
workers have are also tied to an individual’s organizational status—those in higher
positions are rarely as restricted as lower-level workers whose jobs are often carefully
controlled and monitored in ways that make any deviation from work a challenge.
Further, individuals within the organization charged with creating systems that are
intended to control or restrict the behavior of workers (for example, managers) are
equally capable of engaging in behaviors that subvert those same rules and policies, the
44 Design History Beyond the Canon

main difference being that those in higher positions, who make organizational
decisions, typically have greater latitude for such behaviors than those in lower
positions who are often subject to higher levels of control and scrutiny.

The meanings of use and misuse

As organizations construct and reinforce their power through the spaces and objects of
the workplace, workers challenge that power through deliberate misuse. The objects
and spaces of the office thus carry both sets of meanings and uses; they simultaneously
enable organizational authority and worker transgression. Yet, in design history we
often privilege the intended uses of things and spaces as defined by designers,
manufacturers, and organizations over the informal uses, or “misuses,” deployed by
workers and other classes of users. When design historians read objects and spaces
through the lens of function and prescribed use, we are reading for the intentions of
designers rather than reading for the experiences of users. As a type of “script analysis,”
this form of examination empowers designers to inscribe use into the objects and
spaces they create, but sometimes treats users as mere actors fulfilling their assigned
role by correctly using the object.40 This way of thinking structurally prioritizes the
intentions of architects and designers (and the people who employ them) over the real
behavior of users, and naturalizes the systems of power embedded in designed objects.
There are other ways of conceptualizing this gap between use and misuse. In their
2010 article “Affording Meaning,” design researcher Julka Almquist and literature
scholar Julia Lupton challenge the present culture of design practice in which designers
treat users as variables within a human–design interaction. They argue that prescribed
use, as embedded in the design of a given object or space, represents a form of control
that attempts to order and restrict users. In this model of design practice, users’ actions
can be predicted, contained, and controlled through the deployment of visual and
tactile cues for correct usage.41 Drawing on the concept of “affordances,” Almquist and
Lupton argue that objects and spaces often have “latent” functions and meanings that
might transgress or subvert the original intended uses. The concept of affordances was
first developed by psychologist J. J. Gibson in 1977 to describe the inherent properties
of a given material and was later popularized in design discourse by design theorist
Donald Norman, who appropriated the idea of “affordances” to describe the ways in
which objects could be encoded with cues for action. According to Almquist and
Lupton, Norman’s interpretation of affordances has tended to emphasize the
prescription of use by a designer rather than the possibilities of use created by a user.
They argue for a more dynamic concept of “affordances” in which users can repurpose,
adapt, and transform both the meaning and use of particular objects in ways that
subvert, challenge, or resist the meanings and uses prescribed by designers. In this way,
an object is not defined by use as intended by a designer or a manufacturer, but rather
constructed through the diverse uses and meanings deployed by users.42 For Almquist
and Lupton, these alternative uses (and re-uses) are as much a part of the designed
object or space as those intended by a designer or the organization that employs the
designer. “Misuse” is thus no longer misuse at all, but merely an alternative usage.
 Diversionary tactics at work: Making meaning through misuse 45

Looking at objects and spaces of the office through this broader definition of
“affordances” as proposed by Almquist and Lupton not only challenges the standard
narratives of design that too often privilege a designer’s intentions over users’
experiences, but also helps address the ways in which designers’ intentions may be
directly undermined, challenged, or subverted by the organizations and companies
who produce or use their designs. For example, in developing Herman Miller’s Action
Office furniture in the 1960s, designer Robert Propst wanted workers to use the inner
walls of their workstations to post personal and work-related materials, but in practice
some organizations purchasing this new kind of furniture, designed to allow display,
instituted strict rules preventing workers from posting such things to the furniture
partitions.43 Thus, organizations are also users who deploy these designed objects and
spaces in ways that may be entirely separate from, and even antithetical to, those
intentions of the designer or the manufacturer. The concept of affordances creates a
structure for disambiguating these conflicting layers of intention, meaning, and use.
In addition, this way of thinking about the multiple and conflicting uses of things and
spaces also gives design historians a means of thinking more intentionally about the
various meanings and uses over time. Instead of fixing the object in a single moment tied
to its inception by a designer, its first production by a manufacturer, or its first purchase
by a consumer, the concept of affordances engages in the life of the object or space through
various historical contexts and users. Scholars in fields like vernacular architecture,
material culture, and history of technology have developed robust methodologies to
explore this issue of change over time, recognizing that spaces, technologies, and things
do not stay the same but rather evolve and change through usage.44 Bringing this idea to
office design, for example, instead of fixing a particular piece of furniture in the moment
when it was specified by an architect or designer, or installed for its very first user, we
should recognize that after installation a desk might serve as a workspace for decades to
come, and over that time would likely be used for very different kinds of work, by very
different types of workers. The initial user is not more important than all of the subsequent
users, and we need to find ways to think about that life of the object through its use.
Building on this way of thinking about the life of things and spaces, the concept of
affordances creates the opportunity to acknowledge a longer and more complex life in
which the object’s use and meaning may change significantly over time and through
multiple generations of users.
Finally, the concept of affordances is also useful in that it creates a pathway for
thinking about diverse users who may inscribe vastly different meanings and uses in
the same object or space. In the context of the office, workers in different organizational
positions might have entirely different relationships to the spaces of that office: one
worker might see a bright, supportive, and attractive workspace, and another might
view the same office space as a dimly lit, dreary, prison-like environment. Similarly, an
office technology that symbolizes freedom and escape for one class of workers may be
an oppressive mechanism of control and surveillance for another class. Further, these
types of differences in perspective are not mere matters of preference; they can reflect
underlying structural divisions between different classes of workers. Recognizing that
context and identity can inform uses and meanings, instead of treating users as an
undifferentiated mass of people, design historians need to continue to think about the
46 Design History Beyond the Canon

ways in which identity, context, and experience can inform how users might encounter
and relate to a designed object or space. Reading designed things and spaces for these
multifarious meanings and uses offers design historians the opportunity to build a
more nuanced, complex, and inclusive understanding, not only of design itself, but also
of diverse communities of users.

Notes
1 Christine A. Henle, Charlie L. Reeve, and Virginia E. Pitts, “Stealing Time at Work:
Attitudes, Social Pressure, and Perceived Control as Predictors of Time Theft,” Journal
of Business Ethics, 94(1) (2010).
2 Stephen Ackroyd and Paul Thompson, Organizational Misbehavior (Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage, 1999).
3 Jan Karlsson, Organizational Misbehaviour in the Workplace (New York: Palgrave
MacMillan, 2012), pp. 15–18.
4 Anna Andrzejewski, Building Power: Architecture and Surveillance in Victorian America
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2008). Shoshana Zuboff, In the Age of the
Smart Machine (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Thomas Haigh, “Remembering the
Origins of Word Processing and Office Automation,” IEEE Annals of the History of
Computing, 28(4) (2006). Oliver Zunz, Making America Corporate, 1870–1920
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). Angel Kwolek-Folland, Engendering
Business: Men and Women in the Corporate Office, 1870–1930 (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1994). Venus Green, Race on the Line: Gender, Labor, and
Technology in the Bell System, 1880–1980 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).
Lindy Biggs, The Rational Factory: Architecture, Technology and Work in America’s Age
of Mass Production (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1996); David Nye, America’s
Assembly Line (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013); David F. Noble, Forces of
Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1984). Alfred Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American
Business (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977). Harry Braverman, Labor
and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1974).
5 George Terry, Office Management and Control (Homewood, IL: R. D. Irwin, 1958),
pp. 348–50; Carl Parsons, Office Organization and Management (Chicago: La Salle
Extension University, 1921), pp. 18–22; How to Plan Your Office Layout (Washington,
DC: National Stationary and Office Equipment Association, 1953).
6 Andrzejewski, pp. 72–4.
7 Vance Packard, The Status Seekers (New York: David McKay, 1959), pp. 114–18. Fred
Steele, Physical Settings and Organization Development (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley,
1973), p. 48.
8 John F. Pile, Open Office Planning: A Handbook for Interior Designers and Architects
(New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1978), pp. 54–5.
9 Ibid., pp. 72–95. Lila Shoshkes, Space Planning: Designing the Office Environment (New
York: Architectural Record Books, 1976), pp. 43–60. In the Kevin Roche and John
Dinkeloo Associates (KRJD) records at Yale University, multiple projects for corporate
headquarters included detailed space planning information to determine workspace
size, enclosure, technology needs, and adjacencies.
 Diversionary tactics at work: Making meaning through misuse 47

10 Franklin D. Becker, Workspace: Creating Environments in Organizations (New York, NY:

Praeger, 1981), p. 58.
11 Pile, p. 64.
12 Interview Schedule for Union Carbide Corporation, October 18, 1976, KRJD MS 1884,
Box 426, folder “Program,” Yale University.
13 Louis Harris and Associates, Office Environments: Do They Work? (Grand Rapids, MI:
Steelcase, 1978), p. 90.
14 Pile, p. 58.
15 Becker, pp. 72–3.
16 Ibid., p. 68.
17 Alan Lipman et al., “Power, a Neglected Concept in Office Design,” Journal of
Architectural Research, 6(3) (1978): 30.
18 Karen Nussbaum and Judith Gregory, “Race against Time: Automation of the Office—
An Analysis of the Trends in Office Automation and the Impact on the Office
Workforce,” Office Technology and People, 1(2/3) (1982): 226.
19 Ibid., pp. 203–6.
20 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1988), pp. 36–8.
21 William Schmidt, “For Employers, Dialing a Joke Isn’t So Funny,” The New York Times,
March 14, 1981.
22 Alan Dundes and Carl Pagter, Work Hard and You Shall Be Rewarded: Urban Folklore
from the Paperwork Empire (Detroit: Wayne State University, 1992).
23 Danielle Roemer, “Photocopy Lore and the Naturalization of the Corporate Body,” The
Journal of American Folklore, 107(423) (1994).
24 Office of Technology Assessment, The Electronic Supervisor: New Technology, New
Tensions (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1987), pp. 28–9.
25 Mitch Betts, “Drop that Mouse: The Boss Is Coming,” Computerworld, January 23, 1995,
p. 12.
26 FriendlySoft advertisement, PC Mag, September 1983, pp. 404–5.
27 John C. Dvorak, “Inside Track,” PC Mag, June 13, 1989, p. 73.
28 Christine Henle, Gary Kohut, and Rosemary Booth, “Designing Electronic Use Policies
to Enhance Employee Perception and to Reduce Cyberloafing: An Empirical Test of
Justice Theory,” Computers in Human Behavior, 25 (2009): 997.
29 “Don’s Boss Page,” Internet Archive Wayback Machine, February 4, 1998: https://web.
archive.org/web/19980204204901/http://www.donsbosspage.com:80/ (accessed on July
11, 2017).
30 Adam Epstein, “This Year’s ‘Boss Button’ for the NCAA March Madness Livestream is
the Best Yet,” Quartz, March 2015. Jennifer Calfas, “The NCAA’s March Madness Life
Site has an Emergency ‘Boss Button,’ ” Time, March 17, 2017. Nina Golgowski, “Fake
Outlook Skin Lets Users Discreetly Browse Reddit at Work,”Huffpost, November 23,
2015.
31 Trip Gabriel, “New Issue at Work: On-Line Sex Sites,” New York Times, June 27,
1996.
32 “CyberSlacking: The Internet Has Brought Distractions into Cubicles, and Now
Corporate America is Fighting Back,” Newsweek, November 29, 1999, p. 62.
33 Denise Grady, “Keeping Track of Employees On-Line Voyeurism,” New York Times,
May 7, 1998.
34 Ron DiBattista, “Forecasting Sabotage Events in the Workplace,” Public Personnel
Management, 25(1) (1996); John Brehm and Scott Gates, Working, Shirking, and
48 Design History Beyond the Canon

Sabotage: Bureaucratic Response to a Democratic Public (Ann Arbor: University of

Michigan Press, 1997).
35 Digital Dogshit, “Ten Ways to Wreck a Digital Video Terminal,” 1982, Processed World,
6: 28–9.
36 Power to the Processor Igor, “Sabotage,” 1984, Processed World, 11: 37–8.
37 DiBattista, 50.
38 Karlsson, pp. 174–87.
39 Marc Lindner and Ingrid Nygaard, Void Where Prohibited: Rest Breaks and the Right to
Urinate on Company Time (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1998), p. 2.
40 Kjetil Fallan, Design History: Understanding Theory and Method (New York: Berg,
2010), pp. 78–84. Madeleine Akrich, “The De-Scription of Technical Objects,” in
Shaping Technology/Building Society Studies in Sociotechnical Change, ed. Wiebe Bijker
and John Law (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).
41 Julka Almquist and Julia Lupton, “Affording Meaning: Design-Oriented Research from
the Humanities and Social Sciences,” Design Issues, 26(1) (2010): 7–8.
42 Ibid., 9–14.
43 Robert Propst, The Office: A Facility Based on Change (Elmhurst, IL: The Business
Press, 1968), p. 48; “Process Aesthetic: Some Thoughts on the Thinking Process,”
Progressive Architecture (1974); Geri Brin, “Office Decorations: Shipshape Space vs
Sinking Employee Morale,” Chicago Tribune, January 25, 1981.
44 Gabrielle M. Lanier and Bernard L. Herman, Everyday Architecture of the Mid-Atlantic:
Looking at Buildings and Landscapes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1997); James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life
(New York: Anchor, 1996); David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and
Global History since 1900 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
 Everything old is new again:
Modernization, historic preservation, and
the American home, 1920–1966
Emily Wolf

In the February 1952 issue of House Beautiful, the magazine’s then-architectural editor
James Marston Fitch introduced a thirty-page spread with a promise for owners of
older houses. Using the physical evolution of George Washington’s Mount Vernon as
an example, he assured homeowners that the feature would demonstrate “how to merge
what you’ve got (the past) with what you want (the future).”1 Fitch, an architect and
leader in the American preservation movement who would go on to co-found the
nation’s first graduate program in historic preservation at Columbia University in 1964,
positioned the tensions between past, present, and future as ones that had plagued
homeowners from time immemorial, concluding “the first thing you can learn from
American history is this: Contemporary problems always demand contemporary
solutions. If your solutions are as sound for your day as Washington’s were for his,
you’ll have no difficulty integrating your possessions. Good design is ageless.”2
With its emphasis on contemporary, professionally conceived but consumer-driven
design solutions, the feature followed a pattern established by numerous promotional
materials and mass-circulation publications during the interwar and postwar periods
that addressed the modernization of the older or historic single-family home, a building
type at the center of American socio-cultural identity. Put forth by magazines, retailers,
government agencies, and manufacturers of home improvement products as diverse as
House Beautiful, Popular Science, Ladies’ Home Journal, Armstrong Cork, Benjamin
Moore, DuPont, Montgomery Ward, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), and
Sears, Roebuck and Company, such articles, trade publications, advertisements, films,
and prescriptive literature defined domestic modernity in terms of superior building
materials, open interiors, clean lines, and labor-saving and life-improving technologies.3
The plans and actions recommended by this body of literature required varying
degrees of creative input on the part of the homeowner, blurring the boundary between
designer and consumer.4 Rather than foregrounding the designers of the proposed
interventions, homeowners were instead given prominence as directors of their own
aesthetic choices. Even when consuming designs produced and marketed by others, the
homeowner was in control. As Armstrong World Industries’ chief interior designer Hazel
Dell Brown wrote in Ideas for Old Rooms and New, published in 1944, “Whatever you do,

49
50 Design History Beyond the Canon

use your own ideas. Don’t be afraid of them . . . a bit of imagination, a good knowledge
of your own family and its needs, and your own good taste are just about the only
requirements.”5 Whereas Richard S. Tedlow positions the corporate advertiser or publisher
as taking the active role in such design transactions, arguing “the customer disposes. But
the company proposes,” this ignores much of the homeowner’s agency.6 While the
manufacturer or publication proposed design interventions, it was the consumer, in the
end, who exercised the most control by selecting and effecting the design.
These publications and promotional materials frequently presented homeowners
with a choice: march forward, or slip back into the past.7 The ideological or aesthetic
superiority of modern design was rarely debated, in contrast to highbrow and
professional architectural publications of the period (with the notable exception of
Elizabeth Gordon’s vehemently anti-modern The Threat to the Next America).8 Instead,
modernization was broadly defined as an individualistic act that maintained aging,
outdated housing stock by bringing it into the luminous present. Even when the
remodeled houses presented to the public retained an overall historic appearance in
terms of style or form, especially at their exteriors, they were described as modern and
up to date (Figure 5.1). Nor were the recommended interventions framed as acts of
canonical historic preservation, in which the careful retention of older or historic
building fabric was a stated goal. They were more often encouraged as a means of
maintaining “old-fashioned charm,” safeguarding property value, or improving a
house’s appearance.9 Although the modernization strategies often altered historic
fabric for the sake of modern comfort and ease of maintenance, they ultimately resulted
in the retention and continued use of historic buildings.

Figure 5.1 Domestic modernity was largely defined in terms of ease, comfort, and
modern building materials, as opposed to architectural style or form.
 Modernization, historic preservation, and the American home 51

It is not surprising that the recommended design interventions were not framed
within the context of historic preservation, given the narrow historic, aesthetic, and
class-based focus of the nascent historic preservation movement, which was largely
led by educated elites and centered on the architectural and cultural achievements of
well-known early Americans. I argue that the strategies for modernizing older and
historic houses presented in advertising, promotional materials, and mass-circulation
publications between the close of World War I and the passage of the National Historic
Preservation Act in 1966 can be reinterpreted as hybrid, mediated acts of both historic
preservation and modern design, in which homeowners were active participants as
opposed to passive consumers. Given the lack of comprehensive documentation of
actual homeowner choices and house remodels, and the changeable nature of the home
itself (modernization completed during this period may never have been formally
documented with a building permit, and is likely to have been altered in successive
remodeling campaigns), this research relies on Federal Housing Administration data
for non-farm residential buildings, trade literature, and other primary source materials
as a proxy for the actions individual homeowners were undertaking in their own
homes.
Positioning the actions recommended by these promotional materials and publications
as hybrid, user-driven acts of preservation and modern design requires several essential
paradigm shifts. Definitions of Modernism and preservation must be broadened to
include mediated styles, materials, and intents. The construct of the designer must be
expanded to recognize homeowners and other users as legitimate participants in a
complex cycle of design. Buildings must be understood as locations of inherent change as
opposed to static entities, an idea the contemporary preservation movement is beginning
to embrace. Historic preservation interventions must be recognized as valid acts of design,
rather than something that is only done to design. Modernized houses must be accepted
as simultaneous embodiments of modernization and preservation, forces that are often
perceived as oppositional.
Limited attention has been paid to the role of mass-circulation publications and
advertising in promoting the modernization of the existing American home, from
either an historic preservation or design history lens. A robust body of research has
addressed the histories of domestic architecture, intersections between Modernism
and historicism, historic preservation, and the do-it-yourself (DIY) movement, but
there has been little study of the manner in which these elements came together during
the interwar and postwar periods to influence the remodeling of older or historic
housing stock.10 While analysis of FHA records, advertisements, corporate literature,
and mass-circulation publications has been undertaken, especially in relation to DIY,
these materials have not typically been considered with respect to their recommended
treatment of the older or historic home.

New homes from old houses

The push to modernize older houses is closely tied to fluctuations in the American
homeownership rate and home-building industry. In 1900, just under half of all
52 Design History Beyond the Canon

households (46.5 percent) owned their own home.11 Whereas homeownership had
previously been an important goal for blue-collar workers and immigrants, it was not a
priority for middle-class workers and white-collar professionals until the economically
robust 1920s.12 Expanded systems of consumer distribution (such as mail-order
catalogs), mass advertising, and hardware stores emerged during this period, making it
possible for homeowners to obtain the tools and materials necessary to undertake their
own home repair and remodeling projects.13 Corporations and publications saw older
and historic houses as an untapped market, and created modernization materials aimed
specifically at this subset of homeowners.14 Entities that had previously advertised
exclusively to the building professional now communicated directly with the homeowner,
recommending modernization measures that ran the gamut from essential home
maintenance to ambitious improvement projects.15
The Better Homes in America campaign, unveiled in women’s magazine The
Delineator in 1922, sought to create responsible consumers and citizens by encouraging
homeownership and home improvement through local committees and demonstration
weeks.16 Manufacturers of building supplies joined together to form the Home
Modernization Bureau in 1928.17 Regional offices of the bureau advertised in local
newspapers, with aim of inspiring the modernization of three-fifths of existing
American houses; these twelve million households represented a potential market of
$24 billion.18 Often conversational in tone and designed to guide the homeowner
through the remodeling process, many of the advertising materials produced during
the 1920s, such as National Steel Fabric’s “New Homes from Old Houses,” Weatherbest
Stained Shingle Company’s “Making Old Houses into Charming Homes,” and Barrett
Company’s “Better Homes from Old Houses: How to Make Your Old House More
Comfortable, More Attractive and Worth More Money,” continued the “before and
after” trope seen in architectural pattern books and decorating and women’s magazines
since the nineteenth century (Figure 5.2).19
These materials presented “before” houses as “sadly in need of repairs” and “with
poor exterior design” yet retaining some redeeming qualities in terms of size, location,
or sound construction; old houses were “too good to tear down, yet not attractive
enough for a home.”20 The modernized “after” houses were generally light and bright,
with new exterior cladding materials, and often made more spacious via an addition or
the removal of interior partition walls. Typical “after” improvements included “an
entrance changed; a broad inviting porch added, or the old one transformed into a cosy
sun parlor; the roof lines enhanced by the addition of appropriate dormers or, in some
cases, the old ones replaced by a low sweeping roof,” all of which allowed “the old home
to take its place among those of modern-day design.”21
The Great Depression caused homeownership rates to drop to 43.6 percent in 1940,
the lowest rate of the twentieth century, and stalled residential construction almost
completely, with new housing starts falling 95 percent between 1928 and 1933.22
Although home repair expenditures also fell during the Depression, the lack of new
construction created a market, albeit a more limited one, for existing home repair
and remodeling that was promoted in many of the era’s leading shelter magazines.23
Better Homes & Gardens magazine’s 1933 “Better Homes Contest” received 18,706
reader-submitted entries from forty-two states, including the District of Columbia,
 Modernization, historic preservation, and the American home 53

Figure 5.2 Many materials produced during the 1920s continued the “before
and after” trope seen in pattern books and mass circulation publications since the
nineteenth century, with modernized houses typically retaining an overall historic
appearance.
54 Design History Beyond the Canon

all vying for $3,000 in prize money.24 Seventy percent of entrants modernized the
exterior of their homes, with 78 percent adding or altering a porch, building a
dormer, or modifying gable details. Thirty-eight percent of entrants altered interior
plans by removing room partitions, and 29 percent intended to install new heating
systems. Seventy-three percent of entrants installed new wallpaper, paint, or both, and
26 percent refinished their basements, often incorporating up-to-date laundry rooms.25
Held annually, the competition drew 150,000 entries over its first five years.26 House
Beautiful hosted a similar competition with larger prizes, conceived to entice its upper-
middle-class readership to hire architects to design more substantial remodels.27 Such
contests demonstrate the continued enthusiasm for home improvement, even during
the Depression.
Recognizing that many older houses were in need of “repairing and modernizing to
bring them up to the standard of the times,” as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
observed in 1934, the federal government initiated a number of programs to stimulate the
building and remodeling industries, increase homeownership rates, and improve the
quality of American housing stock.28 The passage of the National Housing Act in 1934
created the Federal Housing Administration, which supported both home buying
and home modernization with government loan-guaranty programs. New, federally
guarantied bank mortgages lowered necessary down-payments and made homeownership
feasible for a larger sector of the population. The National Housing Act also mandated
federally guarantied home improvement loans of up to $2,000 for “repairs, alterations, or
improvements” to existing single-family residences.29
These modernization loans were promoted by the FHA’s Better Housing Program,
which advertised through newsreels (Better Housing News Flashes, produced by Pathé
News and Movietone), radio programs, pamphlets, and posters. It was estimated that
over twenty-seven million Americans saw some form of FHA advertisement in 1934,
and by 1936 over forty million Americans had viewed the nine Better Housing News
Flashes at 150,000 screenings.30 Between 1934 and 1937, 1.5 million American
homeowners (one in eight) had an FHA home improvement loan.31 Homeowners
borrowed approximately $400 on average in 1939, with funds most often used to install
new plumbing and heating equipment, refinish exteriors and interiors, replace roofing
materials, or make additions or structural alterations.32 Nearly 50 percent of loans
ranged from $100 to $300 (average household income was $1,368), indicating that
many homeowners were undertaking thrifty yet substantive updates.33 Funds were
loaned to homeowners in all forty-eight states, the District of Columbia, Alaska, and
Hawaii, but the number of loans varied significantly from state to state, with nearly
one-third of all loans allocated to homeowners in New York and California.34 Even
when accounting for population distribution by state, these figures suggest that
homeowners in more populous regions were more likely to modernize.
Modernization was widely encouraged by shelter magazines, building products
companies, retailers, banks, and individual tradesmen, since it increased the consumer
market for their goods and services. Promotional materials, such as Bird & Sons, Inc.’s
“Are You Going to Build or Repair,” Eljer Plumbing Fixtures’s “Modern as Tomorrow,”
Weyerhaeuser Sales Co.’s “Good Homes Never Grow Old,” and Montgomery Ward’s
“Complete Catalog of Plumbing, Heating, Building Materials,” underscored the ease,
 Modernization, historic preservation, and the American home 55

affordability, and desirability of modernization.35 Leading retailer Sears, Roebuck and

Company marketed itself as “the store for home modernizing,” while Montgomery
Ward declared, “it costs so little at Ward’s to modernize your home inside and out”
(Figure 5.3).36 Homeowners with limited modernization budgets typically concentrated

Figure 5.3 During the 1930s, modernization was widely encouraged by the FHA,
shelter magazines, building products companies, retailers, banks, and individual
tradesmen. Promotional materials underscored the ease, affordability, and desirability
of modernization.
56 Design History Beyond the Canon

on the kitchen and bathroom (a focus shared by retailers), installing mass-produced

porcelain and ceramic bathroom fixtures and new appliances, built-in cabinets, and
counters of uniform height.37 Sears, for example, sold a Coldspot refrigerator for
$149.50 and a matched steel “ultra-modern” kitchen unit for $28.95 in 1940, meaning
a kitchen could be substantially modernized for under $200, well in line with a typical
FHA loan of the period.38
Homeownership rates did not rebound until after World War II, advanced by the
booming economy, favorable financing and tax laws, and benefits afforded to returning
veterans as part of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944.39 An immediate
need for five million new homes to house the growing number of American families
spurred the rapid rate of suburban growth that characterized the postwar period.40
Approximately 114,000 single-family houses were under construction in 1944; in 1950,
the number of houses under construction had grown exponentially, to 1.7 million, with
“little boxes” rising in new subdivisions across the United States.41 By 1950, 55 percent
of American households owned their own home; 73 percent of these were detached,
single-family houses.42
Even during this period of expansive new construction, however, more than half of
the US population lived in housing stock that was twenty years old or older and which
lacked “the utility and livability made possible by postwar technical developments.”43
Only in suburban areas did sales of new houses outnumber older ones; in cities
and towns of fewer than 50,000, the ratio of old to new houses sold between 1949
and 1950 was almost two to one.44 Owners of these older houses were well aware of
the new houses under construction across the country and desired similarly modern
building materials, floor plans, and technologies in their own homes. Postwar home
improvement manuals addressed the specific needs of these homeowners, providing
practical advice on how to make old houses “livable in our modern sense.”45 To aid
these owners, the federal government’s Housing and Home Finance Agency declared
1956 as “National Home Improvement Year.” The program, supported by building
material dealers, contractors, banks, and municipal officials in more than one thousand
cities, aimed to improve or repair at least twenty million houses.46 Recommended
interventions included new wings, updated kitchens, and remodeled bathrooms,
modernization efforts that were widely promoted in corporate and FHA literature of
the period.
World War II had taught thousands of American men and women manual and
technical skills, and the postwar skilled worker shortage and rising labor rates meant
that, by the 1950s, middle-class homeowners did far more with their own hands than
their nineteenth-century forebears.47 In 1953, This Week magazine reported that sixty
million Americans engaged in some form of do-it-yourself, making DIY the nation’s
number one hobby.48 The US Department of Labor reported that, in the same year,
American homeowners applied 75 percent of the nation’s paint, installed 60 percent of
its wallpaper, laid half of its asphalt tile, and purchased 25 million power tools and 500
million square feet of plywood.49 The DIY movement provided millions of homeowners
with opportunities for practical, economic, and aesthetic self-sufficiency.50 Especially
for owners of older or historic houses in need or want of modern updates, “do-it-
yourself [made] possible luxuries that once existed only in their dreams.”51
 Modernization, historic preservation, and the American home 57

Mediated Modernism

The middle-class house remained essentially traditional in the decades following

World War I, with many historicizing revival styles remaining popular. However, as
R. W. Sexton observed in 1931, “architects are unanimous in the opinion that the period
idea has been carried too far . . . They still seek inspiration in the past, but instead of
being slavishly imitative they are learning to be interpretive.”52 In new construction of
the 1930s and beyond, traditional and modern elements were often combined to create
a comfortable, mediated Modernism, what House Beautiful called the “American
Style.”53 The simplified revival styles used to historicize newly built houses were
promoted in shelter magazines; employed in well-known subdivisions of the period,
such as the pared-down Cape Cods of Levittown; and included in advertising materials
for home-builders and materials manufacturers that highlighted the designs’
compatibility with the demands of modern family life. Ideal homes were described in
terms of their modern technologies and finishes, such as oil-fired furnaces, porcelain
bathroom suites, and electric kitchen appliances. Publications and promotional
materials tended to emphasize “the effects of technologies”—comfort, economy,
cleanliness, ease—“rather than the technologies themselves,” reflecting the widespread
focus on the experiential outcomes of modernization rather than a strictly modern
aesthetic.54
Modernizing alterations brought older and historic houses in line with the
hybrid modernity that characterized new residential construction. Publications and
manufacturers recommended the removal of older houses’ late-nineteenth-century
features, such as dormers, gables, porches, and towers, to create simplified exteriors.55
The clean lines of Modernism were often equated with the spare forms of the Colonial
or Colonial Revival styles in both home and furniture design, especially in DIY
literature.56 The aesthetic preference for early American styles mirrored historic
preservation activities of the period, which tended to prioritize colonial buildings;
reflected the widespread disdain for Victorian architectural styles held by modernists
and traditionalists alike; and marked a continuation of the Colonial style-remodeling
trend first seen during the late nineteenth century.57
The removal of historic detail in the name of modernization was a common theme
of the FHA’s Better Housing News Flashes. News Flashes “No. 3” featured Cleveland
architect Bloodgood Tuttle modernizing an “ugly Victorian dwelling” into a “charming
Colonial-type home.” Animation shows the modernization of the house as “bric-a-brac
is stripped off.” Before viewers’ eyes, large chimneys, “overemphasized dormers,” a
“useless tower,” overhanging eaves, iron cresting, a porch, and a porte-cochère are
removed and replaced with smaller, white-painted brick chimneys; smaller dormers; a
narrow Colonial-style cornice; new window sash; white-painted brick; a modern rear
porch; a Colonial entry; and a white picket fence. Despite the many historicizing
features that remained or were introduced, the narrator proclaimed that the “house of
the gay nineties [had] gone completely 1935.”58
News Flashes “No. 6” highlighted a display sponsored by the local Better Housing
committee at the California Pacific International Exposition, in which a mechanized
display of flipping models (“First it’s old, then presto it’s new!”) showed visitors how
58 Design History Beyond the Canon

older houses might be transformed. A bungalow whose owners were in need of

more space was modernized with a spacious attic and new wing. A Victorian house
was presented as “a relic of the gay nineties—until the gingerbread trimmings are
ripped off. Then it becomes a modern, up to date abode.”59 Similarly, “101 Practical
Suggestions for Home Improvements,” published by the Johns-Manville Corporation
(a manufacturer of insulation, roofing materials, and other building products) in 1934,
featured a “down at the heels” Gothic Revival cottage transformed into a vaguely
Colonial-style “modern home” through the removal of a cross gable and porch, altered
eave and chimney details, and addition of shutters (Figure 5.4).60 In each example, an
older house’s original form was exchanged for a new, historic–modern hybrid.
Opposing conceptions of the “house of tomorrow” provide insight into the divergent
notions of domestic modernity that characterized the interwar period. Architect
George Fred Keck’s “house of tomorrow” was exhibited as part of the Homes of
Tomorrow Exhibition at the Century of Progress Exposition held in Chicago from
1933 to 1934. Keck’s design was a three-story, glass and aluminum dodecagon with an
experimental air-conditioning system, solar heating, and airplane hanger at its base.
The house’s modernity was defined through technology and materials, but style and
form were no less important. While obviously designed for show, the house embodies
a high-style architectural vision for the modern American home.
In contrast, “101 Practical Suggestions for Home Improvements” invites readers to
“Make your house the ‘Home of Tomorrow.’ ”61 Beneath an image of a Craftsman-style
house set within a manicured lawn and garden (Figure 5.4), the ideal home is described
as “attractive, reflecting good taste—comfortable and modern,” with a fireproof roof, a
redesigned porch, modernized kitchen, updated interior finishes, and efficient heating
and cooling systems.62 Modernity was not limited to a specific architectural style or
form but was instead defined in terms of the overall experience of the domestic
environment, what David Smiley calls the “Modernism of inhabitation.”63 A home’s
modernity was not necessarily expressed through its appearance, but rather by its
ability to comfortably house the modern family.
While exteriors tended to remain fairly traditional, even when remodeled with
asbestos siding, aluminum windows, asphalt shingles, Masonite, and other modern
materials, interiors were more fluid, integrating modern innovations and space patterns.
Owners of older and historic houses were encouraged to create simplified, open living
spaces by demolishing partition walls, removing doors, and expanding openings
between rooms.64 Using an American Foursquare remodel designed by architect and
preservationist L. Morgan Yost as an example (Figure 5.5), the United States Gypsum
Company suggested, “Simplification is the best approach in modernization, for interior
arrangements as well as exterior appearance.”65 In this clean-lined remodel, living
and dining spaces were swapped, a front porch was removed and replaced with a
Georgian-style double stair, and the living room was opened to a rear deck, mirroring
contemporary house plans. Even with the retained or new historicizing elements, the
remodeled house was nevertheless classified as “modern” due to its refreshed plan and
materials. Modernization was thus distinct from Modernism. Rather than an aesthetic
or ideological end in and of itself, it was an effective means to achieve a more comfortable,
up-to-date home.
 Modernization, historic preservation, and the American home 59

Figure 5.4 Opposing conceptions of the “house of tomorrow” provide insight into
the divergent notions of domestic modernity that characterized the interwar period.

This hybrid, mediated domestic modernity was widely criticized by architectural elites;
such houses were neither adequately historic nor acceptably modern. According to Smiley,
who addressed this “modified modern” in relation to postwar new construction, “many
architects and critics considered these houses degraded and hopelessly compromised as
aesthetic objects. The ideas of organic unity and wholeness that undergirded the spirit of
‘high’ modernism were not compatible with the discontinuities, fragments, and syntheses
60 Design History Beyond the Canon

Figure 5.5 Publications and advertisements often recommended the removal of

certain architectural features, such as dormers, gables, porches, and towers, to create
simplified exteriors, as in this modernization scheme designed by L. Morgan Yost.
 Modernization, historic preservation, and the American home 61

introduced by middlebrow or ‘modified’ domestic practices.”66 However, this mediated

Modernism allowed for two of the most oppositional modernist ideologies, individualism
and universal design solutions, to exist in concert, albeit within a more ambiguously
modern context. Homeowners exerted agency over their design decisions, but solutions
were standardized and corporatized, with products and solutions marketed as effective
across a range of housing types and forms.
As Paul Atkinson observed, the modernization strategies put forth by mass-
circulation publications, promotional materials, and corporate advertisers during the
interwar and postwar periods “allowed people from a range of backgrounds, living in
housing stock of various ages to engage with modernist design principles without
employing expensive architectural advisors.”67 In creating these hybrid historic–modern
domestic environments, Modernism was mediated by the publisher, advertiser, or
designer of each intervention; by the subject house’s existing style and form; by building
materials and household technology; and, ultimately, by the homeowner’s own choices.

Modernization as preservation

While some homeowners valued old houses for their “special charm” or “warm lived-in
feeling,” older or historic houses were more often positioned as outdated, lackluster, or
unattractive, in contrast to the visual, social, and economic homogeneity of postwar
suburbia.68 The historic or architectural significance of these ordinary houses was,
for the most part, overlooked. Instead, they were positioned as spaces that could
be rethought and rejuvenated to suit the modern family. Better Housing News Flashes
“No. 6,” for example, urged homeowners to “consult an architect or builder to determine
whether there is a more useful and valuable building under your old one.”69 Even when
taking on a new identity, however, modernized houses overwhelmingly retained
historicizing elements, albeit often from a different period from the one in which the
house was originally built or original features re-exposed after late-nineteenth-century
accretions were stripped away.
What People Want When They Buy a House, prepared by the Housing and Home
Finance Agency and published by the US Department of Commerce in 1955, provides
valuable insight into how homebuyers perceived older and historic houses at mid-
century. The study was based primarily on two surveys conducted in 1949 and 1950 in
which 1,000 buyers of both old and new houses were interviewed in regard to their
housing preferences: 40 percent of buyers preferred a new house, while 20 percent
preferred an old one (the study defined “old” houses as any house that had been
previously occupied).70 Of those who favored old houses, 61 percent cited quality of
construction as old houses’ leading attribute, with 18 percent citing price as their most
attractive feature.71 Size was also a draw: older houses tended to have more stories,
more rooms, and were more likely to have a dining room.72 Interestingly, the appearance
of a house was of little importance to either group; only 3 percent of all buyers preferred
a certain architectural style.73 This suggests that the experiential aspects of domestic
modernity, such as comfort and ease, were more important to homebuyers than a
modern aesthetic.
62 Design History Beyond the Canon

The modernized houses presented in publications and advertisements of the late

postwar period were more ambiguous than earlier examples and yet more honest, with
historic and modern elements existing side by side. Some of the recommended
interventions are problematic from a contemporary preservation perspective, such as
the alterations presented in “The Home Improvement Pictorial,” published by the
Celotex Corporation (a manufacturer of roofing and insulation materials) in 1961
(Figure 5.6). Many original elements of the featured house, built in 1903, were obscured

Figure 5.6 The modernized houses presented in publications and advertisements

of the late postwar period were often more ambiguous than earlier examples, with
historic and modern elements existing side by side.
 Modernization, historic preservation, and the American home 63

or removed: “dated” dark wood trim and cracked plaster walls were covered with wood
paneling and acoustical ceiling tiles, a front porch was eliminated, and the house’s
entrance was moved to what had originally been a side elevation.74 While some of these
alterations negatively affected the house’s architectural integrity, the remodel
nevertheless resulted in its preservation, maintaining its essential historic form and use.
The unabashed complexity of such modernized houses was in direct opposition
to the “galloping restorationitis” that plagued many idealized reconstructions, in
which historic buildings were perfected and sanitized.75 Large-scale restorations and
reconstructions, such as Colonial Williamsburg and Greenfield Village, while certainly
attractive, were not reflective of the layers that accrue as architecture necessarily
changes over time; Ada Louise Huxtable called Williamsburg an “extraordinary,
conscientious and expensive exercise in historical play-acting in which real and
imitation . . . are carelessly confused.”76 These reconceived historic environments were
similar to the modernized older house of the interwar period, stripped down or built
up to reflect past styles and forms within the context of the present.
While it was much more frequently promoted in mass-circulation publications
and promotional materials, modernization was not the only option available to owners
of older houses during the interwar and postwar periods. Reproduction building
materials were first introduced in the 1930s, when professionals working on the
restoration of Colonial Williamsburg partnered with manufactures to create a range of
Williamsburg-branded “approved reproduction” materials that included historic paint
colors, wallpaper, moldings, interior tile, and fences. These were marketed both to
homeowners interested in remodeling or restoring their houses with greater attention
to historic accuracy and to those who wished to imbue newly constructed homes with
“correct” historicizing details.77 Other homeowners engaged in more traditional
preservation activities, completing historically accurate restorations based on careful
research and attention to existing building fabric.
These homeowners tended to be in the minority, however, reflecting the “activity of
a few upper-class antiquarians” as opposed to the actions of ordinary homeowners.78
The consumer-driven modernization under discussion here in many ways mirrors the
findings and recommendations of With Heritage So Rich, the seminal report on the
state of American preservation published in 1966, which concluded,“If the preservation
movement is to be successful, it must go beyond saving bricks and mortar. It must go
beyond saving occasional historic houses and opening museums. It must be more than
a cult of antiquarians. It must do more than revere a few precious national shrines.”79
The report recommended increased government support (both financial and
programmatic) and expanded public–private efforts in order to maintain historic
buildings as living parts of communities, something already achieved by homeowners’
individual modernization efforts.80
The passage of the National Historic Preservation Act in 1966 codified American
historic preservation activities, establishing federal and state oversight and standardized
guidelines for the treatment of historic buildings. By the late 1970s, preservation was
an accepted part of the DIY movement, with some homeowners increasingly interested
in the careful restoration of historic houses and manufacturers producing a broader
range of historically appropriate building materials.81 Iconic television program This
64 Design History Beyond the Canon

Old House premiered in 1979, paying closer attention to the accuracy of materials and
details but continuing to emphasize the adaptation of historic houses to accommodate
modern needs and technologies.
Examining interwar and postwar modernization efforts within the context of design
history challenges essential conceptions about the nature of design and preservation
and forces historians to reconsider whether such actions must be consciously
undertaken in order to be considered valid. While it is unlikely that the homeowners at
whom these advertisements, publications, and other materials were directed were
primarily motivated by a desire to preserve, the user-driven remodeling of older and
historic houses encouraged by this body of literature was ultimately an act of both
preservation and of modernization, completing a cycle of design and creating a hybrid
domestic identity that allowed homeowners to embrace modern living within the safe
confines of a mediated American past. As Fitch shrewdly observed, “In architecture
there are no spectators: there are only participants.”82 While modernization didn’t often
result in aesthetically or ideologically pure iterations of Modernism, it did create
numerous domestic environments—and homeowners—that engaged with modern
ideas, technologies, and finishes in all their complexity.

Notes
1 James Marston Fitch, “How to Merge What You’ve Got (the Past) with What You Want
(the Future),” House Beautiful (February 1952): 60–1.
2 Ibid., 61.
3 Many of the documents referenced in this chapter are part of the Building Technology
Heritage Library (BTHL), a collection of American and Canadian, pre–1964
architectural trade catalogs, house plan books, and technical building guides
maintained by the Internet Archive in conjunction with the Association for
Preservation Technology International.
4 Steven M. Gelber, “Do-It-Yourself: Constructing, Repairing, and Maintaining Domestic
Masculinity,” American Quarterly, 49 (March 1997): 79.
5 Armstrong Cork Co., “Ideas for Rooms Old and New from the Scrapbook of Hazel
Dell Brown,” 1944, 1, https://archive.org/details/IdeasForOldRoomsAndNew.
6 Richard S. Tedlow, New and Improved: The Story of Mass Marketing in America
(New York: Basic Books, 1990), p. 375.
7 Architect Julius Gregory touched on this theme in House and Garden in “Keep Your
Home from Slipping Back” (October 1933) and the “Remodeling Number” (November
1934), in which he observed, “Contrary to popular belief, houses don’t stand still. They
either march forward, or they slip back.”
8 Elizabeth Gordon, “The Threat to the Next America,” House Beautiful (April 1953):
126–31, 250–1.
9 Armstrong Cork Co., “A Houseful of Decorating Ideas,” 1953, 1, https://archive.org/
details/AHousefulOfDecoratingIdeas.
Benjamin Moore Co., “How to Protect and Preserve America’s Homes,” 1940, 1, https://
archive.org/details/HowToProtectAndPreserveAmericaHomes.
10 Notable recent studies of postwar housing include Barbara Miller Lane’s Houses for
a New World: Builders and Buyers in American Suburbs, 1945–1965 (Princeton:
 Modernization, historic preservation, and the American home 65

Princeton University Press, 2015) and James A. Jacob’s Detached America: Building
Houses in Postwar Suburbia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015).
Histories of the American historic preservation movement include Giving Preservation
a History: Histories of Historic Preservation in the United States, edited by Max Page
and Randall Mason (New York: Routledge, 2003) and Keeping Time: The History and
Theory of Preservation in America by William J. Murtagh (Hoboken: Wiley, third
edition, 2005). These tend not to address the smaller-scale actions of individual
homeowners in preserving older and historic houses, especially the manner in
which houses have changed over time as a result of user-driven interventions.
Barbara M. Kelly’s Expanding the American Dream: Building and Rebuilding
Levittown (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993) does address ways
in which homeowners have altered their homes, but her analysis is limited to a
specific postwar housing development. Important studies of DIY include Building
a Market: The Rise of the Home Improvement Industry, 1914–1960 by Richard
Harris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012) and Carolyn M. Goldstein’s
Do It Yourself: Home Improvement in 20th-Century America (New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 1998), which accompanied an exhibition at the National
Building Museum. The Journal of Design History addressed DIY in a special issue
in 2006.
11 “Historical Census of Housing Tables: Homeownership,” US Census Bureau, last
modified October 31, 2011, https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/census/
historic/owner.html.
12 Richard Harris, Building a Market: The Rise of the Home Improvement Industry,
1914–1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), p. 9.
13 Carolyn M. Goldstein, Do It Yourself: Home Improvement in 20th-Century America
(New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), p. 17. Richard Harris, “The Birth
of the North American Home Improvement Store, 1905–1929,” Enterprise & Society, 10
(December 2009): 698.
14 Goldstein, Do It Yourself, p. 25.
15 Gelber, “Do-It-Yourself,” p. 79.
16 Karen E. Altman, “Consuming Ideology: The Better Homes in America Campaign,”
Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 7 (1990): 286.
17 Harris, Building a Market, p. 162.
18 Goldstein, Do It Yourself, p. 25.
19 National Steel Fabric, “New Homes from Old Houses,” c. 1920, https://archive.org/
details/NewHomesFromOldHouses_901.
Weatherbest Stained Shingle Company, “Making Old Houses into Charming Homes,”
c. 1925, https://archive.org/details/
MakingOldHousesIntoCharmingHomesWithWeatherbestStainedShingles.
Barrett Company, “Better Homes from Old Houses: How to Make Your Old House
More Comfortable, More Attractive and Worth More Money,” 1924, https://archive.org/
details/BetterHomesFromOldHousesHowToMakeYourOldHouseMoreComfortable.
20 Weatherbest Stained Shingle Company, “Making Old Houses into Charming Homes,” 12.
Barrett Company, “Better Homes from Old Houses,” 1.
21 Weatherbest Stained Shingle Company, “Making Old Houses into Charming Homes,” 5.
22 US Census Bureau, “Historical Census of Housing Tables: Homeownership.”
Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 193.
23 Harris, Building a Market, p. 15.
66 Design History Beyond the Canon

24 John Normile, “Better Homes & Gardens Awards $1,000 Sweepstakes Prize,” Better
Homes & Gardens (April 1934): 13.
25 Federal Housing Administration, Bulletin for Manufacturers, Advertising Agencies &
Publishers (Washington, DC: US Government, 1934), p. 13.
26 Goldstein, Do It Yourself, p. 19.
27 Ibid., pp. 19–20.
28 Record Group 31, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC,
sound recording 3, part 2, quoted in Goldstein, Do It Yourself, p. 26.
29 Goldstein, Do It Yourself, p. 26.
30 Theodore E. Damm, “How the Paint Manufacturer Can Profit from the National
Housing Act,” Oil, Paint, and Drug Reporter, October 21, 1935, p. 27. Gabrielle Esperdy,
Modernizing Main Street: Architecture and Consumer Culture in the New Deal
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 64.
31 Goldstein, Do It Yourself, p. 26. Harris argues in Building a Market that this is a
generous figure, as it includes landlords and property owners who may have held
multiple modernization loans.
32 Sixth Annual Report of the Federal Housing Administration (Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office, 1940), pp. 87, 93.
33 Ibid., p. 94.
34 Ibid., p. 92.
35 Bird & Sons, Inc., “Are You Going to Build or Repair,” 1935, https://archive.org/details/
AreYouGoingToBuildOrRepair.
Eljer Company, “Modern as Tomorrow,” 1939, https://archive.org/details/
ModernAsTomorrow.
Weyerhaeuser Sales Co., “Good Homes Never Grow Old,” 1935, https://archive.org/
details/GoodHomesNeverGrowOldAManualForHomeOwnersOnTheEconomical.
Montgomery Ward, “Complete Catalog of Plumbing, Heating, Building Materials,”
1935, https://archive.org/details/
WardsCompleteCatalogOfPlumbingHeatingBuildingMaterials.
36 Sears, Roebuck and Company catalog, spring/summer 1940, pp. 636–7.
Montgomery Ward, “Complete Catalog of Plumbing, Heating, Building Materials.”
37 Goldstein, Do It Yourself, pp. 23–4.
38 Sears, Roebuck and Company catalog, spring/summer 1940, pp. 566–7.
39 US Census Bureau, “Historical Census of Housing Tables: Homeownership.”
40 Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, p. 232.
41 Ibid., p. 233.
42 US Census Bureau, “Historical Census of Housing Tables: Homeownership.”
“Historical Census of Housing Tables: Homeownership by Selected Demographic
and Housing Characteristics,” US Census Bureau, last modified October 31, 2011,
https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/census/historic/ownerchar.html.
43 “1956 as National Home Improvement Year,” Marriage and Family Living, 18(2)
(1956): 150.
44 Edward Thurber Paxton, What People Want When They Buy a House: A Guide for
Architects and Builders (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1955), p. 80.
45 See William Crouse’s Home Guide to Repair, Upkeep, and Remodeling (New York:
McGraw Hill, 1947), Reginald Hawkins and C. H. Abbe’s New Houses from Old: A
Guide to the Planning and Practice of House Remodeling (New York: McGraw Hill,
1948), and Henry Lionel Williams and Ottalie K. Williams, Modernizing Old Houses
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1948).
 Modernization, historic preservation, and the American home 67

46 “1956 as National Home Improvement Year,” p. 150. Harris, Building a Market,

p. 312.
47 Steven Gelber, Hobbies: Leisure and the Culture of Work in America (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 268.
48 This Week, June 3, 1956, p. 12, cited in Albert Roland, “Do-it-Yourself: A Walden for the
Millions?,” American Quarterly, 10(2) (Summer 1958): 155.
49 “The Shoulder Trade,” Time, August 2, 1954, p. 62.
50 Paul Atkinson, “Do It Yourself: Democracy and Design,” Journal of Design History,
19(1) (March 2006): 7.
51 “The Shoulder Trade,” quoted in Atkinson, “Do It Yourself,” p. 7.
52 R. W. Sexton, “The Use of Style in Architecture Today,” in The Better Homes Manual,
ed. Blanche Halbert (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931), pp. 149–50.
53 James Marston Fitch, “The New American Architecture Started 70 Years Ago,” House
Beautiful, May 1950, pp. 134–7.
54 Sandy Isenstadt, “Modern in the Middle,” Perspecta, 36 (2005): 67.
55 Goldstein, Do It Yourself, p. 20.
56 Gelber, Hobbies, p. 272.
57 Betsy Hunter Bradley, “Reviving Colonials and Colonial as Revival,” in Re-Creating the
American Past: Essays on the Colonial Revival, ed. Richard Guy Wilson, Shaun Eyring,
and Kenny Marotta (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006).
58 Federal Housing Administration, Better Housing News Flashes “No. 3,” National Archives
Record Group 31: Records of the Federal Housing Administration, 1930–1974.
59 Federal Housing Administration, Better Housing News Flashes “No. 6,” National Archives
Record Group 31: Records of the Federal Housing Administration, 1930–1974.
60 “101 Practical Suggestions for Home Improvements,” Johns-Manville Corporation,
1934, 1, https://archive.org/details/101PracticalSuggestionsForHomeImprovemen
ts–1934.
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid.
63 David Smiley, “Making the Modified Modern,” Perspecta, 32 (2001): 51.
64 Goldstein, Do It Yourself, p. 20.
65 United States Gypsum Co., “Popular Home’s Ideas Galore: How to Build, Buy,
Modernize and Decorate,” 1946, 57, https://archive.org/details/
UnitedStatesGypsumCo.0001.
66 Smiley, “Making the Modified Modern,” p. 51.
67 Atkinson, “Do It Yourself,” p. 7.
68 United States Gypsum Co., “Popular Home’s Ideas Galore,” pp. 53, 59.
69 Federal Housing Administration, Better Housing News Flashes “No. 6.”
70 Paxton, What People Want, p. 12.
71 Ibid., p. 83.
72 Ibid., pp. 81, 36.
73 Ibid., pp. 83, 16.
74 Celotex Corporation, “Home Improvement Pictorial,” 1961, https://archive.org/details/
HomeImprovementPictorial.
75 Ada Louise Huxtable, “Lively Original U.S. Dead Copy,” New York Times, May 9, 1965,
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1965/05/09/97198780.
html?pageNumber=482.
76 lbid.
77 Goldstein, Do It Yourself, pp. 90, 91.
68 Design History Beyond the Canon

78 “Focus on Preservation,” Architectural Record (March 1991), p. 152.

79 United States Conference of Mayors Special Committee on Historic Preservation, With
Heritage So Rich (Washington, DC: Preservation Books, 1999), p. 193.
80 Ibid., p. 194.
81 Goldstein, Do It Yourself, p. 94.
82 James Marston Fitch, “The Future of Architecture,” in James Marston Fitch: Selected
Writings on Architecture, Preservation, and the Built Environment, ed. Martica Sawin
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), p. 280.
 Section 2

Intermediaries

69
70
 Representing modern architecture in
The Rockford Files, 1974–1980
Christopher S. Wilson

Rockford

The Rockford Files was a 1970s weekly American television series that narrated the
exploits of Los Angeles private investigator Jim Rockford, played by Hollywood veteran
James Garner (1928–2014). Rockford, a pardoned convict, was not like other “private
eyes” who had been previously depicted on either stage or screen. Paul Green, biographer
of Rockford Files co-creator Roy Huggins, has described Jim Rockford as “an everyman
and not impossible tough guy figure removed from the experience of the viewer. He loses
his teeth in fights, can’t afford fancy restaurants, asks his father for aspirin and often
doesn’t get paid for his efforts. He struggles to get along.”1 In the words of James Garner:

[Rockford is] a quirky character who turns all the private eye clichés inside out: he
works out of a broken-down trailer at the beach instead of a seedy downtown
office; he’s got a telephone answering machine rather than a leggy secretary; and
while most private eyes are loners without families, Rockford has his dad, Rocky.2

Jim Rockford was cautious; he was not a tough guy who thrived on danger. He would
rather run away than fight, believing that “bravery gets you nothing but hurt.”3 In fact,
Rockford does not like to hit people because it hurts his hand. He owns a gun, but keeps
it in a cookie jar on his kitchen counter. He rarely carried it because, as he said, “If I carry
a gun, I may have to shoot somebody.”4 Jim Rockford was an ordinary guy, with a slight
paunch because of his weakness for tacos and Oreos. Rockford has little ambition beyond
being able to pay his bills, go fishing with his dad, and drink beer while watching TV.
The main character of The Rockford Files was not the only aspect of the show that
made it different from other TV shows of the time; it was also how the weekly stories
were filmed and how they were portrayed on the television screen. Speaking to this
aspect of The Rockford Files, James Garner has said:

In the 1970s, Universal was a factory for prime-time television series: Columbo,
Quincy, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman—all the shows had a
similar style, or lack of it. Bland. Cookie-cutter. The studio cared more about

71
72 Design History Beyond the Canon

getting them out than getting them good. I didn’t want Rockford to be tainted by
that attitude, so I hired my own production crew and bought my own location
equipment. I wanted to get off Universal’s back lot, and I wanted the camera to
follow Rockford wherever he went, so we shot more than half the scenes on
location.5

A total of 122 episodes of The Rockford Files were created over six seasons between
1974 and 1980, with more than half of each show taking place outside and/or in the
actual streets of Los Angeles. Besides Jim Rockford’s trailer, the show’s set was basically
the city of Los Angeles itself. Rockford frequently impersonated different characters to
get the information required for his investigations, which resulted in seeing him at
various Los Angeles locales as he talked his way into and out of many different
situations. A look at the shooting call sheets published in a Rockford Files anthology
reveals locations such as: Exterior, Airport; Exterior, Industrial Area; Exterior, Museum;
Exterior, Embassy; Exterior, Hot Dog Stand; Exterior Payphone; Interior, Bank; and
Interior, Bar. Advanced locations on these same sheets are listed as: Exterior, Donut
Shop; Exterior, Mexican Restaurant; Exterior, Raceway; Exterior, Shopping Mall;
Interior, Beauty Parlor; and of course, Exterior, Rockford Trailer.6 This predominance
of outside filming was in stark contrast to other television shows at the same time—
some listed above—that were mostly shot inside sterile studio conditions or outside on
the fake streets of a studio’s back lot. Watching The Rockford Files each week meant
personally following Jim Rockford around the streets of Los Angeles as he pursued
various clues, hunches, and leads, until he finally solved the mystery of that episode.
That is, watching The Rockford Files was like traveling around Los Angeles itself.
Because of this, the image of 1970s Los Angeles owes a lot to The Rockford Files—and
vice-versa: the two seem to be inextricably intertwined.

Modern architecture

A major component of Los Angeles’ image as depicted in The Rockford Files is the
occurrence of modern architecture in the background or as a backdrop to the action.
To understand the significance of modern architecture in the 1970s, one must first
understand its origins and development. Modern architecture first appeared around
the turn of the twentieth century in Europe, particularly in Germany, the Netherlands,
and France. Following the industrialization of the nineteenth century, architects and
designers began to feel that new buildings and objects should take on new forms to
match the new age. This resulted in undecorated, geometrical forms with flat roofs and
large expanses of floor-to-ceiling glass that utilized the new materials of iron, steel, and
reinforced concrete. Experimentation in the 1920s and 1930s led to a general acceptance
of this new style in Europe. However, it took until the 1950s for modern architecture to
become commonplace in North America. This acceptance came about partly because
of economics—modern architecture was less expensive to construct than traditional
architecture—but also partly because of the forward-looking attitude that characterized
the style and matched the optimistic post-World War II spirit of the time period. As
 Representing modern architecture in The Rockford Files 73

summarized by architectural historian William J. R. Curtis, “The 1950s in the United

States was a period of unparalleled prosperity and relative optimism, in which scientific
and technological ingenuity allowed an increasing sophistication in the construction,
servicing and detailing of buildings.”7
By the 1970s, however, modern architecture and its stark minimalism began to be
questioned, by architects, designers, and the public at large. Specifically, architects
started to challenge the notion that buildings should be, in the words of famous Swiss
modern architect Le Corbusier, “machines for living.”8 They started to look back at the
merits of historical precedents and merged them with the modern architecture
experiments of the twentieth century, resulting in a sort of mash-up style that has been
labeled “Post-Modern Architecture.” Architectural historian Charles Jencks has tongue-
in-cheekly proclaimed that “Modern Architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri on July
15, 1972 at 3:32 pm (or thereabouts) when the infamous Pruitt Igoe scheme, or rather
several of its slab blocks, were given the final coup de grâce by dynamite.”9
The result of this questioning of modern architecture was a change in the general
meaning and/or understanding of it. As argued by architect Robert Venturi in
Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, characteristics such as pure, simple,
clean, and straightforward can also be interpreted as impersonal, boring, conventional,
and redundant.10 And so, whereas modern before the 1970s meant new, futuristic,
progressive, and avant-garde, after the 1970s modern came to mean inhuman, cold,
brutal, and outdated. This is where Los Angeles and The Rockford Files comes in: despite
the gangsters, pimps, schemes, scams, dirty deals, and double-crossing that takes place
in the stories of The Rockford Files, the image of Los Angeles that is projected is
generally a positive one. It is a place where mysteries are solved, a place where the bad
guys get punished, a place where the underdog is supported, and, being southern
California, a place where the sun is always shining. A major component of this positive
image is the modern architecture in the background of most scenes, both inside and
outside. That is, in The Rockford Files, the modern built environment is depicted as an
optimistic place in which everyday life occurs. The modern architecture of The Rockford
Files is far from inhuman or outdated; if anything, it is the backdrop for the drama lived
out every day of one’s life.
This positive image is in contrast to the negative image of 1970s New York portrayed
in television and cinema of the time—crumbling, seedy, crime-ridden—that also
contains modern architecture in the background. Television shows contemporaneous
to The Rockford Files depict the streets of New York as a dirty place to retreat from into
the safety of one’s personal apartment (The Odd Couple, 1970–1975), or where
controversial (and therefore unsafe) social issues of the time period played out (All in
the Family, 1971–1979), or where bad things could happen to good people (Kojak,
1973–1978). Similarly, contemporaneous films depict the streets of New York as full of
gun-toting, bank-robbing, hi-jacking thugs. The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
(1974) follows four criminals with machine guns as they attempt to hi-jack a New York
City subway car with seventeen passengers as hostages in exchange for one million
dollars. A Dog Day Afternoon (1975) narrates a botched bank robbery on a hot
summer’s day that also involves hostages. Taxi Driver (1976) follows the eponymous
character around New York as a vigilante fighting against the city’s sleaze, corruption,
74 Design History Beyond the Canon

and prostitution. In these depictions, the modern, urban, and advanced New York is a
place where just walking down the street, using the subway, or even going to the bank
is a dangerous proposition.
Conversely, in The Rockford Files, modern-styled office buildings, schools, hospitals,
courthouses, universities, museums, apartment buildings, hotels, and even parking
garages serve as a backdrop representing Los Angeles as a modern, forward-looking,
and progressive city. As opposed to modern and dirty New York, Los Angeles is
modern and clean. While the storylines of The Rockford Files reveal just as much sleaze,
crime, and corruption as the New York TV shows and films described above, this is
mitigated by the pleasant modern built environment that serves as a backdrop to the
action. That is, in the Los Angeles of The Rockford Files, there still may be gun-toting,
bank-robbing, hi-jacking thugs, but the pleasant and modern built environment makes
them less noticeable. And, being southern California, the thugs also wear sunglasses
and frequent the beach.
For example, in Season 2, Episode 14, Rockford’s former cellmate Gandolph Finch
is released from prison after twenty years and seeks Rockford’s help in proving his
innocence. One of their first stops is Finch’s former employer, loan shark and pimp
Charles R. Runkin, who, in the years that Finch was in prison, had transitioned to the
respectable world of suits and lawyers. Proof of this respectability is the modern office
building where Rockford and Finch find Mr. Runkin (Figure 6.1). In fact, the building

Figure 6.1 Respectability made three-dimensional through modern architecture: The

“Charles R. Runkin Building,” Season 2, Episode 14.
 Representing modern architecture in The Rockford Files 75

Figure 6.2 Jim Rockford [right] and former cellmate Gandolph Finch [left] at the
entrance to the “Charles R. Runkin Building,” Season 2, Episode 14.

is even named after him; “The Runkin Building” (Figure 6.2) is a tall, gleaming, modern
concrete structure that seems to confirm Mr. Runkin’s decency. Finch even comments:
“Well, after all these years . . . it looks like he done pretty good for himself.” The modern
structure, however, is just an appearance of respectability, because when Finch asks
Runkin for his pre-prison “muscle” job back, Runkin admits that the few times a year
when he does need muscle, he brings it in from out of town.
Another example, from Season 5, Episode 3, is when Rockford is framed for murder.
The initial hearing for the case takes place at the Santa Monica County Courthouse.
Following this hearing, wherein enough doubt was cast to drop the charges, Rockford
and his lawyer “Coop” Cooper discuss the possibilities about who may have actually
committed the murder as they make their way back to their respective cars (Figure 6.3).
All throughout this back-and-forth discussion, which lasts a good three minutes, the
modern courthouse looms in the background, ubiquitous and ever-present (Figure 6.4).
The courthouse in this scene is literally the backdrop for the intense discussion, serving
exactly like a backdrop in a theater: to provide the context in which to place the dialog.
It is as if the modern courthouse building—with its flat roof, undecorated geometric
surfaces, and plain coloring—represents, in the background, the dispenser of modern
justice.
The Rockford Files contains many scenes similar to this in which Rockford and
another person, usually his lawyer, discuss a subject and walk at the same time, resulting
in a series of buildings or interiors moving in the background (Figures 6.5 and 6.6).
Figure 6.3 Jim Rockford [right] and lawyer “Coop” Cooper [left] exit the modern
“Santa Monica County Building,” Season 5, Episode 3.

Figure 6.4 Jim Rockford [right] and lawyer “Coop” Cooper [left] debate in the
parking lot of the modern “Santa Monica County Building,” Season 5, Episode 3.

76
Figure 6.5 Jim Rockford [right] and stewardess friend Lori Jenivan [left] walking
through LAX airport, Season 3, Episode 1.

Figure 6.6 Jim Rockford [right] discussing a contract with lawyer Beth Davenport
[middle] and friend Aaron Ironwood [left], Season 2, Episode 1.
77
78 Design History Beyond the Canon

These buildings and interiors are always modern, and they always present a positive
image of Los Angeles. When looking at the entire six years (and eight TV movies) of
The Rockford Files, what emerges is a picture of Los Angeles as a modern, forward-
looking, and progressive city. This image, however, is conveyed without the use of any
of the canonical modern architectural gems of Los Angeles such as Frank Lloyd
Wright’s textile-block houses, the white boxes of Richard Neutra and Rudolph
Schindler, the Case Study Houses sponsored by the magazine Arts + Architecture, John
Lautner’s Chemosphere House, or Pereira and Luckman’s Union Oil Center, just to
name a few. That is, the architectural aesthetics of The Rockford Files were more oriented
towards “the everyday” than they were towards “the canon.” A sort-of “vernacular
modernism” is portrayed—modern architecture as background architecture, rather
than standing out from the rest.

Vernacular modernism

The idea of “vernacular” is not unique to architecture. The term is derived from the
Latin vernaculus, meaning “native.” It is most commonly used in the field of linguistics,
to describe a common or shared language amongst a group of people. Other uses of the
word include vernacular art (those objects made by ordinary people, not designers),
vernacular culture (those practices, mostly ritualistic, performed by ordinary people),
and vernacular geography (the sense of place revealed by a society’s local surroundings).
Anthropologist Margaret Lantis has defined the components of the vernacular as:
values and goals, time and place, common knowledge, attitude systems, relationship
systems, sanctions, and communication, underlining the fact that “the vernacular” is
just as much a viable concept to study as “the canonical.”11
Vernacular architecture is defined as those buildings constructed that are based
on local needs, utilizing local construction materials, and usually reflecting local
traditions. Its forms vary in shape, style, and material—from the Bali rice barn to the
British thatched cottage to the American “shotgun shack.” Typically, design professionals
are rarely—if ever—involved in the production of vernacular architecture, as revealed
in the title of Bernard Rudofsky’s 1964 landmark book, Architecture without Architects:
A Short Introduction to Non-Pedigreed Architecture.12 University of California
Berkeley Professor Nezar AlSayyad has defined vernacular architecture as “native or
unique to a specific place, produced without the need for imported components and
processes, and possibly built by the individuals who occupy it,” but continues this
sentence by acknowledging that such a definition is changing in the twenty-first
century: “as culture and tradition are becoming less place-rooted and more information-
based, these particular attributes of the vernacular have to be recalibrated to reflect
these changes.”13
I use the term “vernacular modernism” to describe the architectural aesthetics of
The Rockford Files not because those buildings were produced by the local population
with local materials, but because they are buildings that were produced without a
heroic designer. Identified by architect and graphic designer Martin Treu as a form of
“commercial architecture,”14 it is the strip malls, banks, drugstores, gas stations,
 Representing modern architecture in The Rockford Files 79

furniture stores, food stands, beauty parlors, and supermarkets that proliferated
the built environment, especially in North America, after the acceptance of high
modernism following World War II (Figures 6.7 to 6.10). Such buildings have all the
characteristics of modern architecture—flat roofs, large plate-glass windows, and no
traditional decoration—but are not necessarily icons worthy of being included in the
architectural history textbooks because they were not designed by some great master
like Frank Lloyd Wright. Such buildings are indeed designed and constructed by
professionals—architects, planners, interiors designers, etc.—they just do not have the
same pedigree as other, more heroic buildings. In addition to these commercial
buildings, the other component to vernacular modernism is the “stuff in-between”
them—the parking lots, highways, billboards, and signage that come with such an
automobile-oriented environment—brilliantly analyzed by architects Robert Venturi,
Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour in their landmark 1972 book, Learning from
Las Vegas.15
Returning to Los Angeles and The Rockford Files, the modern architecture that
serves as a background in most scenes is composed of this vernacular modernism of
strip malls, gas stations, parking garages, and supermarkets. Matching the character of
Jim Rockford, who is not a glamorous personality but a sort of “everyman,” the
background architecture of The Rockford Files consists of the “everyday” environment
of Los Angeles, not of dazzling locations with breathtaking views. That is, Rockford the

Figure 6.7 “Vernacular modernism”: Jim Rockford’s car driving on a Los Angeles
freeway in the opening credits to The Rockford Files.
Figure 6.8 “Vernacular modernism”: A motel as seen in Season 1, Episode 10.

Figure 6.9 “Vernacular modernism”: Jim Rockford [left] at a fast-food stand with
friend and client Rita Capkovic [right], Season 4, Episode 16.

80
 Representing modern architecture in The Rockford Files 81

Figure 6.10 “Vernacular modernism”: Two thugs search for Jim Rockford in a
concrete parking garage, Season 5, Episode 14.

“everyman” experiences his life—each weekly episode—in the streets of vernacular Los
Angeles. Let’s not forget that, after all, Rockford lives in a trailer.
Some may say that the background architecture of The Rockford Files is nothing
special. After all, the series was filmed on the streets of a city that had major post-World
War II development, coinciding—as explained above—with the rise of modern
architecture in the USA. This might explain the strip malls, gas stations, and hot dog
stands, but does not explain the set-up shots that are constantly used throughout the
episodes to inform the viewer where the action is about to take place. These are three- to
four-second shots, almost stills, that focus on a building—always modern—resulting in
stereotypical building images: hotel, university, federal building, museum, etc. (Figures 6.11
to 6.14). In addition to these specific set-up shots of modern architecture, there are often
other, more general, shots of modern Los Angeles (office buildings, skylines, bridges, etc.)
that also “set the scene.” Such set-up shots primarily reinforce Los Angeles as a modern
city, but they also work to validate these stereotypical building images in their modern
form. That is, in the nineteenth century—during the period of “the styles”—certain
building types became associated with certain styles (banks and government buildings =
Classical temples; educational buildings = Gothic; libraries = Romanesque, etc.). With the
advent of modern architecture, this all changed stylistically but not ideologically: various
building types—particularly institutional buildings—have a stereotypical modern
version, which is being reinforced by these Rockford Files set-up scenes.
82 Design History Beyond the Canon

Figure 6.11 The image of “hotel,” as seen in Season 5, Episode 8.

Figure 6.12 The image of “university,” as seen in Season 4, Episode 13.

 Representing modern architecture in The Rockford Files 83

Figure 6.13 The image of “federal building,” as seen in Season 2, Episode 15.

Figure 6.14 The image of “museum,” as seen in Season 5, Episode 20.

84 Design History Beyond the Canon

Multiple modernisms

The relevance of this discussion of the architecture depicted in The Rockford Files to this
book’s topic of looking “beyond the canon” is two-fold. Firstly, examining such popular
culture staples as television shows is worth the time of the design historian because
such shows cannot take place within a vacuum or against a blank screen. During each
show, the characters will be dressed in a certain way, they will be surrounded with and
use designed objects, and the action will take place inside specific interiors and around
specific exteriors—all of which can be identified and analyzed for historical purposes.
More specifically, however, this analysis of the architecture depicted in The Rockford
Files has revealed that modern architecture is not just simply what can be found in the
textbooks. That side of modern architecture is a grand (hi)story composed of iconic
structures that were designed by iconic architects. Such buildings are photographed in
majestic sweeping views—often without people—and distributed via architectural
magazines, journals, textbooks, and, most recently, the internet. An entire culture (or
cult) of architectural tourism has evolved in recent years in which people travel from
place to place just to see these icons, often to take the exact same photograph as they
have seen in the magazine or textbook. But what has been revealed in this chapter is that
there is another side to modern architecture—a vernacular modernism—which is just
as relevant and deserves the attention of the design historian. Such an analysis opens up
the possibility, not only in architecture but in all areas of design history, of “multiple
modernisms.” Not just one, single modernism, but a multiplicity of modernisms that
co-exist parallel to each other, sometimes informing each other and at other times not.
It is the recognition that not all buildings are destined to become design icons—even the
reassurance that this should not be the case (imagine a world where every single building
screams out “I am an icon!”). It is the recognition that “the everyday” is just as important—
if not more so—as “the extraordinary,” a point that can easily be made both inside and
outside the classroom. And, in the end, the recognition and acceptance of such
multiplicities is the very definition of looking “beyond the canon.”

Notes
1 Paul Green, Roy Huggins: Creator of “Maverick,” “77 Sunset Strip,” “The Fugitive” and
“The Rockford Files” (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2014), p. 126.
2 James Garner and Jon Winokur, The Garner Files: A Memoir (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 2011), p. 128.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid., p. 126.
6 Ed Robertson, Thirty Years of THE ROCKFORD FILES: An Inside Look at America’s
Greatest Detective Series (New York: ASJA Press, 2005), pp. 322, 330, 362, and 365.
7 William J. R. Curtis, Modern Architecture since 1900 (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice
Hall, 1996), p. 400.
8 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (1923), trans. Frederick Etchells (New York:
Dover Publications, 1986), p. 4.
 Representing modern architecture in The Rockford Files 85

9 Charles Jencks, The New Paradigm in Architecture: The Language of Post-Modernism

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 10.
10 Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: The Museum
of Modern Art, 1966), p. 16.
11 Margaret Lantis, “Vernacular Culture,” American Anthropologist, 2 (1960): 206.
12 Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture without Architects: A Short Introduction to Non-
Pedigreed Architecture (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964).
13 Nezar Al Sayyad, “Foreword,” Vernacular Architecture in the 21st Century: Theory,
Education and Practice (London: Taylor & Francis, 2006), p. xvii.
14 Martin Treu, Signs, Streets, and Storefronts: A History of Architecture and Graphics along
America’s Commercial Corridors (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
2012).
15 Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Bown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The
Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972).
86
 CLOTHES CLOTHES CLOTHES PUNK PUNK
PUNK WOMEN WOMEN WOMEN
Maria Elena Buszek

On July 14, 2016, Viv Albertine—of the legendary, all-woman band The Slits—arrived
at the British Library to speak as part of its Punk 1976–78 exhibition. The library had
been collecting material from the British punk movement since the 1970s, and the
exhibition was organized as part of the year-long, city-wide Punk.London celebrations
commemorating the “40th anniversary” of the movement in the UK, which most
participants and scholars agree coalesced around the first performances of the Sex Pistols
in 1976.1 Albertine’s talk was organized—like other events that included The Raincoats’
Gina Birch, punk-musician-turned-scholar Helen “McCookerybook” Reddington of The
Chefs, and Albertine’s fellow Slits member Tessa Pollitt—as part of the library’s efforts to
encourage discussion regarding the significant contributions of women to punk’s
foundations during these formative years. And, yet, in ways reflective of the very clichés
these speakers were coordinated to contradict, the exhibition’s checklist and labels
perpetuated the perspective that UK punk was a near-entirely male phenomenon.
Albertine strode onto the British Library’s stage, clearly a bit hot under the collar,
and opened her talk by asking the audience whether they had seen the exhibition’s
introductory “yellow panel,” name-checking a series of bands listed there as pioneers
of the movement: “The Sex Pistols, The Buzzcocks, la-la-la . . . they didn’t mention the
female bands!” She then added, mischievously, “There is now, if you want to go
around and have a look”2 (Figure 7.1). As was reported by the music press in the
ensuing days, Albertine had vandalized the exhibition’s introductory label and
“corrected” it to include some of the listed bands’ women contemporaries and
collaborators—not a stretch, considering, as the punk-era music journalist Caroline
Coon has confidently asserted: “It would be possible to write the whole history of punk
music without mentioning any male bands at all.”3 And yet, Albertine lamented, the
battle for women’s visibility in punk history continues: “It’s a fight that, honestly, never,
ever ends.”4
Albertine’s critically acclaimed 2014 autobiography CLOTHES CLOTHES
CLOTHES MUSIC MUSIC MUSIC BOYS BOYS BOYS—titled after her mother’s
exasperated mantra during Albertine’s adolescence, filled as it was with these very
obsessions—goes a long way in correcting the historical record. (So, too, have more
recent autobiographies by contemporaries such as Chrissie Hynde, Grace Jones, and

87
88 Design History Beyond the Canon

Figure 7.1 Detail of Viv Albertine’s “corrected” introductory label to the Punk
1976–78 exhibition, 2016.

Cosey Fanny Tutti.) The book was a bestseller among music fans, but scholars of art
and design history would do well to read this art-school dropout’s insights into the
interconnectedness of the visual, musical, and performance cultures of punk, as well as
punk’s role as a feminist incubator for many in her generation. In particular, and as
evidenced by the primacy of “CLOTHES” in the book’s title, Albertine champions the
fact that fashion was the first way in which punk culture expressed itself, its participants
found one another, and perhaps the one subject on which women were looked to as
authorities at punk’s start. This authority was reflected in the significance of women as
professional designers and do-it-yourself pioneers in punk fashion, and also instilled
in many an agency that extended to other parts of their lives. Because recent
anniversaries around punk’s fourth decade have seen a burst of interest in establishing
a canon of its foundational figures that too often marginalize, or outright ignore, the
contributions of women, I would like to address the pivotal roles of both fashion and
women as “intermediaries” in the gestation of UK punk, with a focus on influential
figures for whom clothing served as an empowering extension of their creative practice
and, for several, a realization of their feminist politics.
 CLOTHES PUNK WOMEN 89

“I thought the fashion was much more important than the music. Punk was the
sound of that fashion.”5
Malcolm McLaren

While the precise origins and birthplace of punk are too nebulous and contested to
be fleshed out in any detail here, there is general agreement that between the mutation
of an aggressive American garage-rock sound represented by Detroit’s Iggy and the
Stooges in the late 1960s and the first public performances of London’s Sex Pistols in
1976, a youth subculture recognized as “punk” emerged. The movement’s labeling is
often credited to the New York City fanzine Punk, founded in 1975 by John Holstrom
and Legs McNeil to document the stripped-down, grungy rock scene that began to
revolve around writer-musician Patti Smith and the club CBGB’s in the mid-1970s.
However, the term first entered popular culture decades earlier, arguably through the
writings of William S. Burroughs, whose chronicles of queer life often referenced this
underground term for young, gay hoodlums. “Punk” was first appropriated by popular
music in 1971, when Creem magazine’s Dave Marsh used the term “punk rock” in a
piece about the flamboyant, working-class style and exuberantly messy sound of
Chicano one-hit wonders ? and the Mysterians, and again in 1973 by his Rolling Stone
colleague Greg Shaw (and publisher of the music ‘zine Who Put the Bomp?) in his
review of the garage-rock compilation Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First
Psychedelic Era. Here, Shaw defines punk as “the arrogant underbelly of Sixties pop:”
proudly unschooled, unhinged, and primitive.6 The fact that this style caught on in the
midst of a ballooning economic crisis in the West during the 1970s is no coincidence.
Scholars Dick Hebdige and Simon Frith influentially added to the earliest definitions
of punk the notion that the decade’s recession, poverty, and political turmoil led this
subculture toward a rejection of hippie optimism and “glam-rock” decadence in favor
of a gritty, angry expression of what Frith, by way of Hebdige, called “an oblique
challenge to hegemony.”7
But before it coalesced into a full-blown musical genre, as McLaren’s quote above
asserts, punk was recognized as a “look” rather than a “sound”—and both evolved from
the increasingly visible queer culture that its roots in Burroughs’ writing acknowledges.
As one of the first journalists for London’s music weeklies to write about the then-
emergent punks, Coon noted in the summer of 1976 that all its strands seemed to lead
to David Bowie, who had at that point abandoned his flashy, glam-rock “Ziggy Stardust”-
era personae, adopted a sleek, minimalist look and sound, and moved to Berlin with
Iggy Pop in an effort to immerse himself in the city’s lingering, Dada-era vibes.8
Important, too, was Bowie collaborator Lou Reed’s recent incarnation as a Rock’n’Roll
Animal, through which Reed adopted a similarly theatrical, if less fey, persona: studded-
leather-clad, head shaved, eyes ringed in thick black eyeliner.9 These stark, Weimar
Republic inspirations would have been instantly recognized by the art-school students
who dominated the early UK punk scene, bringing with them a knowledge of the Dada
and Surrealist art crucially rediscovered and taught by their professors who came of age
in the Pop Art era.10 So, too, was this era a rediscovered touchstone for the city’s queer
clubs of the mid-1970s, where interwar-inspired get-ups proliferated following the 1972
hit film Cabaret’s popularization of Weimar kabarett glamour, and dovetailed neatly
90 Design History Beyond the Canon

with glam-rock androgyny.11 These scenes merged as the future founders of the Sex
Pistols, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Clash, and The Slits gravitated toward London
clubs associated with the city’s gay and lesbian scenes, such as Chaugerama’s (eventually,
and famously, rechristened The Roxy), the Masquerade Club, and Louise’s, as would the
Manchester punks who eventually formed The Buzzcocks and Ludus frequent that city’s
drag bar, Dickens. All these clubs were known for playing the dance-oriented glam-rock
of Bowie and Roxy Music, as well as the sensuous soul of Barry White and Isaac Hayes—
music miles away from the chart-making, squeaky-clean sounds of The Bay City Rollers
and Brotherhood of Man that dominated the British airwaves in 1976. As Siouxsie Sioux
would reminisce about punk before “punk:” “Before it got a label it was a club for misfits.
Waifs, male gays, female gays, bisexuals, non-sexuals, everything. No one was criticized
for their sexual preferences [. . .] we attracted that ambiguous sexuality.”12 And cultivating
this “ambiguously”-gendered, Weimar-inspired look meant that soon enough the few
shops that specialized in the unusual, provocative clothing that went over in these scenes
themselves became clubhouses—none more influential than the boutique at 430 King’s
Road run by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, the latter determined to put a
“sound” to the look.
In 1971, Westwood and McLaren had taken over the storefront of the former Paradise
Garage on the King’s Road fashion strip in London, peddling the vintage dead-stock that
appealed to London’s “Teddy Boys,” and clothing of their own design inspired by the
Teds’ Edwardian-England-meets-50s-rockabilly look. They rechristened the shop first as
Let It Rock, then in 1973 changed it to Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die, whereupon
it became a constantly evolving storefront in the mold of Granny Takes a Trip, established
a few doors down in 1963. Granny Takes a Trip was founded at the then-unfashionable
side of the King’s Road known as “World’s End,” but would eventually bookend the strip
that was arguably first established when Mod maven Mary Quant’s boutique opened at
the opposite end in 1955. Granny Takes a Trip was curated with a Pop Art sensibility,
organized events, printed poster art, and even produced an album.13 As English designer
and curator Jane Withers would later write, this model of “the pop boutique” “offered the
possibility of an environment that was both an artistic and a commercial outlet—a
fusion of studio and gallery, court and stage.”14 To peripatetic art student McLaren, 430
Kings Road offered him an opportunity to put his interests in conceptual art—which he
studied at Central St Martin’s, Chiswick Polytechnic, Croydon College of Art, Harrow
Art College, and Goldsmiths (without ever graduating from any of them)—into real-life
practice, in the manner of neighboring Granny’s.
McLaren had also been associated with the King Mob group, formed by a group of
Brits inspired by the Situationist International (SI) movement, which had emerged in
continental Europe after World War II. Claiming themselves heirs to the interwar Dada
movement, the Paris-based SI espoused the idea of detournement, or the strategy of
appropriating and then manipulating pre-existing imagery, texts, narratives, and
technology from the so-called “spectacle” of popular culture in order to undermine the
status quo it propped up. According to Situationist theory, these “detourned” projects
would stealthily re-enter pop culture, whereupon their seeming familiarity would lend
them an audience, but their contradictory, anti-consumption, anti-capitalist messages
would instigate a wave of critical thinking, protest, and even revolution to overthrow
 CLOTHES PUNK WOMEN 91

what they saw as a complacent, bourgeois postwar order.15 In its publications and
interventions, the British King Mob group held up American lesbian feminist Valerie
Solanas as an exemplar for the putting radical theory of her S.C.U.M Manifesto into
practice in her (unsuccessful) plot to assassinate Andy Warhol in 1968—the same year
that SI-affiliated youth helped successfully shut down the city and suburbs of Paris in
the May ’68 uprising. McLaren was convinced that the working-class, often violent
subcultures of the Teds and, later, The Wild Ones-emulating “Rockers” to whom his
boutique catered might be ideal collaborators (or, at the very least, minions) for the
SI-inspired projects that he had in mind.16
Westwood was, if anything, more fueled by and dedicated to the activist
underpinnings of the Situationists, though she lacked the formal education in their
principles that McLaren enjoyed. Born into a working-class family in the northern
county of Derbyshire, Westwood went to Harrow Art School for just one year, studying
silversmithing and painting, but quit and put herself through secretarial school and
teacher’s college. Supporting her family—son Ben from her first marriage, Joe from her
relationship with McLaren, and McLaren himself—with a meager teacher’s salary,
McLaren pulled her into the shop at 430 King’s Road after he took it over, in hopes that
her modern copies of 1950s fashions might supplement his unsuccessful scheme of
selling at a mark-up the vintage records he had spent his art-school grants buying.
Westwood had grown up in relative poverty (in the era of post-World War II rationing,
no less), and was a self-taught seamstress, making her own clothing since adolescence.17
What began as an exercise in pattern-making—as she literally took apart vintage
clothing to learn how to recreate desirable “drape” jackets and zoot suits for the Teds—
quickly took over the store, as the couple’s increasingly modern and, eventually, wildly
original twists on and repurposing of vintage fashions took over the shop’s aesthetic.
Westwood and McLaren began experimenting with more and more aggressive and
confrontational “rocker” styles—leather, metal studs, zips, and even bicycle-tire and
chicken-bone embellishments—in unisex styles and sizes. Following their SI influences,
they also began hand-printing texts, slogans, and lists onto their clothes using a toy
printing set and stencils, marker pens, and fabric dye: “The Barrier Between Friend and
Foe is Thin,” “At Certain Times of the Day There Are Only Us,” “Create Hell and Get
Away With It,” “Be Reasonable Demand The Impossible.”18 By 1974, these experiments
had led them toward increasingly pornographic designs and materials, studying BDSM
fetish gear long custom-tailored and sold by mail-order and at underground
establishments like London Leatherman, and yet another change of name for 430
King’s Road, now provocatively dubbed SEX. The shop was a magnet for the mostly
teenaged “misfits” who had been congregating at clubs like Louise’s, and vice-versa.19
The store’s growing popularity with this new youth subculture inspired McLaren—
no doubt remembering the fictional pop group whose name King Mob had invented
and sprayed around Victoria Station as one of their many efforts to create hype around
their politics20—to piece together a phony band of, essentially, mannequins to shill the
store’s wares. Their name first appeared well before the group existed, on a screen-
printed SEX T-shirt of 1974, cooked up by the shop’s sometime manager and fellow SI
enthusiast Bernard Rhodes, with contributions from McLaren, and which served as
something of a manifesto for the shop’s aims. Often called the “Loves/Hates T-shirt,”
92 Design History Beyond the Canon

(Figure 7.2) it began with the ominous statement: “you’re gonna wake up one morning
and know what side of the bed you’ve been lying on!” followed by a list of hated,
establishment cultural phenomena (“the ICA and its symposiums” “THE ARTS
COUNCIL” “David Hockney & Victorianism” “POP STARS who are thick and useless”),
separated by a diagonal line of white space dividing it from a list of, presumably,
approved ideas and individuals. Significantly, the “loves” list not only includes obvious
SI and King Mob heroes (Valerie Solanas and her “Society for Cutting Up Men,” Alex
Trocchi, Buenaventura Durutti), but the fake band “Kutie Jones and his SEX PISTOLS.”
Within a year, McLaren had cobbled together a group of young men who hung out and

Figure 7.2 Malcolm McLaren, Vivienne Westwood, and Bernie Rhodes: “You’re
gonna wake up one morning and know what side of the bed you’ve been lying on”
T-shirt, SEX c. 1976.
 CLOTHES PUNK WOMEN 93

worked at SEX to essentially become its “Pistols,” who would wear the store’s gear and
act out McLaren and Westwood’s Situationist-inspired fantasies in the shambolic gigs
that followed—and ultimately, ironically, eclipse both the store’s and the designers’
influence in pop-cultural history.21
Returning to the “Loves/Hates” T-shirt, it is interesting that, while the garment has
gained fame for its prefiguring the pioneering punk band, rarely discussed is the fact
that so, too, does the shirt reference many women, and specifically feminist women, as
heroes on the “loves” half: from pop-cultural underminers of the British status quo like
Christine Keeler and Marianne Faithfull, to convicted IRA terrorists The Price Sisters
and Rose Dugdale. More surprising is the presence of feminist philosopher Simone de
Beauvoir and, along with the infamous Solanas, fellow lesbian activist Pat Arrowsmith.
While both Westwood and McLaren consistently shunned the label “feminist”
throughout their lives, Rhodes’ dedication to radical causes and more organized
politics—which eventually led to his breaking from both SEX and the Pistols and
organizing his own band to manage, The Clash—suggests his influence in these figures’
inclusion. (Indeed, Rhodes wearing this very T-shirt at the same 1975 gig that future
Clash guitarist Mick Jones wore his own led to their fateful introduction.)22 That said,
the fact that the “graffiti” that adorned the walls of SEX was derived from Solanas’
S.C.U.M. Manifesto23 is further evidence that, at the very least, British punk’s original
headquarters admired and sought to emulate the radical ideologies of the feminist
figures name-checked in SEX’s shop and garments.
There is no question, however, that SEX attracted many women to its staff and
clientele, for whom the shop’s clothing and community nurtured a transgressive
sensibility—indeed, it is often remarked upon that the shop’s now-legendary
saleswoman Jordan (neé Pamela Rooke) was, as music critic and punk historian Jon
Savage put it, “the first Sex Pistol.”24 The late film director and gay activist Derek Jarman,
who would cast her as the heroine Amyl Nitrate in his 1977 punk epic Jubilee, concurred:
“As far as I was concerned, Jordan was the original. Without Jordan, the shop wouldn’t
have worked. She was the original Sex Pistol. Everyone else came in and saw Jordan
dressed up, and the attitude, and it took off from there. She was the Godfather, the
Godmother if you like.”25 Short and zaftig, with variously colored hair teased and swept
into spikes or an asymmetrical bouffant, and makeup that often separated her plain
features into Mondrian-like planes, Jordan was an unlikely high-fashion muse. But her
insouciant confidence, and dedication to extreme sartorial self-expression, influenced
not only Westwood toward increasingly button-pushing ensembles, but the growing
community of misfit club kids who discovered the store and emulated her look. And
the influence was reciprocated, as Westwood—a generation older than most of her staff
and patrons—became a mentor to many of them from her perch at SEX. In 1976, the
shop was renamed Seditionaries, befitting Westwood and McLaren’s increasingly
assertive use of the shop’s clothing as a Situationist intervention, as it found its way into
the world on the backs of a rapidly multiplying set of kids calling themselves punk
rockers. Jordan herself remembered Westwood’s view of her fashion as kind of
consciousness-raising: “You could never just buy something in the shop. It was always
why are you buying it? [. . .] She could always make it into some political statement
about the world today. [She. . .] worked as a teacher, and has never lost that attitude, of
94 Design History Beyond the Canon

teaching and wanting to teach.”26 The result was a new community centered around the
shop, which resembled Andy Warhol’s studio “the Factory” a decade earlier, but
revolving around McLaren and Westwood. And, as Savage has written, while McLaren
was cultivating the Pistols “during the latter part of 1975 and the first half of 1976,
Vivienne cultivated her own inner circle of performers, mainly women, who would act
out the implications of the Sex Pistols [. . . and] their wildest fantasies. By doing so, they
became part of the Sex Pistols and gave punk its Warholian edge.”27
And, of course, these women gave punk its sartorial “edge,” focusing as Westwood did
on the costuming of this burgeoning scene, with Jordan as its first, and singular,
intermediary across borders of genre and gender. Today, the most visible images of
Jordan in pop culture—like those of the era’s punk women in general—tend to represent
her in the most outrageously hyper-sexual ensembles sold at the store. To many of the
women who frequented SEX and Seditionaries, this overtly sexual costuming felt
liberating; journalist and music scholar Lucy O’Brien (formerly of The Catholic Girls)
reminds us that the hard-edged, fetish-style gear many punk women chose was not only
pointedly confrontational in public vs. private, but appeared against “the [mid-1970s]
backdrop of tiered flowery skirts, flicks and flares, and the crushing conformity of what
it meant to be a female in a Britain still tinged by post-war austerity.”28 (Although,
interestingly enough, while Jordan’s outrageous outfits often so piqued fellow public-
transport passengers on her commute into London from her suburban council flat that
she would be physically attacked, it was her co-worker Alan Jones who was arrested for
“exposing to public view an indecent exhibition” while wearing McLaren and Westwood’s
“Naked Cowboy” shirt, featuring a detourned 1969 Jim French illustration of two
pantsless cowboys in the style of Tom of Finland.)29 However, a closer look at the
historical record suggests that Jordan’s style, overwhelmingly reflected in the garments
sold at SEX and Seditionaries, was—like that of the era’s punk women in general—often
rather androgynous. To Caroline Coon, the real story of punk fashion was the way it
“demonstrated a progressive political story of how patriarchal, orthodox, binary sex and
gender stereotyping was being blurred if not collapsing.”30
Then, as now, Westwood’s bestsellers weren’t the rubber and mesh, lingerie-inspired
outfits Jordan wears in today’s most-reproduced imagery of London punk’s heyday, but
the stores’ unisex, silkscreened T-shirts. Her perhaps most infamous model, the “Tits
T-shirt,” (Figure 7.3) is a hilariously simple example of the kind of gender play at work
in the store’s early punk fashions. As infamous for allegations that Westwood and
McLaren had “detourned” the idea (and possibly the image itself) directly from a
T-shirt produced since the late 1960s by the San Francisco-based Jizz, Inc. label as the
concept itself,31 the shirt featured a chest-height “window” onto a silkscreened, trompe-
l’oeil pair of women’s breasts. Needless to say, the effect was different, but equally
baffling no matter the gender of the shirt’s wearer. The Sex Pistols’ guitarist Steve Jones
wore a version on the band’s legendary appearance on Bill Grundy’s Today show, when
Jones called Grundy a “fucking rotter” on live TV in December 1976 (and effectively
put the band on the mass-culture radar as a result of the scandal); with Jones’ burly
frame and working-class, macho demeanor, its juxtaposition came across as an obscene
joke. On willowy, blonde Viv Albertine, however, the T-shirt’s image invited, then
mocked, the illusion of bare women’s breasts that it suggests. In such cases, the double-
 CLOTHES PUNK WOMEN 95

Figure 7.3 Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, “Tits” T-shirt, SEX,
previously owned by Helen Wellington-Lloyd, c. 1976.

takes that the shirt encouraged were of a different, if no less provocative, sort; musing
over the effect of such garments worn by femmes such as herself, Albertine would later
write, “men look at me and they are confused, they don’t know whether they want to
fuck me or kill me. This sartorial ensemble really messes with their heads. Good.”32
Subtler in its unisex appeal, and perhaps the first Westwood ensemble to clearly
cross into haute-couture, was the iconic 1977 “bondage suit” (Figure 7.4). The original
suit was inspired by Westwood’s studied mash-up of US Army trousers she’d found
during a trunk-show trip to New York City, the zip-and-strap-laden fetishwear for
which SEX had gained notoriety, and a straightjacket; first made of the polished, black
satin cotton that British Rail used for its uniforms, followed by a range of wool tartans.
The suit came in two variations: one with a jacket in a boxy “military style,” the other a
more form-fitted “civilian style.”33 Its trousers—legs connected (and long strides
hobbled) by a strap at the knees—had attachments for an optional kilt “flap” to add to
the ensemble, and the pant-zip went from front-to-back along the crotch seam, making
closing them up a tricky endeavor, especially where men’s more dangly bits were
concerned. While the suit today tends to be identified as menswear, both archival
photographs and films, and accounts of participants from the original London punk
scene, confirm that the Seditionaries bondage suit was made for, sought after, and worn
by punks of all genders.34 Indeed, as seen in Jane England’s photograph of Westwood
and Jordan in the shop (Figure 7.4), throughout 1977 Jordan was summoned by
Westwood to model the unisex suit for photographers and the press—notably, in the
first documentary on punk to be aired on British television, Janet Street-Porter’s The
 96 Design History Beyond the Canon

Figure 7.4 Jane England, Vivienne Westwood and Jordan, Seditionaries, London,
1977.

Year of Punk. Here, Jordan languidly poses while Westwood’s voice-over reels off the
garment’s historical influences, asserting deadpan that the suit is “something that you
might have seen at the Battle of Culloden,” and holding forth on the political significance
of British craft, haughtily informing Street-Porter: “I don’t go to Hong Kong and get
something made up cheaply. I rely on English craftsmen,” adding “If I were the Prime
Minister, one of the things I would do to help the economy of this country is to take
more care of English craftsmen.”35
For all these reasons, women were drawn to punk fashion, and Westwood and
Jordan as its earliest female icons, which would eventually nurture the consciousness
of overtly feminist punks who would emerge from the scene. Coon—who came of age
during the hippie years, and was recognized as a prominent British activist while barely
out of her teens36—was one of the most public, vocal feminists of early punk. She not
only went out of her way to speak to gender issues in her very earliest articles on the
movement for Melody Maker, but often made a point of asking the women she
interviewed their perspectives on women’s liberation.37 Coon, however, was among the
notable exceptions; to most punks, the feminist movement was negatively lumped in
 CLOTHES PUNK WOMEN 97

with hippie culture. The label was rejected, if only—like punks’ appropriation of the
swastika in the years before skinhead punk took Nazi ideology to heart—as another
strategy to shock or claim independence from liberals of the previous generation.
Artist and fashion designer Alex Michon reflected on her own, class-based take on the
term at the time: “feminism seemed to belong to another era. I saw it as a mostly
middle-class thing, something that posh mothers did.”38 When pressed by Coon in a
1977 interview with The Slits to speak to what the journalist felt was the band’s
feminism, Albertine disdainfully responded, “we’re just not interested in questions
about Women’s Liberation. [. . .] All that chauvinism stuff doesn’t matter a fuck to us.
[. . .] You either think chauvinism is shit or you don’t. We think it’s shit.”39 In her
autobiography, Albertine summarized the contradictory feeling of young women like
herself at that moment, who identified with feminism’s aims, but not its “isms”: “I read
a lot about feminism, and I’m a feminist, apply it to everything I think and do, but I
don’t want to be labeled in any way.”40 But, from Coon’s perspective today, reflecting
back on the type of evolving political consciousness very much in evidence in
biographies like Albertine’s, “as they matured and understood the world, in various
ways, all these women realized that they did need feminism—indeed, they embraced
the term.”41 Of Westwood herself, and the deeply feminist lessons Albertine feels she
learned by way of fashion at 430 King’s Road (regardless of the designer’s rejection of
the term), she wrote admirably: “[Westwood is] uncompromising in every way: what
she says, what she stands for, what she expects from you, and how she dresses. She’s [. . .]
made me conscious of the signs and signals I’m giving off with my clothes. I’ve become
much more visually aware from going to the shop, more than from any art-school
teaching.”42 In such ways, through her politically motivated design and consciousness-
raising, Westwood became an intermediary between not just fashion and music, but
punk and feminism.
Linder Sterling, artist and founder of the Manchester band Ludus, was (like many
figures from that city’s scene) less worried about how her political affiliations might be
“labeled” by the London crowd. Then, as now, Manchester proudly identified as the
radical, working-class home of England’s suffrage movement, and pioneering punks
from the area often actively embraced its activist history.43 With her friend Savage, a
queer punk himself allied with the aims of both the women’s and gay liberation
movements, she co-authored the ‘zine The Secret Public, which featured Linder’s
collages inspired by her studies of art and literature in the feminist magazine Spare Rib.
Linder cautions we should “never underestimate the power of the first pair of bondage
trousers that Vivienne Westwood made—it was beautifully crafted and subtly
subversive,” and notes that like many punk women she wore hers as a badge of honor,
even though she was threatened and even beaten by strangers for wearing them in
public.44 Linder additionally credits the ways in which Westwood’s shop encouraged
“women like Jordan, over size 12, daring to wear fantastic clothes. Up North, too, there
were big lumpy punks around. A lot of the punk women weren’t ‘ideal’ prizes, but they
had small skirts on if they wanted [. . .] There was something glorious about all those
shapes and sizes of bodies on show.”45 As is evident in this photograph of women
congregating at The Roxy during London punk’s crescendo in 1977 (Figure 7.5), the
looks ran the gamut from obviously homemade, slashed-and-chained approximations
98 Design History Beyond the Canon

Figure 7.5 Punks at The Roxy, London, April 1977.

of fetish styles to “lumpy,” butch blazer-and-dungaree ensembles; stilettos and Doc

Martens.
This anything-goes approach was furthered by the do-it-yourself ethos of punk,
including punk fashion; seeing as McLaren and Westwood started their own careers as
designers by copying historical fashions, evolving out of the cut-and-paste, “jumble-
sale” aesthetic of the early 1970s, this should be unsurprising. And while the pair were
quick to develop an elitist, hierarchical attitude toward London’s punk fashion scene—
especially after competitors such as Acme Attractions sprung up elsewhere on King’s
Road, and dozens of Pistols-inspired bands cropped up in their wake—the scene they
helped foster was not bound to McLaren’s and Westwood’s shop for its uniform. This
was significant in no small part because their work was so expensive because it was
largely hand-made locally—and, in the case of the bondage suits, of heritage fabric—
often by Westwood herself in her family’s tiny council flat in Clapham. (In 1976, for
example, a Seditionaries button-up “anarchy shirt” ran upwards of £25, or approximately
£170 at the time of this book’s printing.)46 But, the fact of the couple’s own DIY ethos
 CLOTHES PUNK WOMEN 99

was also inspiration to many punks to create their own clothing rather than buy the
pricey gear at 430 King’s Road—especially women, used to being taught or expected to
make clothes for themselves and their families, and long encouraged to pay careful
attention to their sense of style.

“Oh Bondage! Up Yours!”47

Poly Styrene

Indeed, the late musician Poly Styrene suggested her pioneering punk band X-Ray
Spex’s first single, 1977’s “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!” was something of an anti-
Seditionaries rejoinder. Styrene herself (born Marianne Joan Elliott-Said of Scottish-
Irish and Somali descent) was, like Jordan, among the earliest models of punk
femininity in London, but without the name-brand stylist. After running away from
home at the age of fifteen, she supported herself out of a tiny vintage-clothing stall
at the same rabbit-warren of boutiques at the Beaufort Market on King’s Road
from which Acme Attractions first emerged. As Acme’s head clerk, DJ, musician,
and filmmaker Don Letts has said of Beaufort Market’s shops, they were not just
friendlier and less elitist, but also struck the British-born Jamaican Letts as less
racist than the scene at 430 King’s Road: “It was about multi-culturalism, whereas
Vivienne and Malcolm were always more Eurocentric. [. . .] The kids who came to
[Beaufort Market] were intelligent enough to know that there is something aesthetically
wrong with a punk thing being ready-made and sold for £60.”48 Bi-racial and pixyish,
with a mouth full of braces and a head topped by wild, natural curls, Styrene was one
of these “kids.”
Always dressed eclectically in the same rag-picked, second-hand clothing she sold
inexpensively at her stall (Figure 7.6), Styrene embodied both the DIY and anti-
consumerist spirit that was fomented by punk women beyond the clique at Westwood’s
and McLaren’s shop, as well as the significant contributions of Britons of color to UK
punk’s origins—like women, too often forgotten in histories of the scene. Many of her
thrifted ensembles (as seen in Figure 7.6) riffed on the perma-prest looks of 1960s
Mods and the natty “rude-boy” styles of Afro-Caribbean British immigrants. But
Styrene would often undermine these “cool” sources with comical, kitschy additions
such as pom-poms, feathers, and even fake-fruit arrangements that read as more
grandmotherly than vanguard, but no less feminist in its sartorial potential. Styrene’s
style is reflected in the comfortable, make-and-mend aesthetic captured in a photograph
of music journalist and musician Vivien Goldman and musician Neneh Cherry by
Coon (Figure 7.7). First-generation punk fans, both these women would go on to
pioneer reggae-inspired dub and hip-hop sounds in their musical projects of the 1980s;
genres to which Goldman additionally gave some of their first attention in her writing,
as well as her work as Bob Marley’s first UK publicist.49 This frumpy, DIY look featured
layers of cheaply won, second-hand separates, purposely pairing contradictory
combinations like socks and sandals, sheaths and baggy cardigans. The effect was
summarized by Simon Frith and Howard Horne in their book Art into Pop as a look in
which iconography “consistent in patriarchal ideology—woman as innocent/slut/
mother/fool—was rendered ludicrous by all being worn at once.”50
100 Design History Beyond the Canon

Figure 7.6 Marianne Joan Elliott-Said, more commonly known as Poly Styrene, lead
singer with the pioneering punk group X-Ray Spex, December 18, 1977.

The style thumbed its nose at the self-serious elitism of the crew at 430 Kings Road.
In “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!” Styrene’s lyrics mock not just the literal “bondage gear”
sold there, but McLaren and Westwood’s contradictory political/business model: “It
was about being in bondage to material life. In other words, it was a call for liberation.
It was saying ‘Bondage? Forget it! I am not going to be bound by the laws of
consumerism.’ ”51 But, the song also became a (much-covered) feminist anthem,
opening as it does with the now-legendary introduction that sets up Styrene’s anti-
consumerist manifesto, which adds a gendered critique to the concept of “bondage”
when she speaks/screams: “Some people think little girls should be seen and not
heard / But I think ‘OH BONDAGE! UP YOURS!’ ”
Fellow DIY enthusiast Alex Michon took the philosophy in a different direction,
after she met Bernard Rhodes following her foundation year of art school, and was
hoping to put together a portfolio with the goal of transferring to prestigious
Goldsmiths College. Supporting herself in the meantime doing work for a small
bathing-suit manufacturer in London’s West End, she used this experience to essentially
 CLOTHES PUNK WOMEN 101

Figure 7.7 Journalist and musician Vivien Goldman [left] and musician Neneh
Cherry [right], dressed in jumble-shop style, late 1970s.

bluff her way into a position as The Clash’s “in-house” designer. As addressed above,
Rhodes viewed himself as the most rigorously political of the SEX associates, and felt
that the women’s and gay liberation movements offered models and allies for punk
progressivism—indeed, he sent musicians he managed into bookstores to buy Gay
News and Spare Rib not just for the journals’ content, but to experience what it meant
to publicly associate with these marginalized movements in the transaction.52 Rhodes’
mother was also a Russian-Jewish evacuee during World War II, and he was among the
few original UK punks to consistently and vocally take issue with the scene’s flippant
uses of the swastika—vetoing The Clash’s early name of “London S.S.” by confronting
them with ugly Nazi paraphernalia, and refusing to let Siouxsie and The Banshees
borrow The Clash’s gear for their first performance due to the former’s swastika-laden
costumes.53
After Rhodes acrimoniously parted ways with SEX, he grew determined to outdo
McLaren’s band with his own, more overtly political group, and The Clash’s early
mantra “we’re anti-fascist, we’re anti-violence, we’re anti-racist, and we’re pro-creative”54
102 Design History Beyond the Canon

was meant to be the positive-image response to the Pistols’ negative-image nihilism.

Like Michon, the three founding members of the band were all former art students,
and had responded to the Pistols’ flashy Westwood costuming with dingy jumble-sale
suits and coveralls, spattered with paint in a style meant to reference both the uniforms
of working men and the “creative work” of art-world heroes like Jackson Pollock.
However, in the words of the band’s late singer and guitarist Joe Strummer, they realized
“painting dead men’s clothes had gone as far as it would go;”55 Michon was brought on
as a collaborator to create clothing that matched the band’s political as well as creative
ambitions. But, Rhodes also instilled in her the confidence that her move into fashion
might be an extension of her art practice, fueled by the Dada and Situationist ideas that
were by 1977 very much a part of the punk Zeitgeist, as well as conceptual art influences
to which she’d been introduced by her foundation-year faculty associated with the UK
Art & Language group. As Michon wrote in her diary that year, Rhodes reminded her:
“You have to remember Alex that everything in art that is important, initially started as
a revolutionary movement.”56
Michon’s earliest costumes for the band riffed on their earlier, Abstract Expressionist-
inspired look, using zippers to emulate the hard bars of paint underpinning Pollock’s
drip paintings, or the famous “zips” of Barnett Newman’s canvases. In retrospect, Michon
muses, she was working with many of the same ideas about functional and hard-wearing
street-protest clothes that American artist Jae Jarrell was making in the 1960s as part of
the AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists) collective,57 which, like The
Clash and its collaborators in the band’s earliest years, not only saw all their creative and
political work as intertwined, but worked and even lived communally.58 She designed
and constructed her clothing for the band knowing it would be hard-worn, because the
band wore them both on stage and off.59 Clash bassist Paul Simonon contrasted Michon’s
designs with Westwood’s: “If you got chased down the road with bondage trousers on
you’d never get away. With Clash trousers [. . .] you were ready for anything. Ready to leap
over a wall or escape.”60 At this point, the possibility was not simply a romantic notion:
besides the oft-noted reality of punks being met with violence on the streets due solely to
their willfully unique and provocative style, Simonon, Strummer, and Rhodes had been
caught up battling London police alongside friend Don Letts in the race riots that flared
up during the annual West Indian Notting Hill Carnival in 1976—photos from which (by
another Clash associate, Rocco Redondo) materialized on two different Clash albums,
and were silk-screened on several Michon designs (Figure 7.5). The experience inspired
Rhodes to demand of Michon, “The clothes have to be hard wearing as there is going to
be fighting on the streets!”61
While this would ultimately prove a bit of Rhodes’ typically Situationist hyperbole,
the battle-themed and social-justice underpinnings of the band nonetheless became an
important part of their image. And, like many young women of her generation, Michon’s
activist sensibilities gradually turned to gender injustice when Rhodes pressured her to
create a womenswear line. Michon pushed back, arguing that her designs, while
ostensibly made for an all-male band were, like the band’s politics and community-
building, for all genders, writing in her diary “Can’t think separately for girls!”62 In fact,
her archives are filled with the designer herself modeling samples or wearing variations
of the same clothing she created for The Clash: zip-ornamented trousers, tailored shirts
 CLOTHES PUNK WOMEN 103

inspired by the same rude-boy style that impressed Poly Styrene (as in Figure 7.8), and
what she dubbed a “boxer shirt” with a cowl neck inspired by the look of fighters toweling
off in the ring, many in collaboration with her friend and Central St. Martin’s fashion
student (today, Nottingham fashion professor) Krystyna Kolowska (Figure 7.9). Indeed,
as Coon recounts, when Michon and Kolowska would arrive at The Clash’s rehearsal
spaces and squats with “armfuls [of] their wonderful clothes—the result of their style
collaboration with the band—and the band would try on items and decide who should
wear what,” the rest were often divided up and worn by women in the band’s circle. This
included Coon, who briefly managed the band, and was photographed in 1978 wearing
a pair of “Clash trousers” deemed too small for Simonon (Figure 7.10), topped with a
studded, black-leather motorcycle jacket, looking glamorous and dangerous. Reflecting
back upon how Michon and Kolowska’s unisex styles felt from a feminist perspective,
Coon said they were “representative of the hard-style clothing that I/we found so
necessary, protective and liberating as the often violent, misogynist backlash against
women in the workplace ramped up in the 1970s.”63
Michon’s and Kolowska’s clothing for The Clash was noted negatively by Savage at
the time, writing in his diaries shortly after the band had signed to CBS: “All I can think
of, when The Clash come on, is that they jettisoned their great Pollock look for a more

Figure 7.8 Alex Michon wears Michon and Kolowska “running policeman” pocket
shirt and “zip trousers.” The policeman photograph was taken by Rocco Redondo
during the riot that broke out at the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival, and also reproduced
on two different Clash album covers.
Figure 7.9 Macho posturing: Alex Michon trying on masculinity for size, wearing
the Michon and Kolowska, Genet-inspired “Boxer” top, 1980–1981.

Figure 7.10 Caroline Coon, a regular on the punk scene, pictured March 1978,
photographed in a pair of Michon and Kolowska “Clash trousers.”
 CLOTHES PUNK WOMEN 105

militaristic uniform of zippers and epaulettes. It makes them look like rock stars.”64 But,
Michon’s inspiration came from a surprisingly queer source: “I was totally obsessed
with the writings of Jean Genet at the time, [and] the male-only machismo of gay
desire, toughs and crime, bruised masculinity.”65 In another surprising bit of gender-
bending for the otherwise famously butch Clash aesthetic, Michon created for
Strummer what the two of them dubbed his “silk-stocking sleeve” shirt, in which the
see-through, black fabric sleeves of a cotton button-up of her design were double-
hemmed in such a way that they looked like the tops of ladies’ silk stockings, draped
like lingerie over his biceps (Figure 7.11). The name, she says now, “was just a piss take,
really. But, yes [. . .] conceptually it was a big deal!”66 This explicitly feminine bit of
detailing in fact reflects the forgotten first impressions of even this most macho of
punk bands, whose members Savage remembers hitting the scene seeming “quite
vulnerable [. . .] like hurt, scared boys,”67 and whose complex masculinity Michon
recognized and wanted to express through such design subtleties.
Alas, by the time Alex Michon accompanied the band to the United States in 1981
for their now-legendary, seventeen-day residency at New York City’s Bond’s Casino—
where The Clash’s ongoing dedication to supporting women musicians and musicians
of color saw them include opening acts like The Slits, Grandmaster Flash and The
Furious Five, ESG, Lee “Scratch” Perry, and Pearl Harbor—punk culture was jettisoning
its eclectic origins, and already canonizing originators as straight, white, and male.
For those, like Savage, who witnessed punk’s origins in the UK, punk had been “made
for and by outsiders. And that meant outsiders of every hue, and that meant weird
boys, hopeless boys, strong women, and gay men and women.”68 Yet in no time at all
“that whole explosive moment,” Savage lamented, was “tidied up within current laddish
rock modes.”69
This is as true of our understanding of punk fashion as punk music, evidenced by
recent bids to similarly declare a canon of punk design (in which Westwood is the token
woman), contradictorily established along a strict, binary gender norm, and with men as
its style leaders. This sensibility was evident in the two recent “blockbuster” shows
featuring UK punk fashions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute,
Anglomania and Punk: Chaos to Couture. In the former, all the unisex punk fashions were
exhibited on male mannequins in the gallery entitled “The Gentlemen’s Club.” In the
latter, curators unimaginatively dressed its mannequins in a predominantly binary
fashion, with close-fitting, corseted, and skirted ensembles on hyper-slender, female-
bodied mannequins; rough-and-ready, less-formal trouser ensembles on taller, muscular,
male-bodied mannequins. Neither exhibition catalog included a single woman
contributor. In the exhibition and catalog for Chaos to Couture, over and over men
designers and punk figures are held up as representatives of the original movement,
whereas women’s “contributions” were predominantly represented by professional models
wearing couture clothing (near-exclusively by men designers) in the decades since, rather
than the pioneering women who were the acknowledged style-makers at its start.
Now that these institutional shots have been parted, the time seems right to challenge
this emergent design canon to recognize the presence and the style of the punk women
who served as crucial intermediaries—between music and fashion, haute-couture and
DIY, punk and feminism—at the origins of this explosive moment in popular culture.
106 Design History Beyond the Canon

Figure 7.11 Cover of 1981 Best magazine on which Joe Strummer wears Alex
Michon’s “silk-stocking sleeve shirt.”
 CLOTHES PUNK WOMEN 107

Notes
1 See Punk.London: 40 Years of Subversive Culture: http://punk.london/
2 Kate Mossman interview with Viv Albertine at the British Library (July 14, 2016):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpzuxyakTb0
3 Quoted in Helen Reddington, The Lost Women of Rock Music: Female Musicians of the
Punk Era (Bristol, CT: Equinox, 2012), p. 2.
4 Kate Mossman interview with Viv Albertine at the British Library (July 14, 2016):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpzuxyakTb0
5 Nigel Farndale, “Malcolm McLaren: Punk? It Made My Day,” The Telegraph, September
30, 2007: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3668263/Malcolm-McLaren-Punk-it-
made-my-day.html
6 Needless to say—like any exercise in genre—the roots and definition of punk are much
disputed and continue to be debated. This chapter included. In any case, a recent,
handy round-up of the many positions and debates on the matter can be found in
Nicholas Rombes, A Cultural Dictionary of Punk: 1974–1982 (New York and London:
Continuum, 2009).
7 See Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, 10th edn (London: Routledge,
1991); and Simon Frith, Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock’n’Roll
(New York: Pantheon, 1981).
8 See Caroline Coon, “Rock Revolution,” Melody Maker, July 28, 1976, in 1988: Punk Rock
New Wave Explosion (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1977), p. 13.
9 See Mary Harron’s recollections of Reed’s influential look, in Jon Savage, The England’s
Dreaming Tapes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), p. 136.
10 For an excellent summary of the “art-school” trajectory for many British musicians
after World War II, see Simon Frith and Howard Horne, Art into Pop (London:
Methuen, 1987).
11 The film Cabaret had legitimate, Weimar-era origins, based as it was on Christopher
Isherwood’s 1939 novel inspired by his participation in the gay culture of this era,
Goodbye to Berlin. The material from this book was first turned into the 1951 play I am
a Camera, and later the Broadway musical version of Cabaret, which debuted in 1966.
12 “Siouxsie Sioux,” in Savage, The England’s Dreaming Tapes, pp. 341, 345.
13 See Paul Gorman, The Look: Adventures in Rock and Pop Fashion (London: Adelita,
2006), pp. 64–8.
14 Jane Withers, “From Let It Rock to World’s End: 430 Kings Road,” in Impresario:
Malcolm McLaren and the British New Wave (New York: New Museum of
Contemporary Art, 1988), p. 55.
15 See Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 1st English edn (Kalamazoo, MI: Black and
Red, 1970).
16 For arguably the most thorough history of punk rock’s relationship to the Situationists,
see Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1989).
17 See Vivienne Westwood and Ian Kelly, Vivienne Westwood (London: Picador, 2014),
pp. 41–161.
18 See Stephanie Talbot, Slogan T-Shirts: Cult and Culture (London: Bloomsbury, 2013),
pp. 24–30.
19 Savage addresses the relevance of gay clubs in general, and Louise’s in particular, in
bringing together what would become London’s punk community in England’s
Dreaming, pp. 183–8. So, too, do Savage’s interviews with Berlin, Siouxsie Sioux, Viv
108 Design History Beyond the Canon

Albertine, John Ingham, Johnny Rotten, Barbara Harwood, Steve Walsh, and Nils
Stevenson all make note of Louise’s “clubhouse” atmosphere in Savage’s England’s
Dreaming Tapes. Many thanks to Andrew Wilson for his suggestion regarding the fuzzy
timeline between Louise’s pre- and post-punk history (in email correspondence with
the author, January 13, 2018).
20 This history of the (non-existent) Chris Gray Band is briefly addressed in David Wise
et al., King Mob: A Critical Hidden History (London: Bread and Circuses, 2014). With
thanks to Paul Stolper and Andrew Wilson for their thoughts on the relevance of
Gray’s work—especially his SI anthology Leaving the 20th Century—to both King Mob
and McLaren’s foundations.
21 Needless to say: this is not the story of The Sex Pistols. But a blow-by-blow—literally,
month-by-month—history of the band is lovingly documented in Jon Savage’s
England’s Dreaming: Anarchy Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond, 2nd edn (New York:
St. Martin’s Griffin, 2001).
22 See Mick Jones’ and Tony James’ recollections of Rhodes’ first meeting with Jones in Pat
Gilbert, Passion Is Fashion: The Real Story of The Clash (Cambridge, MA: DaCapo
Books, 2005), p. 60; and Chris Salewicz, Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer
(New York: Faber and Faber, 2006), pp. 134–5.
23 See recollections of Chrissie Hynde, Jordan, and Adam Ant, in Savage, The England’s
Dreaming Tapes.
24 Savage, England’s Dreaming, p. 55.
25 “Derek Jarman,” in Savage, England’s Dreaming, pp. 662–3.
26 Savage, England’s Dreaming, p. 183.
27 Ibid., p. 183.
28 Lucy O’Brien, “The Woman Punk Made Me,” in Punk Rock: So What? The Cultural
Legacy of Punk, edited by Roger Sabin (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 186.
29 Savage, England’s Dreaming, p. 103.
30 Caroline Coon, email correspondence with the author (July 9, 2017).
31 Pop-culture historian Paul Gorman published his fascinating study on the “tits
T-shirt’s” history on his blog: http://rockpopfashion.com/blog/?p=178
32 Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 2014), p. 112.
33 See Matteo Guarnaccia, Vivienne Westwood: Fashion Unfolds (Milan: Moleskin, 2015),
p. 32.
34 It’s telling that, forty years after Jordan, Westwood, and Seditionaries salesgirl Debbi
Juvenile were photographed together wearing bondage suits next to the shop,
Westwood’s “World’s End” website continues to photograph women in the suit, still in
production, as its ideal wearer: http://worldsendshop.co.uk/bondage-suit/ (Accessed
August 6, 2017). And yet, the Victoria and Albert’s file on the suit in their collection
contradictorily identifies it as both “a genderless matching two-piece jacket and
trousers” and a “suit consisting of a man’s jacket and trousers.” See “Bondage suit,
Vivienne Westwood,” in the V&A digital collections, https://collections.vam.ac.uk/
item/O72586/bondage-suit-vivienne-westwood/
35 Janet Street-Porter, The Year of Punk (London: LWT Broadcast, 1977): https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=4jal1D_7NaQ
36 See Coon’s appearance (as the only woman) in “Who’s Who in the Underground,” The
Observer color supplement (December 3, 1967): 8–9.
37 Her persistent feminist probing of her subjects and the scene is very much on display
in one of the first books to be published on the subject of punk, the anthology of
 CLOTHES PUNK WOMEN 109

Coon’s reportage entitled 1988: Punk Rock New Wave Explosion (New York: Hawthorn
Books, 1977), p. 108.
38 Alex Michon, email correspondence with the author (July 25, 2017).
39 Quoted in Caroline Coon, “The Slits,” Melody Maker, June 16, 1977, in 1988: Punk Rock
New Wave Explosion, p. 106.
40 Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 2014), p. 153.
41 Caroline Coon, email correspondence with the author (July 9, 2017).
42 Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, pp. 126,
129.
43 See Suffragette Legacy: How Does the History of Feminism Inspire Current Thinking in
Manchester?, edited by Camilla Mork Rostvik and Ella Louise Sutherland (Cambridge:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015).
44 “Linder Sterling,” in Totally Wired: Postpunk Interviews and Overviews, edited by Simon
Reynolds (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2010), p. 218.
45 Quoted in O’Brien, “The Woman Punk Made Me,” p. 191.
46 Albertine’s autobiography is filled with longing remembrances of items from
Westwood’s shop she could not, or literally starved herself to afford to, buy; Adam Ant
similarly noted “I knew that the clothes in SEX at the time were expensive. They were
well made, but thirty-five pounds or forty guineas for a pair of leather trousers was a
lot of money. The suede boots were thirty pounds. You really had to save for that stuff,
you had to want it bad. I remember it said on their handles, ‘sartorial correctness’—it
was expensive.” Quoted in Savage, The England’s Dreaming Tapes, p. 275. It’s also worth
noting that a considerable amount of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection of
McLaren and Westwood designs was purchased from Ant in 2006.
47 Poly Styrene, lyrics from X-Ray Spex, “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!” 7˝ single (b/w “I am a
Cliché”), Virgin Records (VS 189, 1977).
48 Quoted in Paul Gorman, The Look, p. 144.
49 See Evelyn McDonnell’s “Do Everything Yourself: The Lessons of Punk Renaissance
Woman Vivien Goldman,” National Public Radio: The Record, July 21, 2016: https://
www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2016/07/21/486885368/do-everything-yourself-the-
lessons-of-punk-renaissance-woman-vivien-goldman
50 Frith and Horne, Art into Pop, p. 155.
51 Savage, England’s Dreaming, p. 327.
52 See “Tony James” in Savage, The England’s Dreaming Tapes, p. 281; and Gilbert, Passion
is Fashion, p. 62.
53 See Gilbert, Passion Is a Fashion, pp. 63–4; Sean Egan, The Clash: The Only Band That
Mattered (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), p. 66; and Savage, England’s
Dreaming, pp. 172, 219.
54 See, for example, the mantra’s appearance in the very early, international punk
anthology, Isabelle Anscombe and Dike Blair, eds., Punk: Rock/Style/Stance/People/Stars
(New York: Urizen Books, 1978), unpaginated.
55 Savage, England’s Dreaming, p. 305.
56 From Alex Michon’s diaries (1977), Alex Michon personal archives.
57 Alex Michon, email correspondence with the author (July 25, 2017).
58 For an excellent survey of AfriCOBRA’s history and influence, see Bill Day,
AfriCOBRA: The First Twenty Years (Atlanta, GA: Nexus Contemporary Art Center,
1990).
59 See Gilbert, Passion Is a Fashion, p. 170.
110 Design History Beyond the Canon

60 Quoted in Gilbert, Passion Is a Fashion, p. 169.

61 Alex Michon, email correspondence with the author (July 12, 2017).
62 From Alex Michon’s diaries (1981), Alex Michon personal archives.
63 Caroline Coon, email correspondence with the author (January 4, 2018). In a testament
to their hard-wearing properties, Coon still owns the trousers—which also still fit her
slender frame.
64 Savage, England’s Dreaming, p. 305.
65 Alex Michon, email correspondence with the author (July 25, 2017).
66 Alex Michon, email correspondence with the author (August 4, 2017).
67 Savage quoted in Gilbert, Passion Is a Fashion, p. 186.
68 Jamie Thomson, “Jon Savage On Black Hole & Why The Brits Don’t Own Punk,” The
Quietus, November 9, 2010: http://thequietus.com/articles/05250-jon-savage-
interview-black-hole-england-s-dreaming
69 Savage, England’s Dreaming, p. xi.
 Using digital tools to work around the canon
Matthew Bird

A tiny percentage of today’s design students will create iconic, enduring objects that
find their way into museum collections and textbooks. The rest will work to change the
world by introducing improved medical equipment, responsibly manufactured
sneakers, and better birthday presents for your dad. This work will be forgotten by
tomorrow’s design historians, as so many of the humble, utilitarian designs of the last
hundred years have been. This is as it should be; designers for industry sign up for a life
of productive anonymity. But design history, as taught today, is not as useful to young
designers as it could (and should) be. Focusing disproportionally on luxury objects
and the renown of a designer does not do much to explain why we need design in our
world, or help students find ways to do it better. No amount of statement tea kettles,
sculptural chairs, or limited-production sports cars improves our understanding of the
complexities of addressing user limitations and needs.
An object’s inclusion in a textbook is usually linked to its existence in high-
resolution studio photographs and affordable image permission rights, often provided
by museums and archives. As a result, items used to illustrate design history are limited
to these sources, and this limitation is self-perpetuating. Understandably, museum
collections don’t tend to include everyday objects; a paying public has little interest in
can-openers, prosthetics, or deodorant bottles. There are scant sources for studio
photographs of vintage utilitarian objects. The existing equation helps prevent the
story of design from being told by its true participants, and constrains the objects
available to the small number that attain celebrity status and make it into the canon.
This fixed body of objects tells a restricted version of the narrative.
Traditionally, there have not been options for learning or teaching the history of
design in a way that gets past the limitations of the canon; we have been tethered to the
available books and collections. With the maturing of the internet, however, we are now
able to not only work past those limitations, but even accelerate the change with some
intentional use of digital resources. We can harness existing tools to do better work and
broaden the narrative. We can also develop new tools to help historians and teachers
add more layers of information and interpretation to the existing narrative about how
design happened in the past and who was involved.
The internet offers volumes of information, including primary source documents,
images, advertisements, and patents, allowing us to establish new entry points into
learning about objects. By harnessing non-traditional research tools, we can tailor

111
112 Design History Beyond the Canon

traditional narratives to better suit an audience, however specialized its interests.

Online resources are not vetted by professional editors or curators who confirm their
reputations with accuracy and careful research. The challenge in successfully using the
internet is finding (and teaching) ways to produce reliable, truthful, complete results.
Each online resource has advantages and disadvantages, making it useful but unreliable
when used in isolation as a research tool. Using web resources as a network of cross-
linked tools groups their strengths to work past individual weaknesses. They are
transformed from a mere curiosity to a groundbreaking resource.

Working from images

Image use is central in the investigation and discussion of design. The role of images in
research has changed dramatically since the advent of the internet. Historically, an
image was used as an attachment, an illustration. We worked with information, and
then included the image to explain or clarify. Today, it is more common for an image to
be the first contact point for an object. Any information, if it is lucky enough to stay
attached, arrives later in the discovery process. Finding an image has never been easier,
but finding accurate information about an image has never been more difficult. Digital
images quickly become separated from the basic information we need to use the image
in any meaningful way (date, maker, location, materials, ownership). Social media
encourages the constant re-posting of images, making original sources difficult to
locate. When Google Images was launched in 2001, it could not begin to compete with
any serious library collection. Today, there are so many billions of images, it seems
impossible to stay focused on a search without straying into related and enticing new
territory. You may go looking for an image of the Villa Savoye and wind up lost in the
world of Lego Architecture kits. Images on the internet are frequently mislabeled.
Inaccurate tags and misattributions are reasons to be mistrustful of online images, but
hardly reasons to discount them.
A reverse image search (which Google added to its tool box in 2011) is an effective
way to find reliable information about an image, and locate its original source. This is
especially useful for objects in museums. Many museum collections are viewable
online, but the images do not come up in basic Google image searches. A seemingly
random post on Pinterest may not lead you any farther than the first person who
“pinned” it to explain their bathroom redecoration goals or the vibe of their upcoming
wedding. But if you want to know about the object, a reverse image search will lead you
back to that source information. Image-first browsing helps locate better-quality
images of designs you already know about, discover new information sources, and also
find related images. Such a search also leads to new objects and experiences that you
did not already know about. Searching for “classic rotary phone” brings up the expected,
canonical Henry Dreyfuss-designed 1949 Western Electric Model 500 telephone, a
stellar example of good design work producing enduring solutions. It also brings
up the less expected, but still canonical, Western Electric 1974 Sculptura phone
(nicknamed “the doughnut”), a stellar example of design reflecting the interests of the
times. But this image search succeeds where museum collections or textbooks cannot
 Using digital tools to work around the canon 113

because it also brings up the 1979 Iskra phone from Yugoslavia, the 1980s Telkom
phone from Poland, and any number of other examples of how designs change over
time, with geography, politics, material innovation, and fashion all clearly evident.

Learning from amateurs and commerce

Internet image collections provide a quick way to harness the knowledge of both
enthusiasts and commerce. Auction house websites feature search results with accurate
descriptive information, reliable historical context, and provenance data that can put
an object into context, connecting it with a user. The sheer volume of archived auctions
offers lesser-known work by famous designers as well as familiar work by less famous
designers. Most auction houses use professional photography, and they tend to be more
generous with image permissions than non-commercial institutions. User-generated
content sites like Flickr give the obsessive collector an audience. As a result, they also
give the researcher some amazing ways to expand an investigation. Search features on
image-posting platforms are clumsy, and user-generated tags often defy logic. But the
breadth of images is astounding. A search for “1970s hairdryers” on Flickr turns up a
remarkable variety of examples as well as vintage ads, fashion spreads, instruction
manuals, salon interiors, and an immediate understanding of the variety of users,
lifestyles, and hair problems we were dealing with at that time.
As with Flickr, Pinterest offers a host of frustrations that, when conquered, produce
interesting and useful results. Like many online image sites, there is no authority to a
Pinterest post, and the endless clicking back through previous posts of the same image
will raise your blood pressure. If you want to know more about lipstick cases from the
1950s, though, there will be a collector of vintage cosmetics with images that satisfy
your curiosity and lead you down new avenues of inquiry. The history of the felt-tipped
pen may be best encountered through vintage office supply catalogs, and someone on
Pinterest has already combed through them for you, their enthusiasm compelling them
to include vintage ads and maybe even cross-linked photos of their own collection.
Academia has not traditionally valued the authority of the amateur. As the internet
allows us ways to explore our peculiar interests and share them with others, the hyper-
focused, specific authority of many amateurs should not be overlooked. If you want to
see the history of the high-end plastic designer chair, MOMA can help you. But if you
want to know the history of the tragically ubiquitous four-dollar mono-bloc chair
owned globally by nearly everyone, it will not. For that, you need the help of collector
Bryan Ropar, who owns one of every model Grosfillex chair ever made; his YouTube
videos and Flickr photographs are more useful than anything that has been (or will
ever be) published in a book or would ever be included in a museum collection.1
The online auction site eBay offers a global database of nearly everything ever
industrially-produced. By combining the best (and sometimes worst) of user-created
content, specific targeted knowledge of the amateur, and commerce, eBay can be a
rewarding research tool. Because pictures are used to sell an item, they clearly show its
condition, and that clarity frequently offers exciting bonuses. The original packaging
for a coffee-maker might show pictures of intended users, indicate the regions of
114 Design History Beyond the Canon

availability by offering information in multiple languages, or include an original price

tag. Close-up views show construction methods and manufacturing. The MOMA’s
collection includes a beautiful 1956 Braun SK4 record player. It is a sleek and daringly
futuristic example of German Rationalism in gleaming white metal and shiny acrylic.
But if you want to see more than merely the exterior surfaces, eBay is a better resource.
To sell an SK4 on eBay, a seller will remove the bottom to show that all the inside
components are intact. This provides a view of the vacuum tubes and wiring, offering a
contrast to the sleek exterior. We can also appreciate some smart design decisions
because the main housing is made of one simple piece of bent sheet metal with
convenient attachment points for all of the internal engineering cleverly stamped in.
eBay descriptions are also useful. They tell us about the use that objects have
endured. We learn about a design’s flaws (cracked plastic, missing knobs, even chewed
doll fingers). This information tells us how design and manufacturing may have failed,
and how later versions might have been altered. By only considering pristine museum-
quality objects, we see only the designer’s intent, not how well or poorly that intent
aged with the use and abuse it was meant to survive.

Using video

YouTube was launched in 2005 to create a platform for sharing user-created videos. Kitten
lovers around the world have been enjoying it ever since. YouTube now claims over a billion
users, with an estimated sixty hours of content uploaded every minute.2 For whatever
incomprehensible reasons, people have included close-ups of a working escapement
mechanism from a 1850s Chauncey Jerome mantle clock,3 a 1950s ad for non-breakable
Victor portable radios,4 1970s Woodsy the Owl public service announcements,5 an original
1984 ad for the Apple IIc,6 and even a “Do It Yourself in Rubber” instructional from 1959
on how to decorate your home with newly available latex sheet foam.7 These may seem
random and inconsequential, but they offer immediate insight into the world to which
designers were responding to. Reliving first-hand the cringe-inducing but inextricable
sexism of 1956, when Charles and Ray Eames appeared on Arlene Frances’s Home show
brings mid-century design right into today’s ongoing conversations about gender bias,
women in design, and the challenges of attribution in teamwork.8
Vintage film can help clarify any number of research conundrums. Many utilitarian
objects were created to solve problems that, when seen in the rear-view mirror, don’t make
a lot of sense. Lurelle Guild designed a series of lipstick cases for Revlon in 1955
(Figure 8.1). The patent drawings (Figure 8.2) show the designs in the most brutal way,
making them seem generic and mediocre. YouTube allows us to watch a vintage television
ad and learn that the design separated the lipstick from the case, and saved money by
offering refills.9 The line was marketed to women, but also to husbands and children as an
affordable but seemingly luxurious gift. Without this TV advertisement, the design is easy
to write off as mere decoration. With this added information, the design transcends mere
aesthetics to address user needs, perceived value, material use, marketing, and problem-
solving. Seeing the design in action gives it a life and sophistication not evident in the
brutality of an elevation-view patent drawing or two-dimensional photograph.
 Using digital tools to work around the canon 115

Figure 8.1 Futurama lipstick case, collection of the author.

Print advertisements tell stories

Vintage video is not the only easy source for bringing the user back into the equation.
Old print advertisements were created to communicate innovation to consumers in
targeted ways that now offer valuable insights to any design historian. Print ads are
useful if even “merely” as a way to appreciate how advances in typesetting, pigment
manufacturing, or color photography affected graphic design. Revlon’s Futurama
lipstick was well advertised in print (Figure 8.3). Through these advertisements, we can
celebrate how “lustrous” and “dewy” our lips will appear while also appreciating 1950s
glossy color printing. An object in a museum is a sculpture with only an implication of
utility. Print ads show us what a finished design looked like, while also explaining the
intended use.
A 1947 advertisement for a new metal desktop tape dispenser (Figure 8.4) lets us
appreciate it aesthetically (in a fascinating image that uses a combination of photography,
collage, and rendering to arrive at something printable and descriptive). We can also
learn that the world did not yet fully appreciate the problems this device would solve. It
is billed as a “handy new gift for Scotch tape fans” including homemakers, handymen,
company presidents as well as office boys, teachers, and mothers. It can be used “with one
hand!” (they were intentionally heavy) which makes the period between the introduction
of cellulose tape in 1925 and this 1947 advertisement seem like the gift-wrapping dark
ages. We can also understand the business side of design from vintage ads. The Scotch
desk dispenser cost $1.89 in 1947 and came with a roll of tape, in a plaid gift box. The
Futurama lipstick ads tell the researcher that they sold for as little as $1.35 and as much
as $37.50, making it a curiously broad intended demographic. These details are not
116 Design History Beyond the Canon

Figure 8.2 Futurama lipstick case patent, 1956, United States Patent Office.
 Using digital tools to work around the canon 117

Figure 8.3 1957 advertisement for Futurama lipstick for Revlon.

available elsewhere. They may seem small when considered independently, but they
enable us to look at manufactured objects in the world they inhabited, not just in a
lighted case in a museum. This is an important distinction; it allows us to learn about the
people who used objects, the flaws of existing designs, material and manufacturing
advances, and many more areas of inquiry that bring designs to life.
118 Design History Beyond the Canon

Figure 8.4 1947 advertisement for DD-1 desk dispenser for Scotch brand cellulose
tape.
 Using digital tools to work around the canon 119

Was it really affordable?

Purchase price is rarely considered as part of design history. It is easy to find textbooks
that tell us an 1869 Thonet #14 Consumer Chair cost less than a bottle of wine, which
conveys an impression of affordability. That folklore doesn’t really give us the
information we need to understand who could buy the chair and where it would be
used because there is a wide range of prices even with wine. This is, a rare example of
cost being recorded at all. We usually assume that people could afford the objects we
see in books and museums, when in fact they were largely out of reach for most
consumers. Iconic designs now live completely separated from any understanding of
their original price tag.
Is it useful to design historians to know that a 1963 Barbie Fashion Queen doll is
worth 300 dollars today? To learn about the world this doll was designed for, we need
to know what it cost new, in 1963. Vintage ads and online mail-order catalogs allow us
to do so.10 When we discover that this particular Barbie cost just 3 dollars and 69 cents,
we are closer to knowing who would own it, but there is still one huge hurdle to get
over: 4 dollars seems cheap for a toy because we are understanding the price using
today’s dollar. Online inflation calculators offer a truer perspective by telling us that
today the same doll would cost around 30 dollars, making it an expensive toy.11 Using
a few internet resources quickly together connects value and cost, transforming our
understanding of a product and removing many of the barriers that time and distance
have erected.

Patent searches

The best digital tool for expanding the reach of design historians has to be the
availability of online patent searches. Google introduced its search engine for US
patents in 2006. Since then, it has expanded to include a number of other databases
(Germany, Canada, China, Japan, Korea, and the European Patent Office) with more
promised as other countries digitize their patent archives. Patent systems were created
to protect and disseminate innovation, and their use has been an integral part of the
design process since the dawn of industrialization; the two have matured together. The
first US patent was granted in 1790, linking innovation to record-keeping in a way that
now gives researchers access to over eight million cross-linked primary-source US
patent records from any computer, at any time. The implications of this availability have
changed how research can happen, and will continue to enable new kinds of research
and new conversations. We can now consider in new ways which designs and
innovations matter, how we assign credit for a design, and how innovations are linked,
influencing later work.
One example of patents allowing (or forcing) a re-evaluation of the canon is the
Waring blender. Waring Commercial Products’ company history states that it began in
1937 when the popular band leader Fred Waring introduced the world to the kitchen
blender.12 Design historians add more information to that story by giving Peter Muller-
Munk credit for actually designing the blender. But US design patent #104,289-S, filed
120 Design History Beyond the Canon

in 1937, tells us that Frederick J. Osius invented and patented the device. Waring used
his fame as a popular musician (and his collegiate engineering education) to perfect
and market the device. Muller-Munk created the elegant “waterfall” housing that
transformed the device from mere mechanism to household appliance. Part of what
makes the blender work is the interior clover-leaf shape of the pitcher, which creates
the vortex necessary to get all ingredients evenly chopped. Much of what we think of
as Muller-Munk’s design is in fact Osius’s engineering. The canon of design history has
had room only for Muller-Munk, but we now have the tools to reconsider the object,
reposition it (and its creators), and maybe even reconsider the boundaries between
design and engineering.
Patents also allow researchers to reassess designs already in the canon. They also
empower us to disregard the canon altogether and use any patented object to investigate
a trend, identify a pattern, or explore a technology with the accuracy of primary source
documents. We can identify the anonymous work of known designers such as Dave
Chapman at Montgomery Ward or Charles Harrison at Sears, who worked under a
corporate umbrella that was not in the business of promoting individual designers. We
can also identify unknown designers of iconic (but not “important”) designs. The
passage of time and new generations of researchers will discover just how far down
how many different paths we can get with this powerful resource.

Combining tools

The real magic happens when all of these digital tools are combined. Using them in
concert allows easy access to people, innovation, and history that was impossible to
identify before the internet, and has been overlooked or forgotten in traditional
information sources. That cast metal tape dispenser in the 1947 3M print ad (Figure 8.5)
is ubiquitous enough to be familiar to almost everyone. It is a classic example of
American streamline design of the late 1930s and early 1940s. It is not familiar from
museum collections or coffee-table books, but from everyday life. It was on your
grandparent’s counter top, your tax assessor’s desk, and in every junk shop in the
country. A simple Google image search using “metal streamline tape dispenser” returns
hundreds of pictures of it, and reveals that it has an amusing nickname. An eBay search
for “whale tail tape dispenser” offers any number of them, in two sizes and a variety of
colors. One eBay seller has posted particularly clear images, with the interior label
clearly visible: Scotch Desk Dispenser, Minnesota Mining & Mfg. Co., US Patent
2,221,213 US Design Patent 127,388. A Google patent search finds both patents, and
the design history of this overlooked object is clear in under five minutes.
The utility patent is from 1936 and shows a functional tape dispenser that ignored
aesthetics. The design patent from 1941 shows the same basic mechanism now housed
in a beautifully considered shell, with Jean Otis Reinecke listed as the designer. Because
digital patent searches are cross-linked, a click on his name takes us to other patents
that he was granted. It turns out that, in addition to the “whale tail,” he also designed the
first low-cost stamped sheet metal tape dispensers (1939 US Design Patent #116,599,
1951 US Design Patent #170,429), the iconic and omnipresent plastic tape dispenser
 Using digital tools to work around the canon 121

Figure 8.5 3M DD-1 desk dispenser, collection of the author.

(1939 US Design Patent #118,629), dispensers with levers to spit out a controlled
amount of tape (1936 US Patent #2,221,213, 1941 US Design Patent #126,732), and the
unavoidable 1959 plastic desk dispenser that is so ubiquitous it has become part of our
collective subconscious (US Design Patent #190,781). In short, Jean Otis Reinecke,
who is not included in any important design history books, can clearly be crowned the
“king of tape dispenser design.” He created a number of designs that are as central to
the twentieth-century experience as anything iconic designers Henry Dreyfuss or
Raymond Loewy ever designed. Reinecke also patented designs for toasters, juicers,
radios, can-openers, lawn sprinklers, cameras, refrigerators, corncob holders, and
more. Armed with his name, we can now find other shards of information about
Reinecke. We may not be able to reconstruct an entire archive of information or rebuild
his entire career using these quick tools, but in a short time, with little effort, we can
find an astounding amount of useful and accurate information that, a mere ten years
ago, would not have been available or connectable.
Reinecke is hardly an unknown designer. There is a brief biography on the Industrial
Design Society of America (IDSA) website.13 He was president of its predecessor—the
Society of Industrial Designers—and inducted into the IDSA Academy of Fellows in
1952. His work is included in a glancing way in a number of overviews of design. His
career illustrates the birth of the profession of industrial design, when engineering and
manufacturing were combined and improved with added considerations like aesthetics,
ergonomics, an improved understanding of the user, and marketing. But, he is not
considered a major presence in the canon of design history. If design success is
measured by the number of people whose lives are improved through a designer’s
work, surely Reinecke is a major success. Yet, without this way of working backwards
from object to designer, we have little to consider him with.
122 Design History Beyond the Canon

Along this discovery route, all sorts of other avenues of inquiry open up. How
and why did the Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Co. venture from mineral
production into tape manufacturing, reinventing itself as 3M? When did 3M start
making tape in two sizes, requiring two versions of the tape dispenser? How do the
colors offered reflect ideas about décor from that time period? Was Reinecke an
employee of 3M, or did he work as a consultant designer? Did he work for a flat fee or
a royalty? If the bits of convenient biographical information are true and he really did
employ a staff of over 300, did he even design the tape dispensers, or did a still unnamed
underling?
Patent searches are often inconclusive, and create as many new questions as they
manage to answer. Patent archives are scanned using OCR (Optical Character
Recognition) software that sometimes invents new ways of spelling things. Reinecke
has patents as himself, but also as Reineeke and Iteinecke. As Jean O. Reinecke, J. O.
Reinecke, and J.o. Reinecke. The cross-linking between patents is not completely
reliable: the patent for Reinecke’s 1961 redesign is a linking conundrum. It does not
appear at all in the list of his patents, even though the name on the patent is correct.
Clicking the link on his name in this patent does bring you to his other patents, but you
can’t go in the reverse direction. This one patent is floating alone in the database,
unfindable through normal channels. In this case, having the patent number (thanks to
another clear eBay auction photo) was the only path to that actual patent. There is a
certain amount of sleuthing and tenacity required, but that is always true in research,
and it seems a small price to pay for the value of such a rich resource.

Who gets to decide?

Some might argue that “lesser” designs should be forgotten, leaving the more elevated
and pure examples of good design to represent our times. Would it be such a tragedy if
coffee percolators, picture frames, and cafeteria dishes were not treasured a century
after their creation? The danger in this reasoning is that there is no definition of “good
design” that is time-resistant and universal. There are too many subjective factors in the
equation to arrive at anything reliable. Purging the majority of manufactured objects to
perpetuate a selected few is problematic because it leaves the history-writing and the
taste-making in the same hands. It may well be that objects which were (or are)
examples of what someone considers bad taste have more to teach us about their times
and might deserve a better final resting place than the junk heap.
Design history is full of arguments about how good design should be defined and
determined. One such argument is found in What Is Modern Design?, written in 1950
by Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., for the Museum of Modern Art, where he was Director of
Industrial Design. An illustration from that book (Figure 8.6) contrasts a drawing of an
airplane with a drawing of Jean Reinecke’s 1941 tape dispenser (although no credit is
given for either design). The caption states that the engineered streamlining of the
airplane is “naïvely echoed on the Scotch-tape dispenser.” The section attached to the
illustration is titled “Streamlining is not good design.” There you have it: The MOMA
tells us that Jean Reinecke’s work is not good design. Kaufmann goes on to delineate
 Using digital tools to work around the canon 123

Figure 8.6 Edgar Kaufmann, What Is Modern Design?, 1950.

“twelve precepts of modern design” to help us avoid the pitfalls of bad taste. He
proclaims that modern design should be practical, useful, express the spirit of the time,
investigate new materials, improve the use of existing materials, relate form to function
in ways that visually explain instead of confuse, use materials honestly (not in imitation
of other materials), celebrate mass production by letting manufacturing methods
determine aesthetics, be simple, and serve the widest public possible by being affordable
to all.
With a little distance from 1950 and from the prejudices of the author, every one of
those precepts is irrefutably true for Reinecke’s tape dispenser. It was inexpensive,
available to all. It used cast iron, an old material and manufacturing technique, to create
forms that were contemporary instead of mimicking a previous era. It celebrated the
arrival of new materials by getting cellophane adhesive tape into every home. Its form
and material choice were derived from analysis of how and where it would be used.
Its use is obvious without instruction, and all functioning parts are visible and expressed
visually, creating the form and the aesthetic. In addition, the normal life-cycle of
a designed object is short because materials, techniques, demand, and style change
frequently. When Kaufmann was critiquing it, this tape dispenser was already a
decade old and had earned its slightly-out-of-fashion status; expecting it to remain
“modern” for that long is unfair. It continued in manufacture and in use for nearly a
decade after Kaufmann condemned it, which ought to count for something when
gauging success.
By selecting only the parts of our design and manufacturing efforts that reflect the
image we want to see when we look at our past, we craft an intentional, artificial
narrative about design progress. We may remove objects we consider ugly or cheap or
124 Design History Beyond the Canon

in bad taste or too revealing about our real interests and our baser instincts. These
removed and forgotten objects may well offer a truer portrait of who we were and who
we are. If design historians want to find greater diversity of race, gender, income level,
or even merely of interests, it is all available in the tape dispensers, drinking glasses, and
patio furniture that live on in non-traditional sources, outside of the canonical archives.
The online research tools we now have available are making it possible, even easy, to
learn about less celebrated objects and incorporate them into our narratives, our
publications, and our teaching.
One way to broaden the canon is to continue working on inclusion. There are so
many female designers left to learn about and get woven back into the story. There are
new ways to consider and discuss colonialism and find better ways to include racial
diversity in the story. We need to continue these efforts and continue improving the tools
we have available for communicating the story of design history. Today’s students of
design need—and want—to know more about the figures lurking in the shadows. We can
also identify new narratives, however specific and tailored they may be, and support
those narratives with a rich inter-connected group of reliable primary source documents.
By focusing on an object first and what we can learn about manufacturing techniques,
material advances, user demands, trade restrictions, legal constraints, and then finally,
last, designers, we don’t need to expand the canon. We can work around it.

Notes
1 For example: Bryan Ropar, “Comprehensive ‘Definitive’ Grosfillex Malaga Chair Video,”
YouTube video, 4:34, posted by Bryan Ropar in July 2017, https://www.youtube.com/
watch?time_continue=1&v=2iwcfigzJ4Q.
2 YouTube, “For Press,” https://www.youtube.com/yt/about/press/, last accessed on
March 17, 2018.
3 Bill Stoddard, “Escapement of Chauncey Jerome ‘Union’ one-day shelf clock, 1850s,”
YouTube video, 00:37, posted by Bill Stoddard in May 2010, https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=iYwpjE9APHQ&list=PL0E333130D122304D.
4 RCA, “Old RCA Victor Portable Radio Commercial,” YouTube video, 01:15, posted by
“Thompsontech1” in November 2011, https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=dyxVVX5xMak.
5 “Woodsy Owl 1977 TV public service announcement,” YouTube video 00:30, posted by
“robatsea2009” in August 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZB7gSQRIuM.
6 Apple Computers, “Apple Inc commercial,” YouTube video, 00:30, posted by “Patrick R”
in February 2007, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ6u9lvnQ-s&list=
PL5ABDBBC1BB1E9181.
7 “Latex in the Home: Do-It-Yourself Rubber (1959),” YouTube video 01:55, posted by
British Pathé in April 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVfwoduCays&list=
PLEANvcdpJW0muKgJQ9aTViqOXJm1opAOU.
8 “Eames Lounge Chair debut in 1956 on NBC [1/2],” YouTube video, 4:25, posted by
“omidimo” in August 2007, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfzLzOl795E&list=
PL678758830FA293A6
9 Revlon, “Revlon Futurama Lipstick Commercial 1956,” YouTube video 01:25, posted by
“Vintage Fanatic” in May 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcgZSdzS_C0.
 Using digital tools to work around the canon 125

10 Sears, “Christmas Book,” 1964, p 19, scanned catalog from WishbookWeb Project:
http://www.wishbookweb.com/FB/1964_Sears_Christmas_Book/#21/z, last accessed
on March 17, 2018.
11 “Inflation Calculator,” https://westegg.com/inflation/, last accessed on March 17, 2018.
12 Waring Commercial Products, “History,” http://www.waringcommercialproducts.com/
content.php?page=history last accessed on March 17, 2018.
13 IDSA, “Jean Otis Reinecke, FIDSA”, http://www.idsa.org/content/jean-otis-reinecke-fidsa,
last accessed on March 17, 2018.
126
 Section 3

Designers

127
128
 Confronting racial stereotypes in graphic
design history
Karen L. Carter

This chapter begins with a vivid memory of encountering racist imagery almost thirty
years ago in, of all places, a London supermarket.1 I had grabbed a jar of Robertson’s
jam from the shelf and was shocked to see on the label a caricature of a figure with jet-
black skin, wide white eyes, and spiked hair. Although I was not aware of the figure’s
name at the time (only later did I learn it was called a “golliwog,” a character from The
Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a Golliwog, the 1895 book by Florence Kate Upton),
I took this racist representation to be a colonized British subject that was intended to
ridicule and humiliate blacks.2 The moment has stuck with me because I stood in the
aisle for several minutes contemplating what to do next. I eventually placed the jar back
on the shelf because I did not want to purchase such an item, but the confrontation of
racism really rattled me. As an outsider to the United Kingdom, I remembered this
encounter with a sense of disgust and bewilderment about why an internationally
distributed brand would ally itself with a racist stereotype.3 As it turns out, the “golly”
had already come under public scrutiny and by 1988 was no longer used in television
advertising. In 2002, “golly” was eventually dropped as the mascot of the Robertson’s
Jam Company, and even discussing the “golliwog” image on the Robertson’s jam label
is today considered racist in Great Britain.4
A parallel situation exists in the United States, where the racist roots of advertising
images are still largely neglected by an American public that is often ignorant of the history
of race and its consequences, although recent politics are forcing a national conversation
about racist monuments.5 One potent example is the iconic Aunt Jemima, a stereotyped
mammy figure used to advertise Aunt Jemima Brand maple syrup and pancakes (owned
by Quaker Oats Company). The “mammy” caricature is believed to be a holdover from the
female house slave from the antebellum period (although there is scholarly disagreement
about whether the mammy predates the Civil War), yet representations of “mammies”
persist as a stereotype of African-American femininity.6 Starting in the 1890s, the character
“Aunt Jemima” was depicted on pancake mix packages as a heavy-set, African-American
woman smiling widely and wearing a bandana head scarf and neckerchief. The Aunt
Jemima figure is still used as the major figure of brand identity for the Aunt Jemima
Company, although her image was revised in 1989 by lightening her skin, thinning her
physiognomy, and dressing her in more contemporary clothing that included pearl

129
130 Design History Beyond the Canon

earrings and a lace collar; these changes effaced references to the figure’s antebellum roots
and made her image appear more in line with black and white women who would
potentially purchase these products.7 Other racial stereotypes used in American
commercial advertising include caricatures of “Uncle Tom”: for example, the image of
Uncle Ben on packaging for rice products (in use since the 1940s).8 As American consumers
have become acculturated to seeing racial stereotypes circulated throughout society, we
often ignore these examples of graphic design. However, recent examples of racist images
in contemporary advertising have received public scrutiny, as will be discussed below.
Meaningful analyses of historical representations of race in design artifacts are largely
absent in textbooks used to teach graphic design history and, consequently, the topic is
often difficult to broach in the college classroom. In 2009, Sarah Lichtman, a professor at
Parsons, the New School of Design, challenged design historians to integrate issues of
gender, race, colonialism, sexual orientation, and ethnicity into the survey of design
history.9 According to Lichtman, “not engaging with historical or academic frameworks
will mean that students will be unable to fully engage with issues critical to the
contemporary practice of design.”10 Despite this challenge to problematize the issues in
design history, most graphic design history textbooks do not broach the topics of race,
colonialism, or primitivism (the cultural appropriation of African motifs in early
twentieth-century art and design) in relation to American and European graphic
design.11 For example, Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, often referred to as the “Bible” of
graphic design history, includes a lengthy discussion of the impact of modern art
movements on early twentieth-century design, but the book does not mention
primitivism or representations of race within those chapters.12 Stephen Eskilson’s Graphic
Design: A New History acknowledges colonialism as a social factor in poster design, and
his book features two posters (Adrian Allinson’s East African Transport—Old Style and
East African Transport—New Style), in which we see a contrast of a European colonist
and indigenous Africans, with the white European male depicted as a superior overlord.13
Eskilson includes two other posters designed for the 1931 Colonial Exposition held in
France.14 Despite the importance of these examples, there is not a substantial analysis of
race in advertising throughout his history. Large, encyclopedic histories of design, such
as Pat Kirkham’s History of Design: Decorative Arts and Material Culture, 1400–2000 and
Victor Margolin’s World History of Design, employ a more global view of design, and
thereby acknowledge the contributions of non-Western designers to design history, but
with their universal focus and high price tags, these studies make poor choices for a
graphic design survey textbook despite their utility as a resource for the instructor.
Part of the problem, then, is this gap between the desire of design historians to teach
difficult topics such as the impact of race on the history of graphic design and the lack
of material in textbooks that could aid such discussions. This chapter, therefore,
presents some case studies for classroom activities to help graphic design students
learn to critique the use of racial stereotypes in publicity of the past and more recently.
The case studies presented here—Paul Colin’s La Revue nègre poster (1925) for a
performance of Josephine Baker, artifacts from the Jim Crow Museum of Racist
Memorabilia, and examples of contemporary advertising accused of perpetuating
racist stereotypes—were integrated into a junior-level history of graphic design course
(taught in 2016 and 2017) that is required for all graphic design majors at Kendall
 Confronting racial stereotypes in graphic design history 131

College of Art and Design, Ferris State University. My college (KCAD for short) is
located in Grand Rapids, Michigan, about an hour south of our partner institution,
Ferris State University, which is located in Big Rapids, Michigan, and which also houses
the Jim Crow Museum. The objectives of the learning module were: to engage students
in critical thinking about racial stereotypes using artifacts from 1920s and 1930s
graphic design; to have students apply those historical lessons about racial stereotypes
to contemporary graphic design and advertising that had been implicated in charges of
racism; and finally, to enable graphic design students to generate a set of standards for
their own design practice that is sensitive to the history of racial stereotypes. The first
two cases studies were historically located for the most part in the 1920s and 1930s, an
era when Jim Crow Laws were still in force in the American South. At the same time,
American Jazz was incredibly popular at home and abroad, and the Harlem Renaissance
brought African-American culture to the forefront internationally. It is also a period
when there was an active cultural appropriation of African traditional arts by American
and, more particularly, European modern artists who looked to the so-called primitive
arts for inspiration. Most of these European artists, however sympathetic they may
have been to African and African-American culture, were nevertheless perpetuating a
colonialist mindset by appropriating these cultural forms.15
The topic of race may be one that professors hesitate to confront in an art history or
design history course. Any topic that lies outside the canon can cause discomfort
because it challenges expectations and assumptions. Most of my students are
Millennials (born roughly from 1980 to 2000), are Caucasian of Dutch or Polish
backgrounds, come from western Michigan, and are not well acquainted with the
history of racism and segregation in the United States. KCAD prioritizes new diversity
and equity guidelines for teaching, staff and faculty hiring, and student recruitment,
but despite these institutional initiatives, students of color are still in the minority;
there are also international students who come to Michigan, mostly from China, Korea,
and Japan. The students in my graphic design history courses were at first reluctant to
discuss race, but eventually showed a tremendous curiosity about racial issues and the
history of the United States. This reluctance may have stemmed from the perception
that “race” is an issue that affects other people, rather than recognize that white is
indeed a race that carries with it social, legal, and economic privileges in the United
States. This inability to “see” race or to understand the complex historical and social
issues makes discussing race in the classroom often difficult, because it necessarily
requires the students and instructor to openly acknowledge their own identities,
assumptions, and lived experiences. In any case, the make-up of the students in a class
and the background of the instructor (I am a white female) will shape the direction of
how the discussion unfolds and will inevitably be part of the exploration of the topic.
The benefits that students gain in understanding the racial underpinnings of visual
culture far outweigh the temporary discomfort that students may initially feel. It should
go without saying that all classroom discussions need to be conducted in a civil manner
so that all participants are treated with dignity and their opinions are respected. Even
with those ground rules established, instructors who open up their classes to discussions
of race should be willing to tolerate and guide the discussion in relation to remarks that
can range from the bizarre to the downright ignorant.
132 Design History Beyond the Canon

The first case study introduced was Paul Colin’s La Revue nègre poster that
advertised the African-American performer, Josephine Baker. The case study can be
integrated into a history of graphic design as part of the material in the category of Art
Deco graphics. To begin, I provided an overview of Baker’s life, from her childhood in
the US through her rise to fame as a dancer in Paris and situated her biography within
the context of American and European racism in the early twentieth century. Josephine
Baker (born Freda Josephine MacDonald, 1906–1975) was an African American born
in St. Louis, Missouri, to a poor family with few prospects given her race and social-
economic background; her mother was a washerwoman and, as a young teenager,
Baker also worked as a maid. At a young age, she learned to dance, and by the age of
thirteen she married for the first time and later left home to become a performer,
eventually traveling with a troupe from New Orleans to Philadelphia. In 1921, she
joined the Dixie Steppers in Philadelphia. The same year, she married Willie Baker (her
second marriage) and, although the relationship was short-lived, she kept his name for
the remainder of her life.
According to her biographies, Baker was often asked to participate in performances
that capitalized on African-American stereotypes, including playing a clown in
blackface.16 While traveling around the United States, Baker would have undoubtedly
encountered the struggles that faced African-American performers of the time:
segregationist Jim Crow Laws in the South (in effect from 1877 to the 1960s) restricted
blacks’ access to restaurants, lodging, transportation, bathroom facilities, and public
drinking fountains. These laws effectively forced American blacks into a second-class
status that not only separated whites and blacks but also sought to institutionalize a
social system based on an ideology of white racial superiority. The situation of African-
American performers would not have been remarkably better in other areas of the
country, especially in the Midwest, where “sundown” laws made it illegal for blacks to
spend the night in cities and towns. Violators were harshly penalized, and the draconian
laws permitted blacks to work within these whites-only communities as long as they
did not try to take up residence there. These legal restrictions were accompanied by the
presence of white supremacist groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, that reinforced a
social system of white racial superiority through threats, violence, and murder, often in
the form of public lynchings. Rather than operating outside the social and legal
structures of American society, the Klan often had close connections with local law-
enforcement and government.17 As a black woman in the 1920s and 1930s (the height
of the Great Migration), Baker would have faced tremendous prejudice, even in major
urban centers in the northeastern and midwestern United States. Hazel Carby argues
that the experiences of African Americans migrating from South to North varied
greatly depending on gender and class, and that black women were considered at the
time to be “sexually degenerate and, therefore, socially dangerous.”18
Given these conditions of oppression, it is no surprise that in 1924, Baker took the
chance to travel to Paris in order to dance and sing in La Revue nègre (The Black—or
Negro—Review), and she fled the US at a time when lynchings in the South were at an
all-time high. Baker had been selected by Caroline Dudley Reagan, an American
socialite producer, who wanted to bring a real “negro” music and dance review to Paris.
Baker joined the troupe as the lead dancer, singer, and comic, and the job marked a
 Confronting racial stereotypes in graphic design history 133

major turning point in her life and career. Performers who accompanied Baker
included Dennis Day on trombone, Bass Hill on tuba, Percy Johnson on drums, Sidney
Bechet on clarinet, composer Spencer William, and Claude Hopkins, band leader and
pianist. The Mexican-born artist Miguel Covarrubias was hired to design the sets for
the show.19
By the time the troupe arrived in Paris in October 1925, the revue was adapted to
better conform to a Parisian music-hall performance, with opening night only ten days
away. La Revue nègre’s performance at the small Music-Hall des Champs-Elysées was
therefore “tailored” for the French audience with more sexual and voyeuristic fare, and
this change was reflected in the publicity for the performance. Upon the troupe’s
arrival, Baker’s place in the company changed slightly, and she was foregrounded as a
dancer rather than a comic; her costumes were replaced, and she performed a
particularly provocative dance with a partner, Joe Alex, who was hired in France.20
Both Baker and Alex performed almost nude and were outfitted in “primitive” costumes.
In the publicity photographs for the show, Baker is shown topless, wearing ankle
adornments made of straw and a beaded necklace. In her performance at the Music-
Hall des Champs-Elysées, Baker wore almost nothing, except for a pink flamingo
feather covering her groin area. As part of the danse sauvage (savage dance) that Baker
performed, she cartwheeled on the back of Alex; the dance was described in the
Parisian press as possessing the “animality” of the savage: exotic, bestial, and
degenerate.21 The performance catapulted Baker to fame.
Despite the racism of French colonialism, a cultural system in which Baker was
forced to operate as a performer, France offered her the freedom that she did not have
in her native United States. She was well paid and became a star virtually overnight.
French women imitated her hairstyle (she endorsed the hair product “Bakerfix” that
thousands of women used to mimic her slicked-down hairstyle), but she nevertheless
had to conform to pre-existing notions of the African “primitive” and, at least for the
early years of her career, she relied on her erotic dancing and sexuality to distinguish
herself. In her early film career, she was cast in roles in which her ethnic and racial
background were highlighted and in which she was presented as a colonial subject.22
Even though for most of her life she was a singer and later became a political activist
and war hero, this pivotal stage of her career as an erotic dancer assimilating the colonial
racism of primitivism has been what essentially defined her for the rest of her life.
One question raised by this meteoric rise to fame in Parisian culture is what
precisely was Baker’s contribution to the danse sauvage? In other words, was she wholly
responsible for the dramatic transformation of her career once she arrived in Paris?
Some scholars who have written about Baker’s claim that she was fully aware of the
cultural impact of her danse sauvage and entirely responsible for its creation. Sieglinde
Lemke writes about Baker’s early performances as part of La Revue nègre:

Baker herself seemed to have been aware that her stardom was predicated on her
embodiment of the primitive de luxe, and she consciously decided to give the
French what they so desperately wanted. Playing off the imagery of the jungle, she
adapted the racist stereotypes by which black people had been oppressed and
exploited them for her own commercial success.23
134 Design History Beyond the Canon

Lemke bases her assessment on comments that were attributed to Baker in her 1927
biography that was penned by Marcel Sauvage.24 She also contends that Baker
understood that her performances fit into a construction of the black body within the
ideology of colonialism in Europe, and that she “played the role of the savage as long as
she was adequately compensated.”25 As Bennetta Jules-Rosette contests, later in life
Baker became a master of constructing her professional identity and embodied many
performative types that were enshrined in the dioramas (with wax figures) at her
residence at Château des Milandes, including the Cinderella myth, the Black Venus,
and the Marian (or Mary) figure as the mother of the “rainbow tribe” of adopted
children.26 While these touristic displays at her château were no doubt the result of
careful constructions of Baker’s various celebrity personas by a seasoned performer,
one has to at least question the ability of a nineteen-year-old American with little
exposure to European audiences in 1925 to foretell the tastes and preferences (according
to Lemke, the “exotic yearnings”) of Parisians after having landed in France only a few
days before the first performance of La Revue nègre.
Rather than attribute the transformation of La Revue nègre performance and
subsequent publicity to Baker alone, there were probably others responsible for the
transformation, and the creation of the danse sauvage should best be considered a
collaboration between Baker and three men: director Rolf de Maré, André Daven
(artistic director), and Jacques Charles, director of the Casino de Paris, who was asked
to make the show more “African.” The illustrator Paul Colin was commissioned by
Maré and Daven to create the poster for the troupe. These taste intermediaries made
possible the construction of Josephine Baker as a sexualized, exotic performer and
subject of graphic design and publicity. Jules-Rosette also credits Baker’s manager and
companion, Guiseppe (Pepito) Abatino, with helping Baker construct her early persona
from 1925 to 1935, the height of her career.
Paul Colin’s poster (Figure 9.1), advertising La Revue nègre, then, assimilates some
of these influences as it features two African-American men and a young woman
dancing in the background. Colin’s design incorporated an image by Miguel
Covarubbias (1904–1957) that had been published in Vanity Fair only a few months
earlier.27 Although the style of the poster can be categorized as Art Deco because of its
streamlining and use of geometrical forms, the figures nonetheless still contain gross
racist stereotypes represented with large grins, wide eyes and thick lips. The female
dancer also adds a clear element of sexuality as she appears to tug her short skirt up to
the top of her thighs. The Art Deco style makes these stereotypes slightly more palatable
and less grotesque yet still depends on a tradition of stereotyping black performers
using exaggerated facial features and enhancing the sexuality of black females. In the
class we compared Colin’s depiction of the performers in La Revue nègre (Figure 9.1)
to images of African Americans in the 1920s and 1930s, including Colin’s images of
Baker in Le Tumulte noir (Figure 9.2), a fine art series of lithographs printed in 1927
that further served to transform Baker from black urban flapper to African primitive,
and to disseminate her image to the French public as a sexualized African body.28
Part of the class lecture on Baker included information about European colonialism
and the cultural appropriation of African motifs in sexualized imagery that was used
to advertise Baker’s performances in Paris. We watched short clips from historical films
 Confronting racial stereotypes in graphic design history 135

Figure 9.1 Paul Colin, poster for La Revue négre performance at the Music-Hall des
Champs-Elysées, 1925. Posters Please, Inc., New York.

of her “banana dance” that made her famous and viewed other photographs and prints
that represented Baker as a plantation slave and savage. These images and films were
discussed as dependent on European colonialism, a system that was based on theories
of racial inferiority and that France wholeheartedly adopted. For example, throughout
the early twentieth century, the country held exhibitions of Africans and Asians in
136 Design History Beyond the Canon

Figure 9.2 Paul Colin, “Josephine Baker, Banana Skirt,” from Le Tumulte noir, 1927,
lithograph with pochoir coloring on paper. Posters Please, Inc. Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York.
 Confronting racial stereotypes in graphic design history 137

human zoos and colonial villages as part of state-sponsored and organized festivals
celebrating French colonialism.29 As Jennifer Boittin maintains in Colonial Metropolis,
“interwar Paris was a colonial space, meaning a space in which the spectre of ‘empire’
guided the self-identification of its residents as well as their social and political
interactions.”30 Clearly, Baker was operating within this colonial space.
We discussed as a class the stereotype of the African physiognomy (the exaggerated
facial features) that were circulating in Paris at the time, and compared the Colin poster
(Figure 9.1) to American images and objects from the early twentieth century that are
shown on the Jim Crow Museum website. While this comparison may seem a bit like
comparing apples and oranges (or drawing parallels between racist American artifacts
and European graphic design), the grotesque racist stereotypes seen in posters
advertising American minstrel shows, for example, were widely disseminated in France
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, well before Baker ever came to
France.31 One such example is the poster for the minstrel troupe, Les Jolly Koon’ess, for
a performance at the Ambassadeurs, Champs-Elysées (Figure 9.3). While many
American performers (both white and black) who came to Paris to perform minstrel
acts brought their own posters with them, this one was printed by Emile Lévy, a Parisian
printer and publisher, who employed his own designers.32 The Josephine Baker case
study allowed the students to link American social stereotypes to moments in graphic
design history and also provided a transition to the next case study about racial
stereotypes and caricatures that were displayed in the Jim Crow Museum.33
A second activity of the learning module was a field trip to the Jim Crow Museum
of Racist Memorabilia, which is located in Big Rapids, Michigan. This field trip was
planned because I wanted to capitalize on a collection of objects that was connected to
my college. Dr. David Pilgrim, the founder and primary collector of material in the Jim
Crow Museum, and several volunteers took the students on a guided tour of the
collection and displays.34
Many of the students were initially hesitant to discuss racial stereotypes and seemed
to be uncertain about the trip to the Jim Crow Museum. Part of the problem may have
been that they thought the visit would be a kind of litmus test about race and that they
would be judged in some way about their responses to racial imagery. The exhibits
included information about American slavery and Jim Crow Laws and included visual
documentation of segregated practices (water fountains, bathrooms). Photographs of
lynchings, a replica tree with noose, and a small display about the Klan filled a central
gallery. The next few galleries contained exhibits of mass-produced and distributed
graphic design that caricatured and de-humanized blacks: toys, games, illustrated
books, magazines, food packaging, signs, music sheets, and posters—all the categories
of graphic design had been utilized in the American system of racism between the
Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement. This section was overwhelming in the sheer
number of artifacts that had been collected by Pilgrim or donated to the museum.35
The students made connections between familiar products, such as Aunt Jemina
Pancakes and Syrup, and the stereotype of the mammy, who has since receded from
public memory, but still lurks behind the image of Aunt Jemima. The next exhibits
followed the rise of the Civil Rights Movement that eventually ended Jim Crow, but as
Pilgrim and his docents emphasized, the 1960s did not witness the end of racist
138 Design History Beyond the Canon

Figure 9.3 Emile Lévy (printer), “Ambassadeurs,” Champs-Elysées, 1885

imagery. Other displays contained post-1970s artifacts including racist propaganda

against President Barack Obama, most of which pledged violence and death to the
former president. Some objects still capitalized on the image of blacks as sub-human—
such as the game Ghettopology (designed by David Chang in 2002 and sold briefly in
Urban Outfitters) complete with “pimps,” “hoes,” and “drug dealers,”36 while others—
such as the Oreo Barbie doll (by Mattel and Nabisco) of 1997—revealed a callous
insensitivity to racial stereotypes by using the derogatory term, “oreo,” which can
indicate an African American “who behaves more white than black.”37
For the most part, however, the students were remarkably quiet during the field trip,
perhaps because they, like me, felt overwhelmed by what they had seen. There were two
objects that were the most memorable for the students: one, a small photograph
 Confronting racial stereotypes in graphic design history 139

depicting black children with the legend below reading “gator bait.” The actual practice
of using children as “gator bait” has not been authenticated; however, the representation
of black babies as gator bait was rampant and indicates the level of hatred towards blacks
during the Jim Crow era. The image was striking for the students because it showed the
blind contempt for black lives, even for innocent children. The Aunt Jemima ad campaign
and its stereotype of the mammy was unknown to them, and they were shocked that the
product was still sold by a caricatured logo until 1989, when it was revised.
The field trip had an impact, as was seen in the next classroom activity, which linked
racial stereotypes seen at the Jim Crow Museum to contemporary advertising. We saw
that when discussing contemporary advertising, racial stereotypes still re-emerge in
contemporary media. Once the class returned to campus, the students discussed
specific examples of contemporary graphic design in small groups. The examples
included recent advertising that had been accused of racism on the internet and social
media, including: a Burger King television commercial featuring Mary J. Blige singing
about fried chicken;38 an ad for Pizza Planet: California Meat print ad (Nexus BBDO,
Bolivia, 2011), one in a series of ads with “divided” personalities to represent divided
pizzas (this ad showed the California Meat pizza as a “divided” black man half dressed
in a Laker’s jersey and sideways ball cap and the other half shirtless and adorned in
body paint feather and beads); an Intel brochure advertising its Core2 Duo processor
that depicted black sprinters kneeling in front of a white man; a Sony PlayStation
Portable billboard (the Netherlands) featuring a white woman (representing the “white”
PlayStation) aggressively dominating a more diminutive black woman (indicating the
“black” PlayStation);39 Nivea’s “White is Purity” ad campaign released on Twitter;40 and
Kendall Kardashian’s infamous Pepsi television commercial set in a generic protest.
Some of the ads were distributed in other countries, while others were designed and
distributed in the United States. With the internet and the globalization of many design
firms, racial stereotypes in graphic design have become an international problem. As
we saw above, globalization of racist stereotypes existed more than a hundred years ago
when American minstrel posters (Figure 9.3) were exported from America to Europe,
but they are the focus of greater scrutiny and debate today. Some of the examples were
not immediately recognizable to my students as potentially containing racial
stereotypes (the Intel Core Duo2 processor ad in particular), but others were more
evident, partly because they had been discussed in greater depth in the media, such as
Kendall Kardashian’s Pepsi commercial, which the students immediately recognized as
appropriating a widely publicized image of a participant in a “Black Lives Matter”
protest.41 The students mostly discussed how the advertisements were examples of
poor design principles. As one student remarked about the Sony PlayStation billboard,
“Using skin color to market a product is never a good idea.”
After we discussed these case studies together—Josephine Baker, the Jim Crow
Museum, and contemporary advertising—the students were asked to write individual
papers. They were given three possible assignments for their papers: they could write
about contemporary examples they found that contain racial stereotypes; they could
write about an artifact in the Jim Crow Museum; or they could research a female,
African-American and/or a Latino designer whose work can be interpreted as attempting
to challenge racial stereotypes.42 The papers were assessed according to how well the
140 Design History Beyond the Canon

students analyzed the ad they selected and made connections with the issues we had
discussed for the past few classes. Most students chose the first two options, either writing
about the Aunt Jemima ads (and conducting research on their own to trace the
development of the character) or contemporary advertising. In this last category, students
found and researched additional examples of racial stereotypes in advertisements (such
as a Chinese television commercial for laundry detergent in which a black man is put
into a washing machine and emerges several shades lighter, and a Nivea print ad for
men’s products [the “Re-Civilize Yourself” campaign] in which a clean-shaven black man
prepares to throw a head with a long afro and full beard). One student attempted to re-
design the Aunt Jemima ad from the 1930s and wrote about her choices in the design
process; she first featured an updated female African-American chef, then completely
omitted a person altogether and depicted instead a stack of pancakes. Another student,
who talked about her Native American origins in class, wrote about cultural appropriation
seen in the cover of an issue of British Elle Magazine (November 2014), which depicted
pop star Pharrell wearing a Native American headdress.
The main objectives of these case studies were to engage students in critical thinking
about cultural insensitivity and racial stereotypes using examples from graphic design
history. The basic learning module can, however, be extended to include artifacts that
relate to industrial design and fashion, depending on the interest of the instructor.
Graphic design examples from the past and the present abound on the internet and can
be used to instigate discussion with students, and ads that perpetuate racial stereotypes
still circulate in our society and deserve more scrutiny in academia as the subject of
research and teaching. This chapter has proposed several case studies that can be used
by teaching design history “beyond the canon” as one way to confront these racist
stereotypes. We owe it to our students, and to the design professions in which they will
eventually practice, to help them learn to recognize, analyze, and challenge racial
stereotypes while in college, so they may more productively contribute to the design
professions after graduation.

Notes
1 I am indebted to Victoria Rose Pass, Assistant Professor, Maryland Institute College
of Art, and Mark Fetkewicz, Professor, University of Northern Colorado, for their
collaboration in the initial exploration of this pedagogical project in 2015 as part
of the NEH Summer Institute: Teaching the History of Modern Design. Part of this
chapter was presented at SECAC 2016 held in Roanoke, Virginia, in the panel, “The
Canon and Beyond: Theory into Practice,” that was chaired by Russell Flinchum.
2 For an analysis of the character of the golliwog, see David Pilgrim, “The Golliwog
Caricature,” The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, https://ferris.edu/HTMLS/
news/jimcrow/golliwog/homepage.htm, accessed March 5, 2018.
3 To my knowledge, the “golly” figure was not reproduced on package labels for items
exported to the US.
4 Marcus Dunk, “How the Golliwog Went from Innocent Child’s Hero to Symbol of
Bitter Controversy,” Daily Mail (February 4, 2009), http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/
article-1136016/How-golliwog-went-innocent-childrens-hero-symbol-bitter-
 Confronting racial stereotypes in graphic design history 141

controversy.html, accessed March 3, 2018. Claire Carter, “Discussing Robertson’s

Jam ‘Golliwog’ Label Is Racist, Judge Rules,” The Telegraph (December 18, 2013),
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/10525121/Discussing-
Robertsons-jam-golliwog-label-is-racist-judge-rules.html, accessed March 3, 2018.
5 See, for example, Maggie Astor, “Protesters in Durham Topple a Confederate
Monument,” New York Times (August 14, 2017) https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/14/
us/protesters-in-durham-topple-a-confederate-monument.html (accessed March 5,
2018) and Yoni Appelbaum, “Take the Statues Down,” The Atlantic (August 13, 2017),
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/take-the-statues-down/536727/
(accessed March 7, 2018).
6 See David Pilgrim, “The Mammy Caricature,” the Jim Crow Museum of Racist
Memorabilia, https://ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/mammies/homepage.htm,
accessed March 5, 2018. Probably the best-known example of a mammy is the Mammy
character in Gone with the Wind (1939) performed by Hattie McDaniel (1895–1952).
McDaniel was the first African American to be awarded the Academy Award for Best
Supporting Actress. For a short film about the Aunt Jemima character, see “I’se in
Town, Honey” with excerpts from the Aunt Jemima Variety Show, posted by the Jim
Crow Museum on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ipamH6EEwI,
accessed March 3, 2018.
7 Many African-American artists have appropriated the image of Aunt Jemima and
transformed her into a militant icon. See, for example (in chronological order): Jon
Onye Lockhart, No More (1967), Betye Saars, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972),
and Faith Ringgold, Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima? (1983). The first example is
displayed at the Jim Crow Museum in Big Rapids, Michigan.
8 David Pilgrim, “The Tom Caricature,” Jim Crow Museum website, https://ferris.edu/
HTMLS/news/jimcrow/tom/homepage.htm, accessed March 5, 2018.
9 Sarah Lichtman, “Reconsidering the History of Design Survey,” Journal of Design
History, 22, 4 (2009): 343. Lichtman’s case study is “History of Design, 1850–2000,”
the design history survey course taught at Parsons.
10 Ibid., p. 343.
11 Primitivism and the “primitive” are two deeply problematic terms that can refer to
the impact of non-Western art in European countries, but they depend on a binary
opposition of the “civilized” West to the “primitivized” Other. In the nineteenth
century, the primitive could have been defined as pre-modern art (“pre-Raphael” as
in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood) or the rejection of industrialization in favor of
rustic handicraft, as in the presumed spiritual simplicity of Breton culture or Tahitian
art (in the paintings, prints, and ceramics of Paul Gauguin). Despite its elegance and
sophistication, Japanese art was interpreted by artists such as Vincent van Gogh as
“rustic” and could therefore be categorized as “primitive.” By the early twentieth
century, the primitive was overwhelmingly associated in European art with the
influence of African culture that was appropriated as a direct consequence of
colonialism. For an in-depth analysis of the term, see Mark Antliff and Patricia
Leighten, “Primitivism” in Critical Terms for Art History, edited by Robert Nelson and
Richard Shiff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
12 Philip Meggs and Alston W. Purvis, Meggs’ History of Graphic Design (Hoboken, NJ:
John Wiley and Sons, 2016). See Part IV, The Modernist Era; Chapter 13, The Influence
of Modern Art; and Chapter 14, Pictorial Modernism.
13 Stephen J. Eskilson, Graphic Design: A New History, 2nd edn (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2012), “Art Deco and Colonialism,” pp. 172–5.
142 Design History Beyond the Canon

14 Ibid., p. 174–5.
15 See Jody Blake, “Taking the Cake: The First Steps of Primitivism in Modernist Art,” Le
Tumulte noir: Modernist Art and Popular Entertainment in Jazz-Age Paris, 1900–1930
(University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), pp. 11–36.
16 See, for example, Jean-Claude and Chris Chase, Josephine: The Hungry Heart (New
York: Random House, 1993) and Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Josephine Baker in Art and
Life: The Icon and the Image (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007).
17 This connection between government and Klan membership was brought to national
attention in 1988 and 1992 when former grand wizard of the Klan, David Duke, ran as
a presidential candidate. Duke served in the Louisiana House of Representatives from
1989 to 1993.
18 Hazel V. Carby, “Policing the Black Woman’s Body in an Urban Context,” Critical
Inquiry, 18, 4, Identities (1992): 739.
19 Details about Baker’s danse sauvage (savage dance) and La Revue nègre can be found
in Karen C. C. Dalton and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Josephine Baker and Paul Colin:
African American Dance Seen through Parisian Eyes,” Critical Inquiry, 24, 4 (Summer
1998): 903–34.
20 According to Dalton and Gates, Joe Alex, possibly born in Martinique, frequented Le
Grand duc, a black club in Montmartre. Dalton and Gates, “Josephine Baker and Paul
Colin,” p. 913.
21 For a description of the performance, see Wendy Buonaventura, Something in the Way
She Moves: Dancing Women from Salome to Madonna (Da Capo Press, 2004),
pp. 194–6. For an incisive look at the reception of Josephine Baker in Paris and
beyond, see Mae G. Henderson and Charlene B. Regester, eds., The Josephine Baker
Critical Reader (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2017), pp. 30–125.
22 For a summary of her early films, see Jules-Rosette, pp. 72–123.
23 Sieglinde Lemke, Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic
Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 103.
24 Marcel Sauvage, Les Mémoires de Joséphine Baker (Paris: Editions Kra, 1927),
pp. 99–100, as cited in Lemke, p. 103, footnote 160.
25 “Baker knew that she was being categorized as a figure of primitivism and that she was
fulfilling the exotic yearnings of Europeans. She knew that she owed her success to this
dubious ‘primitivismus.’ Although Baker had heard about primitivism in the arts—e.g.,
in expressionism—she did not seem to have a thorough understanding of what
primitivismus meant and why and how she had become a part of it. Apparently, she
willingly played the role of the savage as long as she was adequately compensated.”
Lemke, p. 103.
26 Jules-Rosette, pp. 13–29.
27 Covarubbias’s illustration is reproduced in Josephine Baker and La Revue nègre: Paul
Colin’s Lithographs of Le Tumulte noir in Paris, 1927 with an introduction by Henry
Louis Gates, Jr., and Karen C. C. Dalton (New York: Harry Abrams, 1998), p. 6; and
Dalton and Gates, “Josephine Baker and Paul Colin,” p. 913. The image, sometimes
titled “Jazz Baby,” was published in Vanity Fair (December 1924) under the title
“2 A.M. at ‘The Cat and the Saxophone’ ” as part of a two-page spread, “Enter, The
New Negro, A Distinctive Type Recently Created by the Cabaret Belt in New York,”
pp. 60–1.
28 The title, Le Tumulte noir (The Black Furor), suggests the craze in Paris for American-
African music and popular culture. Colin’s series included 45 lithographs with pochoir
printed in an edition of 500. Baker used Colin’s imagery in these lithographs and his
 Confronting racial stereotypes in graphic design history 143

illustrations in her 1927 biography by Marcel Sauvage to bolster her celebrity and
used variations of the images in subsequent publicity posters. See Marcel Sauvage,
Les Mémoires de Joséphine Baker (Paris: Editions Kra, 1927) with illustrations by
Colin. For reproductions of Le Tumulte noir portfolio, see Josephine Baker and La
Revue nègre.
29 The connection between the depictions of Josephine Baker and displays of African
bodies are examined in Mae G. Henderson, “Josephine Baker and La Revue nègre:
From Ethnography to Performance,” Text and Performance Quarterly, 23, 2 (August
2003): 107–33, reprinted in The Josephine Baker Critical Reader, ed. Mae G. Henderson
and Charlene B. Regester (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Publishers, 2017), pp. 67–87. For
an analysis of the 1931 Colonial Exposition, see Patricia Morton, Hybrid Modernities:
Architecture and Representation at the 1931 Colonial Exposition, Paris (Cambridge,
MA: The MIT Press, 2000).
30 Jennifer Anne Boittin, Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism
and Feminism in Interwar Paris (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), p. xiv.
31 For information about the popularity of late-nineteenth-century minstrel shows and
performances of the cake walk in Paris, see Blake, Le Tumulte noir, pp. 11–36.
32 There are many examples of posters for American minstrel shows that were exported
to Paris and deposited in the collection of the National Library of France
(Bibliothèque nationale de France); see the digitized collection of advertising posters
in gallica.bnf.fr.
33 There is a distinction between a stereotype and a caricature. Stereotypes are usually
negative characteristics foisted on a group of people, and caricatures are depictions
that exaggerate physical attributes or facial features.
34 The museum and David Pilgrim were featured in The New York Times in a series about
collecting racist objects. Logan Jaffee, “Confronting Racist Objects,” New York Times
(December 9, 2016), https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/12/09/us/
confronting-racist-objects.html, accessed February 26, 2018.
35 Most instructors will not have access to a collection like the Jim Crow Museum, but
the museum has an excellent website with an introductory video and categories of
racist stereotypes. The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia: Using objects of
intolerance to teach tolerance and promote social justice, https://ferris.edu/jimcrow/.
A virtual tour of the museum has recently been added to the website, https://my.
matterport.com/show/?m=8miUGt2wCtB, accessed March 15, 2018.
36 These modern figures continue the stereotypes of the “brute” and the “jezebel.” Ibid.
37 The Free Dictionary by Farlex. According to The Free Dictionary (idioms), the offensive
slang term “oreo” derives from the cookie, which is “black on the outside, white on the
inside.” https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/oreo
38 “Mary J. Blige: Burger King Chicken Ad Fallout ‘Crushed’ Me,” Rolling Stone Magazine
(June 28, 2012). https://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/mary-j-blige-burger-king-
chicken-ad-fallout-crushed-me-20120628, accessed March 15, 2018.
39 Steve Totilo, “Sony Pulls Dutch PSP Ad Deemed Racist by American Critics,” mtv.com
(July 12, 2006), http://www.mtv.com/news/1536222/sony-pulls-dutch-psp-ad-
deemed-racist-by-american-critics/, accessed March 13, 2018.
40 Ivana Kottasova, “Nivea Pulls ‘White is Purity’ Ad after Outcry,” CNN Money (April 5,
2017), http://money.cnn.com/2017/04/05/news/companies/nivea-white-is-purity-
racist-ad/index.html, accessed March 13, 2018. For a short summary of recent ads
accused of racism (Dove Soap, Nivea, Seoul Secret, and Vaseline), see “Advertising:
Off-Color Ads by Beauty Brands,” Time (October 23, 2017).
144 Design History Beyond the Canon

41 To see Jonathan Bachman’s (Reuters) photograph of Ieshia Evans, the Black Lives
Matter protester, arrested by police during a protest at Baton Rouge, Louisiana (2016),
see “Baton Rouge Killing: Black Lives Matter Protest Photo Hailed as ‘Legendary,’ ”
www.bbc.com (July 11, 2016), http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-36759711,
accessed March 12, 2018.
42 An excellent source of information for student research is “Race and the Design of
American Life: African American in Twentieth-Century Commercial Life,” The
University of Chicago, Regenstein Library, Special Collections Exhibition: https://
www.lib.uchicago.edu/collex/exhibits/race-and-design-american-life/. A bibliography
is included under “About this Exhibit.” See also issues of The Crisis Magazine for the
period examined here, which are available online: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.
edu/webbin/serial?id=crisisnaacp, accessed March 14, 2018.
 The Mangbetu coiffure: A story of cars, hats,
branding, and appropriation
Victoria Rose Pass

In 1924, George Specht photographed a woman named Nobosodru (Figure 10.1). She
was a member of the Mangbetu—a group of people living in what was formerly called
Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo—and the wife of King Touba. Specht
made the photograph as a member of La Croisière Noire (The Black Crossing), an
expedition across the Sahara sponsored by the Citroën car company. While over eight
thousand photographs were taken by Specht as part of this expedition, led by Georges-
Marie Haardt and his second in command Louis Audouin-Dubreuil, this photograph
is the image that circulated most widely in popular culture, and continues to circulate
even now. I argue that the particular resonance of this image through so many different
iterations in European and American design is due to the ways in which it signifies the
exoticism and eroticism that was attached to Africa in the popular imagination of these
audiences. Europe and America have historically defined themselves in opposition to
Africa, othering the entire continent as primitive and hyper-sexual.
The photograph served in certain contexts—books, posters, and exhibitions—as
evidence of what many European explorers had identified as the Mangbetu people’s
advanced and hierarchical society.1 Eventually though, the publicity for the expedition
and the accompanying film, Nobosodru and her Mangbetu coiffeur became a brand
identity for Citroën and La Croisière Noire, and later for Belgian colonialism at the
1931 Colonial Exposition in Paris. Nobosodru was chosen as an icon of Afrocentric
beauty by Harlem Renaissance graphic designer Aaron Douglas, and as an icon
representing the perceived exoticism of Africa by milliner Mme Agnès and a number of
other fashion designers in the 1920s and 1930s. This one image is assigned multiple
significations in a complex network of Art Deco aesthetics, black beauty, and fashionable
modernity. Nobosodru’s elegant profile was objectified by European and American
audiences as an embodiment of the modernist aesthetic becoming popular in the 1920s.
While many studies have argued for the significance of the aesthetic of primitivism
and the usage of non-European and American sources by designers in this period,
my study uses a specific image to unpack the ways that its meaning can change from
one that is specifically about colonial power in Africa to a tool for the construction of
white womanhood. By attending to a specific image and its origins, we can see how

145
146 Design History Beyond the Canon

Figure 10.1 Nobosodru, a Mangbetu woman, wife of King Touba, Niangra, Belgian
Congo.

signification is structured in design and better understand the use such appropriations
had for designers in this period. This chapter will trace the various design applications
and appropriations of this photograph in the early twentieth century, and explore the
ways its meaning changes in these various contexts. Looking at the origins of the
photograph of Nobosodru and its iconic status in Art Deco design is important because
this image continues to be referenced in design and popular culture, most recently by
Beyoncé in Lemonade (2016) and the film Black Panther (2018). I argue that the reason
for this image and the hairstyle’s remarkable staying power as a generic signifier for
 The Mangbetu coiffure: Cars, hats, branding, appropriation 147

Africa (even as it has long fallen out of vogue with actual Mangbetu women) is the way
in which it combines both the sharp angles of Art Deco and modernist streamlined
aesthetics with a distinct silhouette that fits in with notions of African “otherness.”
Thus, it is malleable to the changing tastes of both designers and users, later allowing
it to be claimed by artists and designers interested in the political aesthetic of
Afro-Futurism in the early twenty-first century.

An ethnographic image

Even before the Croisière Noire expedition, images of Mangbetu women were in
circulation throughout Europe. Anthropologist and chief curator at the Museum of
African Art in New York, Enid Schildkrout, has traced the ways in which images of
Mangbetu women have been codified and circulated both outside of and within the
culture. She has identified an 1871 illustration of King Munza (Mbunza) dancing for
his wives as one of the first and most enduring of these images.2 Schildkrout has shown
that the Mangbetu woman, “embodies an idealized image of African beauty, yet at the
same time captures the ambivalence of the colonial attitude to African women.”3 While
the European public was drawn to the beauty of these women, they were also constantly
othered and treated as less than human, as evidenced in the profile pose chosen by
Specht in his photograph.
Specht’s photograph of Nobosodru entered most powerfully into popular European
visual culture in the 1920s as a result of the “multimedia extravaganza” of the Croisière
Noire.4 This expedition from Algeria to Madagascar between October 1924 and June
1925 was originally intended to demonstrate the capability of Citroën vehicles on the
unpaved roads of the jungles and deserts of Africa. The eight vehicles used by the
expedition were hybrids with traditional automobile fronts and tank-like rear-ends
with caterpillar treads—called a half-track caterpillar system.5 André Citroën hoped to
demonstrate the flexible capabilities of the automobile to tame the various landscapes
of central Africa more easily than trains.6 He had already shown the possibilities of
these hybrid vehicles on a twenty-one-day crossing of the Sahara from December 1922
to January 1923. While he was unable to garner financial support from the French, his
expedition did receive an official mission from the government as well as tasks from
the French Museum of Natural History and the French Geographic Society.
The expedition was a way of showing that French industry, namely Citroën, could
help the state to manage and extend the commercial possibilities of their colonial
possessions. In this regard, Madagascar, the most distant of France’s colonial
possessions, was a significant point for the expedition to terminate as a way of
demonstrating the Metropole’s control over even the most distant of its colonies.7 The
importance of the mission in terms of publicity for both French colonial enterprise
and Citroën is underscored by the fact that two of the eight cars on the expedition were
dedicated solely to the transport of photography and film equipment in order to
document this historic visit.8 Ultimately, the expedition included the photographer
Specht, a film-maker, Léon Poirier, and an artist, Alexander Jacovleff, all of whom
collectively created the various visual documents of the expedition which included
148 Design History Beyond the Canon

paintings, photographs, exhibitions, books, magazine articles, and a film, La Croisière

Noire, 1926. Images from the expedition as well as the film were seen all over Europe
and in America, including a long article written by Haardt in National Geographic in
1926. Film historian Alison Murray Levine has argued that this focus on the visual
made this expedition unique and gave it staying power in French visual culture, writing
of the expedition film:

In short the reasons for the popularity of La Croisière Noire today are very similar
to the explanations for its popularity in the 1920s: the rich imagery that
accompanied it, an energetic public relations campaign on the part of its leaders,
and the chance it offered its audience to experience a moment of escapism and
high adventure that associated French technology with exciting, exotic backdrops.9

The inclusion of technology—cars along with photography and film cameras—is an

important part of this story, marking this expedition as modern. The photographs, as
well as the film, highlighted the modern cars tackling the rugged terrain and often
contrasted them with the “primitive” technologies of the Africans—canoes, camels,
horses, and even elephants.10 At least nineteen of the photographs published in National
Geographic include the cars in them, making visible Citroën’s message of the technological
superiority that allowed the French colonizers to master the African colonies.11
Many of the images made by the men on the expedition were intended to document
the dress and self-presentation of the people they encountered, as was the case with the
image of Nobosodru. This image shows the results of the elongation of the skull
practiced by Mangbetu men and women of the ruling class, which became popular
among all classes of the Mangbetu, as well as surrounding peoples, at the beginning of
the twentieth century. Babies would have their skulls bound with bandages starting
from birth. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Mangbetu women created
beehive-shaped basketry hairstyles, often supported by reed frames and including
foreign hair woven in and adorned with combs and hairpins. Men would wear hats
atop their elongated coiffeurs, often with flourishes of feathers and hatpins. Around the
turn of the century, styles changed and women began to embrace the funnel-shaped
coiffeur we see on Nobosodru. Again, a reed framework and foreign hair were used to
supplement the wearer’s own hair and create this elaborate look. This was a fashionable
status symbol for Mangbetu women since it took so long to create, and was only worn
at public functions by members of the ruling classes.12
By the nineteenth century, the Mangbetu had gained a reputation for being
fashionable, and were referred to as “the Parisians of Africa.”13 A 1946 ethnography by
M. H. Lelong described the Bangala/Lingala word lipombo as essentially the same as
chic, describing anything that was fashionable and elegant in terms of bodily
adornment.14 Elaborate hairstyles continued to be an important part of Mangbetu
adornment and self-expression, even as the funnel-shaped style has gone out of fashion.
While the elongation of the skull from birth was outlawed by the Belgian colonial
government in the middle of the twentieth century, “the Mangbetu have always
considered hairstyles that show a rich imagination to be the most appealing, and that
trend continues to this day.”15 The unique funnel-shaped coiffeur, however, represents a
 The Mangbetu coiffure: Cars, hats, branding, appropriation 149

highly specific style popular in the early part of the twentieth century, rather than an
unchanging traditional style, as it was often perceived by Europeans and Americans,
who connected it with Ancient Egypt.
As a document of La Croisière Noire, the photograph of Nobosodru follows
ethnographic conventions, presenting her with bare breasts and clearly highlighting
her hairstyle through a profile view. Enid Schildkrout explains that such images
of Mangbetu women were typical among European representations, “stereotypical
expressions of the Western fascination with the merged categories of erotic and exotic
African.”16 The practice of skull elongation was used by Westerners “as profound and
physical evidence of [the] deviance and inferiority” of those who practiced it.17
Nobosodru’s bare breasts and dark skin also mark her as other in the photograph, as
does the profile pose, not a portrait of an individual as much as a representation of an
ethnographic type. As with most colonial representations of women, she is available for
the white male viewer’s sexual gaze.
Haardt makes this ethnographic gaze explicit in his text in the book he published in
1927 on the expedition, La Croisière Noire: Expèdition Citroën Centre-Afrique. He
describes a photograph of a row of Mangbetu women with the funnel-shaped coiffeur:

Seated in a hieratic pose on small ebony stools, the women of Mangbetou [sic] are
arranged in file, like figures on an Egyptian frieze. They suddenly call up in our
minds a striking picture that connects the present time to the civilization of the
Pharoahs. Their bronze bodies colored a copper patina, these creatures with
harmonious figures remain motionless, knees locked and heads held high. A
disdainful look emanates from their narrow eyelids, dominated by the strange
deformation of their heads. These have an egg-like form, according to the custom
of ancient Egypt, where this allusion to their esoteric beliefs about the origins of
the world was a sign of the absolute power of the Pharaohs.
A hairstyle crowned with a halo, ornamented with pins from the tibia bones of
monkeys, spread out behind their ovoid heads. Wearing bracelets of copper and
carved ivory, a miniscule apron held on a by a discrete elephant hair passed around
the back, ornamented behind by a light basketry screen (nekbé) with geometric
designs, these are the sole ornaments to these nude figures which give them the
chastity of statues with eyes of enamel.18

Here, we can see clearly the ways in which these women are objectified as statues
with “eyes of enamel” and reliefs as opposed to living and breathing people. They are
also described as creatures with strangely deformed heads who wear adornments made
from exotic materials, elephant hair, monkey tibias, and ivory. We can also see the
careful way in which the sexuality of these women is managed through the evocation
of “the chastity of statues,” allowing the white male colonizer’s gaze to examine them,
without the threat that they might gaze back. The eroticism of the topless photograph
of Nobosodru is key to her adoption as a symbol of the expedition and of Africa itself.19
Brett A. Berliner rightly points out that “integral to exoticism is ‘ethno-eroticism,’ the
state of sexual arousal and desire for a specific people solely because of their racial or
ethnic identity.”20
150 Design History Beyond the Canon

Josephine Baker is perhaps the most well-known example of “ethno-eroticism” in

European popular culture of the 1920s and 1930s. In the context of the representation
of non-white women in Hollywood film, Sarah Berry argues that “primitive constructions
of femininity emphasize an edenic sexuality that is libidinal but innocent, providing a
mediation of Western split femininity.”21 We can see precisely this kind of rhetoric in
Haardt’s description of Mangbetu women quoted above and in the celebrities like Baker
who provided a middle ground in the Western dichotomy of women as madonna or
whore. Baker is the keenest personification of the conflation of African, African
American, and the erotic in the white imagination. In her show at the Folies-Bergère in
Paris, she performed in a skirt of phallic sequined bananas in a clear parody of the
primitivist erotic fantasies of her white audiences. Baker deliberately cultivated an image
of herself on stage as an uninhibited jungle girl. The primitive stereotypes visualized in
her performances allowed her display of uninhibited sexuality to be read as primal and
innocent, not threatening to her white audience.22
We can see the same kind of sexuality projected on to the Mangbetu women in the
context of National Geographic. Six photographs of the ninety-eight included in the
article written by Haadt for the June 1926 issue highlighted the skull elongation of
the Mangbetu. The article also includes three photographs of women with lip plates. It
is clear that these, and other body modifications such as scarification and elaborate
hairstyles, as well as costumes and headdresses, were perceived to be of the most
interest to readers. In National Geographic, Nobosodru is not referred to by name, but
rather as the “favorite wife of Mangebetou [sic] Chief.”23 She appears on her own in the
iconic profile photograph (although her bare breasts are cropped out), as well as at the
front of “the ‘better halves’ of a Mangebetou [sic] Chief, lined up in order of preference.”24
Here again, Haardt underlines the otherness of the Mangbetu through the practice of
polygamy. Another photograph is captioned, “A Mangebetou [sic] chief, surrounded by
his wives, enjoys his pipe.”25 These Mangbetu women are repeatedly described as taking
special care of their appearance: “women of the upper classes do little or nothing but
cook and busy themselves with their toilet. This latter takes up much more time than
their scanty attire would indicate.” These women are portrayed as constantly sexually
available to the chief, and also subservient to him, busying themselves in their efforts to
make themselves visually pleasing to him. Alexander Jacovleff appears in a photograph
holding a Mangbetu child whose skull has been clearly elongated by the practice of
binding. Nobosodru was also noted by viewers of the film, La Croisière Noire (1927).
French film critic Pierre MacOrlan enthused, “I know nothing more graceful than this
ebony girl stylized according to Egyptian traditions.”26 The Mangbetu practice of skull
elongation, as well as that of polygamy, clearly struck a chord with the French explorers
and these are prominently featured in the documentation of their trip. Both practices
spoke to the French explorers’ expectations of the primitive nature of the Africans they
encountered, marking them as uncivilized.
Nobosodru’s elegant profile clearly captured the imagination of many viewers,
including sculptor Malvina Hoffman. Hoffman used her image as the model for one of
her sculptures in the 1933 exhibition “The Races of Man” at the Field Museum in
Chicago.27 Hoffman, a student of Rodin, was commissioned in 1929 to create sculptures
to be used by the museum to exhibit racial difference. While Hoffman insisted
 The Mangbetu coiffure: Cars, hats, branding, appropriation 151

on sculpting specific individuals from life, traveling around the world—including

extensive travel to Africa—as well as relying on immigrant populations in the US and
Paris, in the case of the Mangbetu she chose to use Specht’s photograph. Art Historian
Jeff Rosen has shown that “the ‘Mangbetu Woman’ was chosen [by Hoffman] not for
her characteristic racial qualities, but, it seems, for the purpose of creating an exhibition
that would display both a racial deformity and a sexualized primitivism.”28 He shows
how Hoffman chose to highlight “deformities” that conformed to the idea that the
women she represented shaped their bodies as a way of striving towards the standards
of beauty that were a part of their culture. As an American woman who had to decide
what girdle and brassiere to wear and whether to bob her hair or not, the idea of the
female body’s malleability to changing standards of beauty must have seemed familiar
to Hoffman. At the same time, the perception that the Mangbetu woman’s skull was
deformed through permanent modification performed since birth continues to other
her, and the inclusion of her bare breasts further sexualizes and others her. Rosen
explains how Nobosodru, like most popular representations of colonized women, is at
once treated as sexual and innocent, “in Hoffman’s survey of racial types, the Mangbetu
woman is also both desirable and unattainable; as an emblem of a chaste ‘Other,’ she is
at once seductive in her child-like innocence and degenerate in her abject primitivism.”29
In the context of the Field Museum, we can see how Nobosodru is used to construct
white femininity, her modification of her body is extreme, marking the beauty rituals
of white women—such as girdles and bras—in the US as impermanent and modern by
comparison. Her primitive sexuality is set in opposition to the modern sophistication
coded into the construction of whiteness.

A brand identity

“Spectacles of difference,” such as the visual culture surrounding the Croisière Noire and
the Field Museum’s “The Races of Man,” were an important part of visual culture in the
1920s and 1930s in both Europe and the United States.30 Outside of such ethnographic
spectacles, primitivism in visual and commodity culture was a means of making racial
“others” available to be safely consumed by white Americans and Europeans. Creating a
spectacle of difference—whether through an exhibition, a documentary or Hollywood
film, or fashion (as we will see)—was a way “to normalize, contain and manage non-
European cultures through the very process of creating them as spectacle.”31 By
commodifying, and thus fetishizing, aspects of the “other,” white consumers could
contain the traits which they were at once attracted to and feared in “primitive” and
“oriental” cultures. White consumers’ projections of unbridled sexuality, savagery, excess,
and abandon onto the ethnic other were made into a commodity through spectacle; this
allowed these imagined racial others to be consumed and thus assimilated into the
everyday life of white Europeans and Americans.32 This is evident in the ways in which
Nobosodru’s image is used as a marketing device in the 1920s and 1930s.
Even as Nobosodru’s blackness and African-ness is framed as other to white
femininity in the context of anthropological representation, both visual and textual,
there was (and in fact still is) an aesthetic appeal to her image. Looking back at Haardt’s
152 Design History Beyond the Canon

description, Ancient Egypt is cited as the origin of the tradition of skull elongation, and
while the truth of this connection is dubious, certainly there is a visual connection to
be made.33 There is a particular resonance between Nobosodru’s profile and that of the
iconic bust of Nefertiti. Nobosodru’s funnel-shaped coiffeur seems to sprout directly
from her forehead, as does Nefertiti’s distinctive crown. This similarity was perhaps
apparent to Specht when he photographed Nobosodru, since he chose a profile to
highlight the swooping shape of the coiffeur as it grows out from Nobosodru’s head.
Nefertiti would have been very much in the consciousness of Europe at that moment,
since her famous bust was presented to the public in 1923 at Berlin’s Museum of
Antiquities after being found in 1912.34 Profile images are standard in Ancient Egyptian
painting and relief work—referred to by Haardt—and the curvature of Nobosodru’s
headdress also resembles that of the hedjet, or “white crown,” of Upper Egypt as well as
the khepresh, or “blue crown,” worn by pharaohs of the New Kingdom. These visual
connections help to explain the status that this photograph would attain as virtually a
logo for the Croisière Noire.35 In addition to Nefertiti, the 1823 discovery of King Tut’s
tomb ensured that Ancient Egyptian motifs would be a vital source of inspiration for
Art Deco designers.
A stylized version of her profile appears on the cover of the catalog of the 1926
exhibition on the expedition at the Louvre, on the poster for the film (Figure 10.2),
and on a deluxe leather-bound version of Haardt and Audouin-Dubreuil’s 1927 La
Croisière Noire: Expédition Citroën Centre-Afrique.36 All of these representations stylize
Nobosodru’s profile. On the book cover, bands around her hair colored turquoise and
short curved lines give texture to her hair until the point it begins to fan out and is
represented by simple radiating stripes that reach the binding of the book. On one
version of the film poster, shades of black and brown are used and Nobosodru is
depicted from the neck up. The texture of her hair is carefully depicted surrounded by
more stylized bands of black that refers to the binding worn around the hair. The
largest portion of the halo, at the end of the coiffeur, is cut off, focusing the image on an
elegant line going from the tip of her noise to the end of the coiffeur. Her face is
reshaped to accomplish this, and the slanted quality of her eyes, in part a result of the
practice of skill elongation, is exaggerated by the illustrator. In a horizontal version of
the poster, a fuller view of the hairstyle is offered and tones of red and yellow are added.
Both versions have an abstract stylized pattern as a background.
All of these objects were a part of what Bret Berliner has called the “multimedia
extravaganza” of the Croisière Noire.37 The illustration from the film poster was also
slightly modified and used on the cover of Opportunity Magazine by African-American
artist Aaron Douglas. Douglas was part of the Harlem Renaissance and chose this image
for the cover of an issue of the National Urban League’s magazine that focused on art
from Africa and the ways it inspired contemporary European artists. This issue also
included an article by French journalist Pierre Mille, on the exhibition’s artist Alexander
Jacovleff. Mille praises Jacovleff ’s ability to create “documents . . . of ethnographic and
near-prehistoric value,” once again connecting the Mangbetu coiffeur, in this case worn
by a woman named Uru, illustrated by Jacovleff, to Ancient Egypt.38
In each of these graphic contexts, Nobosodru’s profile is turned into an iconic Art
Deco illustration. Art Deco, or what was known at that time as moderne, or modern, was
 The Mangbetu coiffure: Cars, hats, branding, appropriation 153

Figure 10.2 Poster for La Croisière Noire, the documentary film of the Citroën
Centre-Afrique expedition, c. 1926.

a style that came into prominence in the 1920s utilizing the streamlined forms of avant-
garde artistic styles such as Cubism and Futurism in tandem with machine aesthetics.
Specht’s staging of the photograph as a profile constructs Nobosodru’s body and hairstyle
in the style of a streamlined Art Deco object. Her forehead curves back and up into the
funnel-sharped coiffeur, while the line to her jaw and neck as well as her breasts mimic
these curves. These lines echoed those that were being formed by Art Deco designers like
Peter Muller-Munk. He creates a funnel form in his iconic “Normandie” pitcher between
its handle and straight spout edge. The chrome-plated surface highlights the meeting of
sharp angles and curvilinear forms of this streamlined object. Russel Wright’s spun
aluminum pitcher (1932) captured the funnel form of Nobosodru’s coiffeur even more
clearly, in a less expensive form.39 We can see these same forms in Roger Broder’s poster
154 Design History Beyond the Canon

for the French Railway Company, “Marseille Porte de l’Afrique du Nord” (1920–1932). A
fascination with the streamline forms of the modern cruise ships dominated the
foreground with many funnel-shaped forms, and the scenic port is relegated to the
background. These aesthetics are also a strong part of the modernist art of the period. For
instance, sculptor Constantin Brancusi explored similar forms in his Le Coq (1924;
MoMA). Strong diagonals are paired with curved forms and a funnel-shaped base.
Looking at Munk’s pitcher, Broder’s poster, and Brancusi’s sculpture alongside Specht’s
photograph of Nobosodru, we can see how he staged the photograph to appeal to viewers
versed in this formal language. The translation of photograph to illustration heightens
these formal similarities, exaggerating the diagonal of Nobosodru’s neck and smoothing
the line from her nose to forehead and the upward sweep of her coiffeur.
Streamlining, a term coined to refer to the penchant American designers had for
applying aerodynamic lines to any number of products, from cars to pencil sharpeners,
in the 1930s is also embodied in Nobosodru’s elegant contours. The visual vocabulary
of streamlining emerged from forms discovered in the aviation industry, as well as
European modernist and Art Deco styles. The ways in which the photograph of
Nobosodru anticipated this aesthetic are most clear in the way her image was translated
into a hood ornament for Citroën; the iconic image of Nobosodru was transformed
from a logo for the expedition into a brand identity for Citroën as a whole. This is
perhaps the most disturbing image since, in this context, Nobosodru’s head stands in
for Africa as a whole, conquered by the technology of the Citroën Corporation. The
black female body, as is typical in colonial imagery, stands in for the so-called “dark
continent,” and occupies a place on the car often occupied by animals or sexualized
women.40 As Anne P. McClintock explains, “Africa and the Americas has become what
can be called a porno-tropics for the European imagination—a fantastic magic lantern
of the mind onto which Europe projected its forbidden sexual desires and fears,” and
the land of Africa itself was figured as feminine by explorers and colonizers.41 In this
way, it is natural that a woman rather than a man would be the face of not only the
Citroën expedition, but African colonial exploration more generally. In the hood
ornament, sculptor François Bazin exaggerated the angle of Nobosodru’s head so that
her hairstyle juts back in a line that would be perpendicular to the car she was attached
to. The hair that pokes out in decorative rings in between the wrapped portion of the
hairstyle is abstracted into rings of small squares, and the woven quality of the funnel
shape is heightened through the metallic texture of stylized concentric circles of braid.
In addition to the tilt of her head, Nobosodru’s mouth is also softened into a smile,
making her a more palatable “mascot” for the company. She is transformed into an
elegant and compliant exotic figure in this application.
Bazin’s hood ornament demonstrates the ease with which the Mangbetu woman
was transformed into a commercial icon, not only for Citroën but also for the Pavillon
des Tabacs at the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition, and even for Belgian Colonialism
writ-large, since the Congo was one of the most significant parts of Belgium’s colonial
holdings.42 Featured on the cover of the American magazine Opportunity in 1927,
Nobosodru’s profile is essentially a copy of the film poster, but in the context of a
Harlem Renaissance publication she became an Afro-centric icon of black beauty.
African art was a key source of inspiration for artists like Douglas, and the Mangbetu
 The Mangbetu coiffure: Cars, hats, branding, appropriation 155

hairstyle is referenced by him later in the first panel of his 1934 mural for the Harlem
Branch of the New York Public Library, now the Schomberg Center. Sculptor Nancy
Elizabeth Profit, also associated with the movement, described a bas-relief she made in
1931 based on “that strangely beautiful female with the marvelous headdress in the
Croisière Noire.”43 The relief is now lost, but according to Theresa A. Leininger-Miller,
Profit sent W. E. B. DuBois the book La Croisière Noire.44 Harlem Renaissance artists
and thinkers used African art to illustrate the rich history of the continent and to create
a pan-African aesthetic that was uniquely African American.
One of the most striking elements of the use of Nobosodru’s hairstyle as a
brand identity is the use of this hairstyle by Mangbetu artists. Enid Schildkrout has
demonstrated that in the early twentieth century, Mangbetu artists responded to
Western collectors’ interest in representational sculpture that captured this iconic
image of Mangbetu identity: “around 1900, then, representations of Mangbetu women
began to appear on a great variety of functional objects: on the necks of ceramic
jars, on the wooden covers of bark boxes, on the arms and back of wooden steamer
chairs, on handles of metal knives, on the ends of many kinds of musical instruments,
and on ivory hair pins.”45 She shows that production of figural objects depicting
women with the funnel-shaped coiffeur marked a significant shift in the artistic
production of the Mangbetu—clearly catering to this market saturated in images from
the Croisière Noire—and also sidelining female makers, who were the traditional
producers of pottery and baskets, in favor of the male, who capitalized on these new
markets; women “became the subject of the art of pottery and lost their stake in its
production.”46

Fashion

In addition to direct representations of racial others in visual and design culture, as

we’ve seen in the examples above, fashion was also a potent site for white consumers,
particularly female consumers, to explore racial otherness. For instance, Sarah Berry
argues that the mediation offered by primitivist and Orientalist ideas of ethnic sexuality
allowed American cosmetic companies to market their products not as the deceptive
tools of the whore, but instead as the products that allowed any woman to become
beautiful: “Orientalist beauty was offered to Western women as a means of transgressing
the strictures of split femininity: by temporarily adopting signs of exotic sensuality via
makeup and clothing, Western women could present themselves as a combination
of (white) virtue and (nonwhite) sexuality.”47 The temporary and contingent nature of
fashion and cosmetics is precisely what makes these areas ripe for the expression of
fantasy and experimentation with sexual expression. This helps to explain the
popularity of Nobosodru’s coiffure in fashion in the 1920s and 1930s, and in fact
through to the present.
The French milliner Agnès probably created the first hats inspired by Mangbetu
hairstyles to appear in French and American fashion magazines in 1926, tying in
directly with the release of the Croisière Noire film. Her turban styles reflected both
the older basketry hairstyles as well as the contemporary Mangbetu fashion for the
156 Design History Beyond the Canon

funnel-shaped hairstyle. One style wrapped grosgrain or velvet ribbon into a turban
that fit closely over the ears of the wearer and extended back off of the head,
approximating the backwards sweep of Nobosodru’s elongated forehead.48 Another
hat in jersey and black velvet ribbon attempted to replicate the funnel shape of the
more recent Mangbetu coiffeur. L’Officiel assured readers, “don’t think in reading
this title that the printer made a mistake . . . No! Agnès and ‘The Black Cruiser
[Crossing]’ are closely associated this season. As we already said Mme Agnès took
most of her inspirations in looking at this beautiful film and as she told us herself:
‘I thought that if the nigger women [négresses] often sougly [laides—meaning ugly]
were almost pretty when wearing these becoming head-dress, how our Parisian
would be charming when these same headdress would be adapted to their types
[sic].”49 This description is particularly revealing, since it clearly demonstrates the
racism that is at the root of “spectacles of difference.” Nobosodru herself cannot
possibly be seen as beautiful by Agnès, and so her aesthetic interest in the Mangbetu
woman must be projected onto her hairstyle. This statement reveals the ways in which
the European representations of Nobosodru and the Mangbetu women in visual
culture and fashion are deeply embedded in the rhetoric of white supremacy and
colonialism.
Here, we can see how the Mangbetu-style hats are a mode of mitigating the
ambivalent image of Nobosodru. It is her hairstyling that makes her beautiful, not her
natural form, as Schildkrout points out, “in description after description, the African
woman is beautiful, yet ‘deformed’; she comes from a wild place, yet she is not part of
nature; she is a work of art and a product of civilization.”50 The practice of skull-binding
that is used to achieve this graceful line was seen as evidence of a culture that was
“other.” White women could define themselves through their difference from
Nobosodru, rather than binding their skulls, permanently altering them, and weaving
their hair into a basket, they simply put on a hat. Scarification, lip plates, and ear plugs
were all seen in the visual materials accompanying the Croisière Noire, but the
elongated skull and coiffeur of the Mangbetu was the most visually alluring of these
practices to Europeans and Americans, not described in grotesque terms, as was the lip
plate modification of the Ubangi. In this way, the coiffeur was distinctive enough to
represent a “barbaric” form of creating a particular fashionable aesthetic, but one that
appealed to the modernist Art Deco sensibility of Americans and Europeans in the
1920s and 1930s.
Josephine Baker was an early model for the funnel-shaped turban just a year after
she had burst onto the Paris scene (Figure 10.3). The hat was being connected through
Baker to a modernist aesthetic, not only an African and ethno-erotic one. As Anne
Anlin Cheng has argued, “Baker . . . became an overnight sensation and an icon
of European primitivism, which is also to say an icon of European modernity.”51
Baker’s modernity, constructed through her off-stage persona, elegantly dressed and
accessorized by French designers, helped the French readers of L’Officiel to view Agnès’s
hat as an elegant and modern accessory rather than a grotesque costume belonging to
the primitive Mangbetu woman. After all, Baker had also used her own image to sell
tanning oil and hair products to French consumers, so Agnès knew how powerful her
star-power was.
 The Mangbetu coiffure: Cars, hats, branding, appropriation 157

Figure 10.3 Josephine Baker modeling a hat by Agnès, photographed by d’Ora (Dora
Kallmus) and two uncredited illustrations of Agnès hats, in L’Officiel de la Couture, de
la Mode de Paris, August 1926.

The introduction of African (or Africanist) aesthetics into 1920s Art Deco stemmed
particularly from the growing interest in and popularity of jazz, as well as the continued
colonial presence of European powers in Africa. The continent had become a
particularly fertile site for the imaginations of European and American designers and
artists, inspiring popular culture of all kinds. To understand why fashionable women
158 Design History Beyond the Canon

would have wanted to adorn themselves with African headdresses, it is crucial to

understand the complex network of ideas that formed social politics of Jazz-Moderne.
The Jazz-Moderne aesthetic developed from the link that European and American
listeners produced between the sounds of African-American jazz music and an
imagined Africa of lush jungles populated by wild dancing women and primitive
men.52 Jazz music synthesized elements of both the primitive and modern, and this
combination fit in seamlessly with the rise of Art Deco style which made use of sharp
staccato geometry and rhythmic patterns.53 Visually, the Jazz-Moderne style was
angular and dissonant, as was the jazz music of the period and the styles of dance
associated with it. As historians have noted, during this time, Art Nouveau and Isadora
Duncan were out, Art Deco and Josephine Baker were in.54 Organic and natural forms
were disposed of in favor of the angles and raucous rhythms of Jazz and its
accompanying dances, such as the Charleston. Nobosodru’s highly structured hairstyle
fit neatly into this aesthetic. Rather than the loose waves of hair so popular on Art
Nouveau posters, Nobosodru’s hair was woven into a structured headdress, in the same
way that Josephine Baker’s bob was shellacked into a kind of shiny helmet on her
head—a look emulated by many white women who bought her Bakerfix hair products.55
Designer Agnès frequently connected herself to this distinctive strain of modernist
sensibilities, Jazz-Modern, not only in her design work but also in her self-presentation.
In fact, her use of Baker as a model fits neatly into her overall marketing strategy. She
frequently wore African-inspired jewelry made by Swiss designer Jean Dunand; for
instance, she wore Dunand’s gold giraffe necklaces on the cover of L’Officiel in May
1927, and in a portrait painted by Dunand that appeared in the magazine in 1926.56 The
necklace was a series of several simple bands in graduated sizes to be worn together,
inspired by the jewelry worn by Massai women, and were covered with irregular motifs
of triangles and stripes.57 A similar necklace can be seen on a model wearing a different
version of Agnès’ Mangbetu-inspired hat in Harper’s Bazaar (Figure 10.4). The Jazz-
Moderne aesthetic was a part of Agnès’ branding as a both a modern woman and
modern designer.
Perhaps even more remarkable is a Vogue illustration in which Agnès herself models
the funnel-shaped turban (Figure 10.5). She is drawn by the Russian artist Alexander
Jacovleff, the very painter who participated in the Croisière Noire and documented the
dress of Africans encountered on the trip. In the illustration, Agnès poses in the same
three-quarter view as a Mangbetu woman named Uru who Jacovleff painted on the
journey. Agnès’ softly closed eyes and perfectly arched eyebrows create a crisp modernist
sheen in the image. She also wears earrings that replicate the ear plugs worn by the
Massai, who were also painted by Jacovleff.58 Agnès clearly saw an opportunity to market
herself and her hats as part of the Jazz-Moderne aesthetic. Josephine Baker had
demonstrated the appeal of this style to French audiences, and Agnès would attempt to
extend the market to the United States. The use of Baker herself as a model in the French
fashion magazine cemented the connection between the hats and two of the most famous
icons of black beauty at the time, Nobosodru and Baker. Baker’s status as an ethno-erotic
sex symbol underlines the sexuality evoked by the reference to Africa. Like Citroën,
Agnès used the cultural capital of African references, and indeed the Croisière Noire
itself as a way of connecting her label to modernity and French colonialism.
 The Mangbetu coiffure: Cars, hats, branding, appropriation 159

Figure 10.4 Baron Adolph de Meyer, a hat by Agnès, Harper’s Bazaar, September
1926.

It is crucial to note that Baker is not used as a model in American fashion magazines
in this period. Black female bodies are almost completely erased from American
fashion magazines of this era, both visually and textually. In Harper’s Bazaar, two white
models pose in profile wearing Mangbetu-inspired hats, one in the funnel shape, and
the other in a soft cone. Their profile poses mimic Nobosodru, but she has been entirely
eliminated from the images in the magazine, only referred to indirectly as a “Congo
belle.”59 Agnès’ hats are described as being inspired by African headdresses, but
interestingly in Harper’s Bazaar the quote attributed to her is rather different. Marjorie
Howard reports that while watching the Croisière Noire film, Agnès asked herself, “I
who love the lines of the gown close to the body, why don’t I make hats with line close
to the shape of the head, outlining the skull across the front, as these beautiful black
women do?”60 A deep anxiety among whites in the US around miscegenation—and the
use of Jim Crow Laws after Emancipation to prevent it—meant that the bodies of black
160 Design History Beyond the Canon

Figure 10.5 Alexandre Jacovleff, “Iacovleff [sic] Sketches a New Agnès Hat,” Vogue,
August 1, 1926.

women were systematically excluded from the pages of fashion magazines. Perhaps the
quotation was modified with the understanding that, while black women were not
present on the pages of the magazine, they might well be subscribers.61 Even in these
small bits of text, we can see the complex negotiation around race being managed by
fashion intermediaries in these magazines.62
African-inspired Jazz-Moderne styles remained popular in Europe and the United
States through the 1930s, and the Mangbetu coiffeur remained one of the most often
copied styles. In 1933, Women’s Wear Daily noted that “while not general, the Congo
influence received sufficient endorsement to bear watching, and always in ultra-high
effects worked out in cired [smooth or waxed] straw cloths, lacquered straw braids or
matt finish silks. In the promotion of the fez, the crown treatments varied, adopting
 The Mangbetu coiffure: Cars, hats, branding, appropriation 161

either the closed or open paper bag idea, arranged from side to side, back to front of on
the diagonal.”63 The “paper bag crown,” a hat in a tube shape formed close to the head
and gathered at the back, allowing an extra bit of the tube to fan back out at the top, like
a paper sac, is clearly a hat shape derived from the Mangbetu coiffeur.64 The straw braid
perhaps mimicked hair, as did the tubular straw used in a 1937 hat by American
designer Sally Victor. She also created a funnel-shaped hat in black embellished with
wooden triangles that mimics the look of the elongated skulls and upswept hairstyles
of Mangbetu women.65 These hats were likely inspired by a 1937 exhibition of hats
from the Congo at Charles Ratton’s gallery. The exhibition showed not only the hats,
but also a series of photographs taken by the surrealist photographer Man Ray of
mostly white French models wearing them. The show inspired milliners like Sally
Victor and Lilly Daché who were working in the US.66 Daché in fact bought the hat
collection after the exhibition for $2,500. Like Agnès, Daché used African references as
a selling point in her design work. Her branding was slightly different in that she had
built a reputation as a designer who researched other cultures to create new styles. A
New Yorker profile in 1944 lauded her process, explaining that she “studies so intently
that, in her own words, ‘I even know the color of the wind that blows there’.”67 LIFE
magazine published an article on September 13, 1937 showing how Daché used the
collection of Congolese hats to inspire her own designs. This article and the designs
were part of the publicity engineered for the grand opening of her new ten-story New
York headquarters on East 56th Street that year. She exhibited the Congolese hats there
and sent them to be shown at Marshal Fields in Chicago.68 South of the Marshall Field’s
location in downtown Chicago, Malvina Hoffman’s bust of Nobosodru could still be
seen in the Field Museum’s permanent installation “The Races of Man.” Among Daché’s
Congolese-inspired designs for 1937 was a “lofty barbaric turban” based on the
Mangbetu hairstyle.69 This description from a Bullock’s Wilshire ad highlights the way
the hat was viewed as primitive, and a part of the lingering strain of Jazz-Moderne
which stereotyped the Congo, and Africa more generally, in this way. Another milliner,
Alix, created a hat of black lacquered straw worn at the back of the head that “suggests
native Congo ways of dressing the hair.”70 The Mangbetu coiffeur was so emblematic of
the Congo that even over a decade after the photograph of Nobosodru had first
appeared in the US, and without a visual presence in Ratton’s show, it was still referenced
by these designers.

Coda: Yves Saint Laurent, Thierry Mugler,

Lemonade, and The Black Panther
In the 1920s and 1930s, the image of Nobosodru and her coiffeur appealed to
Art Deco and Jazz-Moderne aesthetics. Her photograph was turned into an icon for
the Croisière Noire and its resulting multimedia by-products. She was used to sell
magazines and cigarettes and cars. Citroën’s adoption of Nobosodru as a “mascot” for
the company encapsulates the way in which the company hoped to create an image
which would connect them to national aspirations of colonial exploration and
domination. The adoption of Nobosodru’s coiffeur as an inspiration for milliners made
162 Design History Beyond the Canon

her exotic sexuality something that could be worn by white women, but also removed.
The coiffeur was used to lend designs an air of the exotic, a frisson of sexuality, or a
sense of fantasy, virtually transporting the wearer to the imagined place “Africa” and
allowing her to temporarily take on the ethno-erotic appeal of an imagined “African”
woman. These hats allowed their white female wearers to adopt this exotic style without
the permanent alteration to the body that they saw as marking the Mangbetu as
radically other. This kind of fantasy space was not open to women of color, who were
not, and often still are not, treated as the blank slate that white women are seen as in
fashion.
What is especially striking about the image of the Mangbetu woman is the staying
power of this image in European and American visual culture. Multiple fashion
designers used the hairstyle on their runways, now an actual coiffeur as well as a hat. In
1967, a white model sported the hairstyle in Yves Saint Laurent’s African Collection. As
has often been the case throughout the twentieth century, the collection was a stylized
interpretation of “African.” Fashion historian Emma McClendon has explained that
Saint Laurent was an “armchair explorer . . . thus he developed a highly romanticized
notion of the exotic as fashion fantasy based on his knowledge of French fine art,
literature, and haute couture.”71 While his sculptural designs reflected the influence of
African textiles, and certain forms of dress, it was mostly a bricolage of influences,
filtered through “the thick lens of French culture.”72 It is especially significant, then, that
among the few specific references in this collection is Nobosodru’s coiffeur. This speaks
to the ways in which the image is embedded in French visual representations of Africa.
The coiffeur has made appearances in other European designer collections in more
recent years. If Saint Laurent’s Africa is filtered through French culture, John Galliano’s
is filtered through Saint Laurent in his Spring 2009 ready-to-wear collection for Dior.
The Mangbetu coiffeur is used by Galliano as a generic signifier, alongside raffia, beads,
and reference to sculptures made by Senufo people in West Africa. It is both a shape for
a hat and a hairstyle worn by white models. In 1988, Thierry Mugler used the coiffeur
in a slightly different way. In his Spring–Summer collection, the coiffeur was placed
alongside references to surrealist biomorphic forms, Isamu Noguchi and Alexander
Calder-style accessories, and strong-shouldered silhouettes that looked back to the
1930s and 1940s. Significantly, it is worn as a hat by both black and white models and
as a hairstyle by black models. Rather than use the bodies of his white models as a kind
of blank canvas onto which any racial signifier can be used, Mugler’s black models
sport this hairstyle in ways which are more futuristic than primitive.
Mugler’s show plays with his audience’s perceptions of African fashions as primitive,
traditional, and unchanging by showing their similarity to the space-aged biomorphism
of mid-century designers. While Mugler’s show is rife with stereotypical primitivist
and Africanist images, he playfully and self-consciously undermines them.73 For
instance, at one moment a black model walks down a darkened runway with what
seems to be an Ubangi lip plate—another key image from the Croisière Noire—but
taking a bite, she holds up the remainder of a cookie.74 Humor plays a key role in the
show. Rather than a permanent body modification, the lip plate is literally a consumable
object, a cookie—not to mention that the last thing we expect to see is a model eating
on the runway. Mugler’s collection begins to suggest a more complex appropriation of
 The Mangbetu coiffure: Cars, hats, branding, appropriation 163

an African hairstyle on a European runway, moving beyond an evocation of primitivism

and ethno-eroticism.
Contemporary African-American artists and designers have pushed this exploration
even further, using references to Nobosoru as an icon of black beauty and African
history. In both the films Lemonade (2016) and The Black Panther (2018), reference to
Nobosodru is made as part of an Afro-futurist aesthetic which aims to critique the
Euro/American view of Africa as backwards, traditional, and unchanging. The
Mangbetu coiffeur appears in Lemonade during the song “Sorry.” The costuming used
in the context of this song includes a number of African references to Dutch Wax
fabric, Malian mudcloth, and Massai collars. The Mangbetu coiffeur appears about half
way through the song, during the bridge which marks a tonal shift both in the music
and imagery. Beyoncé appears alone in an abstract space seated on the floor with legs
crossed (Figure 10.6). She wears a bra by Zana Bayne that appears metallic, and the
lighting also gives her skin the appearance of shining steel. The large fan-shaped
earnings sparkle and shine, and reference several of the iconic publicity photographs of
Josephine Baker (Figure 10.7). Her posture and movements with the coiffeur are
robotic, lending the scene an air of futurism. The look plays on the sculptural quality of
the hairstyle, the same streamlined form that appealed to Art Deco designers. Aaron
Douglas’s appropriation of the film poster image for the cover of Opportunity pre-
figures Beyoncé’s use of the hairstyle as part of an aesthetic of black beauty. Both
Douglas and Beyoncé deploy the hairstyle as a political tool in their Afro-centric
projects. Where Douglas’s image looks back in the context of a Harlem Renaissance
publication, constructing a visual representation of heritage for African Americans as
a part of Alain Locke’s New Negro philosophy, in Lemonade the hairstyle becomes a
part of a futuristic aesthetic, or more precisely an Afro-futurist aesthetic.

Figure 10.6 Beyoncé in Lemonade, directed by Kahlil Joseph, Beyoncé Knowles

Carter, Melina Matsoukas, Todd Tourso, Dikayl Rimmasch, Jonas Åkerlund, and
Mark Romanek, 2016.
164 Design History Beyond the Canon

Figure 10.7 Josephine Baker, c. 1925.

Afro-futurists such as Octavia Butler and SunRa, or more recently Janelle Monae
and Wengchi Mutu, use the genres of science fiction and fantasy to place black
characters at the center of their imagined futures, and to explore the politics of
encounter in worlds which reflect our own, but are freed from the constraints of our
own histories of race. These artists often use the freedom allowed in creating imaginative
worlds to revisit historical events, or to imagine different possibilities for the future,
mining images that are part of our collective consciousness. The vitality of Afro-
futurism demonstrates the value of such fantasy spaces for imagining a different kind
of future. While not explicitly engaged with science fiction, Beyoncé certainly imagines
a different world that places black women, their stories, and their histories at the center.
In the film, fashion plays a key role, along with the other visuals, in enriching the
personal narrative that emerges through Beyoncé’s music. It enhances and underlines
the politics present sonically in the album and presents a very different way of looking
at black women and their histories, which all too often are completely absent from
popular culture. By mixing the Mangbetu coiffeur with contemporary fashion, Beyoncé
 The Mangbetu coiffure: Cars, hats, branding, appropriation 165

creates an image that invokes a powerful lineage of black beauty: Nefertiti, Nobosodru,
and Josephine Baker.
In the future of Lemonade, black women are at the center of things, they possess the
power to stare, to look, to desire, to gaze uninhibited by the authority of white men or
women.75 In this context, the Mangbetu coiffeur is part of a future in which black
women have agency and power within society. We see the same imaging in The Black
Panther, in which costume designer Ruth E. Carter uses the coiffeur on Angela Basset’s
character Ramonda (step-mother of T’Challa, the Black Panther) as part of the
construction of the fictional Wakanda, a highly advanced and intensely secretive
country in Africa. While Carter has cited headdresses by married Zulu women called
isicholo, the resemblance to Nobosodru’s hairstyle is also unmistakable. The Zulu
headdresses were, in fact, based on a hairstyle worn in the early nineteenth century
which was replaced by hats made from human hair woven into basketry forms and
colored with red ocher. Carter collaborated with architect and designer Julia Koerner
to produce headdresses through 3D printing that mimicked the form of the Zulu
isicholo, and perhaps also the Mangbetu hairstyle, but have a high-tech machine-made
look.76 Ramonda’s 3D printed Zulu/Mangbetu crown appears alongside characters
with scarification and lip plates, and wearing a vast array of styles related to multiple
regions of Africa.
While some designers and artists have used Nobododru’s image as a means of
celebrating black beauty and African history, she continues to be deployed in ways that
reinforce the racism of the colonialist ideology that produced the photograph of her
image in the first place. The granddaughter of François Bazin, Julie Bazin, has launched
a business reproducing some of Bazin’s best-known hood ornaments, including the
sculpture of Nobosodru. Beyond simply reproducing the sculpture of Nobosodru for
her “Collection Croisière Noire,” she has also created a line of jewelry based on
Nobosodru’s iconic profile, including abstracted disks referring to the halo ring of her
coiffeur. Photographs on Bazin’s Instagram—one in which she kisses the sculpture and
another in which she holds a rind with the bust on it in her teeth—show the ways in
which appropriations of Specht’s initial photograph are still used to objectify and
exploit Nobosodru.77 Here, Nobosodru can again be worn as a colonial prize, not only
on cars, but also on the bodies of white women.

Conclusion

The Mangbetu coiffeur has had a remarkable life in European and American fashion.
The elegant, streamlined shape of Nobosodru’s hairstyle fit seamlessly in with the
aesthetic of Art Deco in the 1920s and 1930s. Evoking the elegant and otherworldly
profile of the famous bust of Nefertiti, an African woman absorbed into white standards
of beauty, the coiffeur also signified the otherness of the Mangbetu for Europeans and
Americans, as it would only be fully realized though a careful stretching and shaping of
the skull starting from birth. The style was sufficiently similar to popular aesthetics
of the Art Deco style, but also carried with it enough difference to foster the excitement
of exoticism. Following the image of Nobosodru through her various incarnations as
166 Design History Beyond the Canon

a representation of the Congo, the Croisière Noire, the Citroën Car Company and
their colonial exploits, Jazz-Moderne fashion, and more generic African fashion
aesthetics in the second half of the twentieth and into the twenty-first century shows
how design culture itself can propagate certain images and representations of entire
cultures. Nobosodru’s image has often been used in reductive and damaging colonialist
ways, but has also been reclaimed by African-American creatives and used as an
expression of African history and black beauty. By examining the life of this single
image in design culture, we can understand what makes it so appealing to certain
audiences, and how its meaning can change over time and in different contexts. This
helps to complicate narratives of cultural appropriation, underscoring why certain
appropriations of style happen in the ways that they do, and, in this case, the way that
the image of this Congolese woman is used to define white femininity. It helps us to
trace the events, such as the Croisière Noire, and the media through which such
appropriations can happen, and how this can inflect the meaning of the resulting
designed objects. The case study also reveals the importance of cross-disciplinary
studies of design which include fashion. While histories of design often marginalize
fashion, as Nobosodru’s example shows, fashion is intertwined with other areas of
design production and is often engaged with similar ideas and images. Exploring
fashion alongside other forms of design not only enriches the narrative, but helps to
bring identity to the fore.

Notes
1 The photograph first appeared in the book published by expedition leaders
Georges-Marie Haardt and Louis Audouin-Dubreuil, La Croisière Noire, Expedition
Citroën Centre-Afrique (Paris: Plon, 1927).
2 Enid Schildkrout, “Les Parisiens d’Afrique: Mangbetu Women as Works of Art,” in Black
Womanhood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies of the African Body, ed. Barbara Thompson
(Hanover: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 2008), p. 71.
3 Ibid.
4 Brett A. Berliner, Ambivalent Desire: The Exotic Black Other in Jazz-Age France
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), pp. 189–90.
5 Alison Murray Levine, “Film and Colonial Memory: La Croisière noir 1924–2004,” in
Memory, Empire, and Postcolonialism: Legacies of French Colonialism, ed. Alec G.
Hargreaves (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005), p. 83.
6 Levine, p. 83.
7 Levine, p. 85.
8 Levine, p. 84.
9 Levine, p. 93.
10 See Georges-Marie Haardt, “Through the Deserts and Jungles of Africa by Motor,”
National Geographic, 49(6) (June 1926): 650–720. See also images in Adriane Audouin-
Dubreuil, La Croisière Noire: Sur les Traces de L’Expédition Citroën Centre-Afrique
(Grenoble: Éditions Glénat, 2014), p. 115. This celebratory volume also supports
Levine’s contention that the expedition remains popular as a nostalgic adventure story,
the back cover notes, “Entre dans l’intimité de ces aventuriers d’un autre temps! [Enter
into the private world of these adventurers of another time!] “
 The Mangbetu coiffure: Cars, hats, branding, appropriation 167

11 See Georges-Marie Haardt, “Through the Deserts and Jungles of Africa by Motor,”
pp. 650–720.
12 Els De Palmenaer, “Mangbetu Hairstyles and the Art of Seduction: Lipombo,” in Hair in
African Art and Culture, ed. Roy Sieber and Frank Herreman (New York: The Museum
of African Art, 2000), pp. 117–23.
13 In the nineteenth century, “designations commonly applied to the Mangbetu were
‘artistes,’ and ‘the Parisians of Africa,’ ‘les élégants,’ and ‘les jouisseurs.’ ” The Mangbetu
were a natural source for European milliners to draw from with their interest in
adornment and stunning headwear. Enid Schildkrout and Curtis A. Keim, African
Reflections: Art from Northeastern Zaire (Seattle: University of Washington Press,
1990), p. 30.
14 De Palmenaer, “Mangbetu Hairstyles,” p. 123.
15 Ibid.
16 Enid Schildkrout, “Gender and Sexuality in Mangbetu Art,” in Unpacking Culture: Art
and Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds, ed. Ruth Phillips and Christopher
B. Steiner (Berkley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 198.
17 Jeff Rosen, “Of Monsters and Fossils: The Making of Racial Difference in Malvina
Hoffman’s Hall of the Races of Mankind,” History and Anthropology, 12(2) (2001): 134.
18 Translation from Rosen, “Of Monsters and Fossils,” p. 136. Original text: Haardt and
Audouin-Dubreuil, La Croisière Noire, pp. 179–80, 182.
19 The fact the Aaron Douglas made Nobosodru the subject of the cover of Opportunity,
an African-American magazine, in May 1927, reflects the image’s status in both Europe
and America as a representation of Africa.
20 Berliner, Ambivalent Desire, p. 4.
21 Sarah Berry, Screen Style: Fashion and Femininity in 1930s Hollywood (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 127.
22 Wendy Martin, “ ‘Remembering the Jungle’: Josephine Baker and Modernist Parody,” in
Prehistories of the Future: The Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism, ed.
Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 321.
23 Haardt, “Through the Deserts and Jungles of Africa by Motor,” p. 715.
24 Ibid, p. 716.
25 Ibid, p. 714.
26 Quoted in Berliner, Ambivalent Desire, p. 203.
27 The exhibition was seen by ten million people until it was dismantled in 1969 as these
theories of racial difference were systematically disproven by scientists. The exhibition
was recently remounted at the Field Museum as a way of talking about the museum’s
own history of constructing racial difference, as well as exploring Malvina Hoffman
herself who was always uncomfortable with the scientific racism embedded in the
project, writing in 1936: “I will leave the much-disputed subject of what is meant by the
word ‘Aryan’ to be fought out between anthropologists and Mr. Hitler.” Malvina
Hoffman, Heads and Tales (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), p. 159. Quoted in
Jennifer Schuessler, “ ‘Races of Mankind’ Sculptures, Long Exiled, Return to Display at
Chicago’s Field Museum,” New York Times (January 20, 2016): https://nyti.
ms/2kpoFwm.
28 Rosen, “Of Monsters and Fossils,” p. 135.
29 Ibid.
30 The term “spectacle of difference” comes from the work of Ella Shohat, “Gender and
Culture of Empire: Toward a Feminist Ethnography of the Cinema,” Quarterly Review
of Film and Video, 13 (1991). Sarah Berry’s use of the term to describe Hollywood’s
168 Design History Beyond the Canon

commodification of ethnicity in the 1930s is particularly useful here: Berry, Screen

Style, p. 98.
31 Caroline Evans, Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity, and Deathliness (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2003), p. 31.
32 See bell hooks, “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance,” in Black Looks: Race and
Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), pp. 21–40.
33 I haven’t found any contemporary anthropological source that supports this
theory.
34 Egypt has lobbied Germany for the sculpture’s return since it was put on public display
in the 1920s: “PLANNING TRIP FOR FUAD: Egyptian Foreign Minister in Berlin to
Arrange for King’s Visit,” New York Times, March 23, 1929, p. 6.
35 Schildkrout, “Les Parisiens d’Afrique,” p. 72.
36 See: Exposition de la Croisière noire, documents rassemblés par l’expédition Citroën-
Centre Afrique (Paris: Draeger, 1926) cover, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/
bpt6k313567x/f1.image. And: Livres Anciens et Modernes Autographes et Manuscrits:
Paris Mercredi 16 Juin 2014 (Paris: Pierre Bergé & Associés, 2014), p. 107: http://asp.
zone-secure.net/v2/index.jsp?id=2637/4688/46054&lng=fr, accessed September 13,
2018.
37 Berliner, Ambivalent Desire, pp. 189–90.
38 Pierre Mille, “The Africa Work of Alexander Jacovleff,” Opportunity, 5(5) (May 1927):
134.
39 See Figure 10.31 in David Raizman, History of Modern Design, 2nd edn. (Upper Saddle
River: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2011), p. 240.
40 Africa has been figured by Europeans as feminine since at least as early as ancient
Rome. See Anne P. McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the
Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 22.
41 Ibid.
42 Enid Schildkrout explains that, “by the 1930s, the image of the ‘long-headed Mangbetu
woman’ was virtually a logo for Belgian colonialism, featured in images at the 1931 and
1937 French expositions and on postcards, posters, guidebooks, and in art galleries.
This image was simultaneously exotic, erotic, and easily aestheticized.” Schildkrout,
“Les Parisiens d’Afrique,” p. 81.
43 Theresa A. Leininger-Miller, New Negro Artists in Paris: African American Painters and
Sculptors in the City of Light, 1922–1934 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
2001), p. 58.
44 Leininger-Miller, p. 58.
45 Schildkrout, “Les Parisiens d’Afrique,” p. 86. See also pp. 85–91.
46 Ibid, p. 86.
47 Berry, Screen Style, p. 133.
48 One version in velvet appears in “An African Head-Dress again Inspires Agnès,” Vogue,
September 1, 1926, p. 61.
49 Articles in L’Officiel were printed in French, English, and Spanish. The French was the
primary text and English translations do not appear to have been written by native
speakers, hence the grammatical errors and awkward translations. I have tried to note
words in the original French where they may affect the meaning in a significant way.
L’Officiel, August 1926, p. 27.
50 Schildkrout, “Les Parisiens d’Afrique,” p. 71.
51 Anne Anlin Cheng, “Skin Fashion: Josephine Baker and Dressing Race,” NKA: Journal
of Contemporary African Art (November 2015): 8.
 The Mangbetu coiffure: Cars, hats, branding, appropriation 169

52 Jazz clubs in Harlem were often adorned with “jungle” décor. The Cotton Club, for
instance, was “decorated with palm trees, bongo drums, and African inspired geometric
pattern, every element of the entertainment was geared towards white audiences’
expectations of the primitive.” Ghislaine Wood, “The Exotic,” in Art Deco 1910–1939,
ed. Charlotte Benton, Tim Benton, and Ghislaine Wood (London:
V&A Publications, 2003), p. 137.
53 Wood, “The Exotic,” p. 135.
54 Wendy Buonaventura, Something in the Way She Moves: Dancing Women from Salome
to Madonna (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2004), p. 194.
55 Archer Straw, Negrophilia, 97. Phillis Rose, Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her
Time (New York: Doubleday, 1989), pp. 100–1.
56 Working in France, he created objects of all kinds that married references to exotic
Africa with a modernist streamlined aesthetic in the Jazz-Moderne style. He used a
variety of metals, as well as lacquer (one of his interior design innovations) in his
jewelry, introducing several African-style motifs and often working in geometric
patterns featuring gold, black, and red. See, for example: Marjorie Howard, “The
Latest Judegment of Paris: At a Summer Villa Near Cannes,” Harper’s Bazaar,
June 1928, p. 71.
57 Laurence Mouillefarine and Evelyne Possémé, Art Deco Jewelry: Modernist
Masterworks and Their Makers (London: Thames & Hudson, 2009), p. 235.
58 For images, see Adriane Audouin-Dubreuil, La Croisière Noire, p. 115.
59 Marjorie Howard, “New Feather and Fabrics,” Harper’s Bazaar, September 1926,
pp. 90–1.
60 Marjorie Howard, “New Feather and Fabrics,” p. 92.
61 See: “An African Head-Dress again Inspires Agnès,” Vogue, September 1, 1926, p. 61.
“Iacovleff [sic] Sketches a New Agnès Hat,” Vogue, August 1, 1926, p. 38. And Marjorie
Howard, “New Feather and Fabrics,” p. 91.
62 With thanks to Regina Lee Blaszczyk for introducing this term to me during the NEH
Summer Institute. See Regina Lee Blaszczyk, Producing Fashion: Commerce, Culture,
and Consumers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). Regina Lee
Blaszczyk, Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
63 “Fez Dominant Expression of High Crown in Millinery Exhibited at Guild Fashion
Revue,” Women’s Wear Daily, March 9, 1933, p. 4.
64 “Lilly Daché Opens New ‘Salon Jaune’ with Reception and Fashion Promenade,”
Women’s Wear Daily, February 13, 1933, p. 10.
65 Both in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, accession numbers:
2009.300.1120 and 2009.300.1119.
66 While Women’s Wear Daily articles routinely date the hats in Raton’s collection to the
late eighteenth century, those hats that Lilly Daché ultimately purchased from him and
donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1974 have subsequently been dated by
the museum to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This earlier dating by WWD
seems to have been important since this was “before the European influence had a play;
these are ideally suited to modern conception.” Maude G. Moody, “18th Century
African Craft, on Display in Charles Rattoon’s [sic] Paris Studio, Expected to have
Repercussions in Fashion World—Bead Embroidery Technique Especially Susceptible
to Modern Adaptation,” Women’s Wear Daily, July 16, 1937, section 1. Thanks to Wendy
Grossman for sharing the provenance information from the Daché bequest to the
Metropolitan Museum with me.
170 Design History Beyond the Canon

67 Margaret Chase Harriman, “Hats Will Be Worn,” New Yorker, April 4, 1942, p. 24.
68 “Daché Hats to go ‘African’ this Fall,” Women’s Wear Daily, September 10, 1937, p. 23.
69 Bullock’s Wilshire advertisement, Los Angeles Times, August 9, 1937, A8.
70 “Exotic Designs from Alix and Schiaparelli,” Women’s Wear Daily, March 17, 1937, p. 1.
71 Emma McClendon, “Yves Saint Laurent and Exoticism,” in Yves Saint Laurent &
Halston: Fashioning the 70s (New York: The Fashion Institute of Technology, 2015),
p. 103.
72 McClendon, “Yves Saint Laurent and Exoticism,” p. 118.
73 There is much more to say about this show, and it is the subject of my ongoing
research.
74 This occurs between 21:24 and 21:34 in: “MUGLER S/S RTW 1988,” YouTube video, 46:
34, posted by “Yukikoandthe,” January 15, 2012, https://youtu.
be/93l0oi1NbnU?list=PLdvjI6mkk-HxuYDBinjBYFk6gwisO-HA0.
75 The large black sombrero-style hats that Beyoncé wears throughout the video and on
her tour is one example of attention being drawn to the question of who gets to look
where. The hat allows her to deny viewers the pleasure of looking at her, and also
allows her to freely survey others; this is particularly prominent in the song “6 inch,” in
which she is seen in a dark limo surveilling white men on the street as they try to hide
from her gaze.
76 Tess, “Meet Julia Koerner, the designer who helped bring Black Panther’s 3D printed
costumes to life,” 3Ders.org, March 9, 2018: http://www.3ders.org/articles/20180309-
meet-julia-koerner-the-designer-who-helped-bring-black-panthers-3d-printed-
costumes-to-life.html
77 @f.bazin on Instagram, January 8, 2018 and February 14, 2017.
 Adventure play in physical and virtual spaces
Gayle L. Goudy

In disorienting surroundings somewhat resembling an industrial ant farm, two restless

kids and a grumpy dad absorb the labyrinth of slides and tunnels made of steel rebar
and salvaged architectural remnants like a lantern that once adorned a stately St. Louis
building or a bank vault door. Suddenly, the little girl disappears—dad can hear her
calling from parts unknown far beneath him. He grabs his boy and jumps down a dark
slide after her. With his adrenaline fired up, he reunites with her two stories below. This
instant sparked dad’s memory of being a kid on an adventure and the family spent the
next three hours in that uninhibited mindset.1
The threat of real (or perceived) danger experienced by this family at the City
Museum in St. Louis, Missouri, is the essence of “adventure play.” The idea goes back to
1943, when landscape architect Carl Theodor Sørensen built a “junk playground” in
Denmark following his observation of children enjoying play in construction sites.
Though intended for children, adventure play spaces resemble spaces prohibited to
them like junkyards with waste material, old cars, boxes, and timber.2 Children have
agency to transform adventure spaces with no set outcome; each play episode is unique.
In this chapter, I advocate for adventure play for children and chronicle how play
spaces can take many forms, even if makers do not designate their space as an adventure
play space. Video games can currently provide a psychological adventure play, and in
the near future will provide fully immersive experiences as haptic technology develops.
Though adventure play has gained momentum in pedagogical and psychological
fields, it began in the discourse of landscape architecture and has re-emerged in fields as
diverse as fine art, sculpture, installation art, architecture, playground design, digital art,
and video games. In this post-disciplinary discussion, the terms “maker” and “player”
designate the designer, creator, sculptor, programmer, or artist and viewer, spectator,
receiver, user, or co-creator (respectively, regardless of what the makers call themselves).
This chapter will look at adventure play in physical play spaces made by Toshiko Horiuchi
MacAdam and Bob Cassilly, digital play spaces such as Windosill and Journey, and
manipulative objects by Rockwell Group. Playgrounds, including adventure play spaces,
extend beyond the design canon because the progressive narrative of modern design has
omitted play spaces. A reason for this omission may be that play spaces lack a disciplinary
home emerging from landscape design, architecture, child psychology, early childhood
pedagogy, art, and sculpture. Play spaces are not interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary
because collaboration or theoretical insights are not necessarily part of their development.

171
172 Design History Beyond the Canon

The discussion of play spaces in the physical and virtual worlds are post-disciplinary since
the organizational divisions of disciplines, as they have evolved in academia, and the
definitions of genres do not serve us in understanding but create more artificial boundaries.

Physical adventure play spaces

Adventure playgrounds take many forms. The maker provides parameters of a mutable
space and relinquishes control of the ultimate form to children (players) who experiment
with the materials and every interaction is designed to be different. Ellen Sandseter,
professor of psychology at Queen Maud University in Norway, points out that children
naturally and intentionally seek risky play “to experience the thrill, joyful fear and the
wonderful feeling of mastering something they wouldn’t think they dared. In doing so,
they find their own level of manageable risk, and progressively master more by seeking
challenges suitable for their mastery level and courage.”3 In the United States, Richard
Dattner designed several adventure play spaces in New York City in the 1960s and 1970s.
Sesame Street featured one of Dattner’s playgrounds in the 1970s and 1980s introduction,
where children run toward the camera in what looks like a construction site. Like
Sørensen’s junkyard playground, Dattner’s playgrounds had chaotic or anarchic elements
in them that included tunnels, tree houses, dirt, sand, and water areas, and/or building
materials such as palettes, blocks, or cardboard. Dattner said, “The next best thing to a
playground that children design themselves is a playground designed by an adult but
incorporating the possibility for children to create their own places within it.”4
Adventure play spaces encourage children to experience autonomy and peer-
cooperation without the intervention of adults. A core belief in adventure play is the
idea that children should have the freedom to experience real risk to test their limits.
Adventure play activist Lady Allen of Hurtwood said, “better to have a broken arm than
a bruised spirit.” However, this autonomous play outside constant adult supervision,
along with the potential for real injury, is exactly what curtailed the growth of adventure
play spaces in the United States as society grew more litigious in the 1980s.
Fear of litigation had changed play spaces in the United States by the 1990s into
brightly colored, ultra-safe, plastic forts with cushioned rubber playground flooring
beneath them.5 ASTM Standards regulated critical fall heights, head-entrapment
guidelines, and restrictions on the use of sand. Even Dattner’s popular adventure
playground in Central Park was blocked off in the 1990s after parents complained of
not being able to see their children.6 Illustrating this societal shift, a 1997 renovation
took much of the adventure out of Dattner’s Adventure Playground around the same
time that the opening credits of Sesame Street replaced the construction-site-looking
playground scenes with puppet characters and organized play, like baseball.7

Adventure play in physical spaces

Between 1993 and 2011, as a new generation of parents in the United States built
protective bubbles around childhood, sculptor Bob Cassilly turned a derelict shoe
 Adventure play in physical and virtual spaces 173

factory in St. Louis, Missouri, into an elaborate adventure playground, though he never
used the term.8 After purchasing the building which covered an acre and a half of
ground space, he rented space to artist friends and began collecting junk, including
salvaged architectural remnants from demolished buildings. Affectionately, they called
this “The Museum of Things that Could Kill You.” To revitalize the neighborhood, the
Danforth Foundation offered Cassilly and his wife Gail Soliwoda a $250,000 grant, and
they registered as a non-profit children’s museum with Soliwoda as the director.
Cassilly began to fill the enormous space with sculptures of animals, plaster versions
of geological formations, forests, collages of architectural follies, and abandoned
vehicles and airplanes (Figure 11.1). In one area of the museum above the caves on the
first floor, a warren of rebar tunnels, slides made from sheets of metal or assembly-line
rollers, and architectural remnants form a maze that extends five stories upwards
(Figure 11.2). Exploring this dynamic play space feels like crawling through an elaborate
steel hamster tunnel-maze or space station. Cassilly intended the museum to feel alive,
breathing, and changing, so he used organic forms. Squares were too stable, Cassilly
believed, but curves had energy, so dead ends and hard corners were avoided. Matt
Philpott, former manager of the City Museum, describes the forms as moving around,
diving into each other, appearing, disappearing, and reappearing “as if there were no
one thing in control, but multiple principles competing against each other in almost a
survival of the fittest.”9 The employees that Cassilly assembled at the museum joked that
they were the City Museum Engineers: Creating the Impossible for the Insane.

Figure 11.1 Bob Cassilly, City Museum in St. Louis, Missouri, 1993–2011.
174 Design History Beyond the Canon

Figure 11.2 Bob Cassilly, City Museum in St. Louis, Missouri, 1993–2011.

Cassilly loved danger, fun, and fear, and thought that one intertwined with another.
Like Lady Allen of Hurtwood, he believed that it was better to scrape your knee and
develop confidence than to fabricate fears in your mind and never live. He would send
his young daughter Daisy out onto scaffolding to see where she would stop or cry out
to determine where handrails would go. Soliwoda said:

Danger, for him, equaled challenge. It was something that would keep him from
the mediocre, keep him alive. But he never wanted to subject others to real danger.
For them, it was the illusion. He wanted them to get as close to it as they possibly
could, and he took it to the farthest degree possible because he wanted people to
feel the impact. He felt people had to get off their couches and away from their
television screens and experience something real.10

This is related to the “Peltzman Effect,” a risk compensation theory by economist Sam
Peltzman who hypothesized that people tend to react to a safety regulation by increasing
other risky behavior, which offsets the regulation.11 When people feel safe, they are less
cautious. Conversely, adventure play is safe because people feel unsafe and act more
cautiously.
The requirements of running a nonprofit children’s museum (fundraising and
liability insurance) as well as some philosophical differences about the purpose of the
museum eventually ended the non-profit children’s museum and the couple’s marriage.
In 1997, Cassilly changed the status of the museum from non-profit to profit and began
 Adventure play in physical and virtual spaces 175

running an “anti-Children’s Museum.” Over the years, art expanded to fill the entire
762,000 square feet of the building with neither teachable moments nor signage or
maps—typical in most children’s museums—because they discourage exploration.
City Museum has few rules, but one that is enforced is that minors are accompanied
by an adult. Richard Callow, a long-time friend of Cassilly who handled media for the
City Museum, remarked that this rule brought a tension that Bob desired. The holes in
the floor leading to tunnels and slides completely out of sight of their entrances could
be reached faster by crawling than by walking, “to keep up with their kids, adults had to
join them or lose them. That only bothered the adults.”12 Intuitively, Cassilly had
embraced the idea of adventure play for his visitors, even if it was forced upon the adult
visitors. The risk of injury was real and many visitors have left bruised and scraped.
Frequent museum-goers advise wearing knee pads to everyone over twenty years of
age. The City Museum has been sued twenty-six times, and Cassilly kept a mocking list
of lawyers who had sued him in the museum lobby. His best-known infractions were
building permit violations—how could he tell the city what he was going to build when
his plans would only take shape as he worked? And yet, more than 700,000 people visit
the City Museum each year. Many visitors who post online reviews of the museum
report fear when separated from their children, bruises, and cries of lost children. At
the same time, many of these visitors report that they return precisely because it is
scary, intense, and a bit dangerous. While fear and danger in a dark cavernous place
describes the play space in Bob Cassilly’s Children’s Museum, adventure play does not
have to contain those elements to challenge and thrill the player’s experience. Toshiko
Horiuchi MacAdam’s adventure playgrounds are bright and open, and the cries of
children in this space are squeals of delight.
Toshiko Horiuchi MacAdam transitioned to play space designer after beginning
her crocheted net sculptures as fine art installations in museums. In her art installations,
she transformed spaces with knitted, large-scale, abstract geometrical shapes based
on architectural forms, such as the Toshi Net at the Kaleideum Children’s Museum
in Winston-Salem, North Carolina (Figure 11.3) or the Takino Rainbow Nest in

Figure 11.3 Toshiko Horicuchi MacAdam, Toshi Nets Play exhibition, “Kaleidoscape,”
installed 2013.
176 Design History Beyond the Canon

the Takino Suzuran National Park in Hokkaido, Japan (Figure 11.4). MacAdam feels
that Antonio Gaudí’s forms are naturally connected to textiles, and his methods
of sculpting using hanging chains or ropes bear a direct similarity to MacAdam’s
work (Figure 11.5). Gaudí would place a building’s plan on the ceiling and suspend
a chain or a rope from the plan to determine in three dimensions the volume, height,

Figure 11.4 Toshiko Horiuchi MacAdam with Interplay Design & Manufacturing,
Inc., “Takino Rainbow Nest” in the Takino Suzuran National Park in Hokkaido, Japan,
installed 2000.
 Adventure play in physical and virtual spaces 177

Figure 11.5 Antoni Gaudí’s inverted catenary arch model.

and curvature of the vaulting and the columns that supported them. MacAdam also
drew inspiration from inlaid tile work, such as that covering the interior of the Shah
Mosque at Isfahan (Figure 11.6), which compare readily to her knitted patterns when
considering them in two dimensions. In her words, this tile work “forms part of the
building’s fabric and geometry [that] work together to create a space of fantastic beauty
and spirituality.”13 Combining these elements, she transformed spaces with a knitted
architecture, such as in the installation “Gothic Arches, Romanesque Church,” 1976
(Figure 11.7).
MacAdam’s art transitioned to a play space when two children asked her if they
could swing in her installation Multiple Hammock No. 1. After nervously obliging these
young patrons, who were unfamiliar with art gallery protocol, she watched how
the work was suddenly imbued with an unanticipated new energy, “swinging and
stretching with the weight of the small bodies, forming pouches and other unexpected
transformations, and above all there were the sounds of the undisguised delight of
children exploring new play space.”14 After this experience, the full-body interactivity
became a greater priority to her than a visual experience. After this, she spent most
weekends for the next three years visiting all the parks and playgrounds in central
Tokyo with student collaborators.
MacAdams and her collaborators wrote to the national newspaper to express their
concerns regarding this generation of children growing up in Tokyo who were often
without siblings, living in cramped high-rise apartments, watching television, and only
178 Design History Beyond the Canon

Figure 11.6 Tile work in the entrance of the Shah Mosque, Isfahan, Iran, 1611–1629.

Figure 11.7 Toshiko Horiuchi MacAdam, “Gothic Arches, Romanesque Church,” 1976.
Collection of the Jean Lurcat Museum of Contemporary Tapestry, Angers, France.
 Adventure play in physical and virtual spaces 179

playing in organized sports. She advocated for play spaces where children could use
their bodies, challenge themselves, grow emotionally and imaginatively, develop social
skills, learn to cooperate, and gain wisdom about life.15 In so doing, she describes
adventure play, and like Bob Cassilly, she does not use the term specifically.
In 1971, MacAdam intentionally created a play space that she donated to a
kindergarten designed by architect Hatsue Yamada. For this new audience, she changed
her color scheme from somber, monochromatic tones to bright rainbow colors and
knitted with a twisted rope made of vinylon (PVA fiber) because nylon (her preferred
material) was unaffordable to her at the time. In 1979, she worked with landscape
architect Fumiaki Takano for a national park under construction in Okinawa, and
soon she made “Unknown Pockets: A Gift / Knitted Wonder Space,” which drew as
many as 6,000 visitors in a single day. MacAdam’s net play works were so appealing that
in 1990, she and her husband, Charles MacAdam, established Interplay Design and
Manufacturing, Inc. in Nova Scotia, Canada, to promote textile play environments
commercially.16
She describes the nets as a womb, which imply a nurturing space of safety and
comfort. However, her spaces intentionally encourage risk-taking; MacAdam believes
that:

Children need to cope with risk. . . . [in] a challenging play environment, well
designed so children challenge themselves but with many routes and options.
There is no program of play. There are always alternatives. Each child plays at the
level he or she is comfortable with. . . . Some groups of children come regularly to
play on their own; their play is fantastic. They know what they are capable of and
then stretch just a little further, becoming more and more adept. Some of their
maneuvers are heart stopping to a bystander—but they know what they are doing.
Often it is the parents who are the problem. They seem to have forgotten what it
was like to be a child.17

For an adult to remember what it is like to play like a child is to connect to an intuitive
self-confidence that allows the person to experiment within his or her innate limits
of comfort rather than extrinsic fears or imposed limitations. Too often, adults limit
their play (or that of their children) because of outside concerns such as the hundreds
of ways a stunt could result in injury or embarrassment. Children play without these
fears.
MacAdam’s forms are deceptively complicated because nylon will continuously
stretch over time (referred to as creep). One or more of the corners are tethered with
ropes, which can be shortened to adjust the tension as necessary, compensating
for creep and ensuring that the nets will clear the ground and nets below when they
are weighted by children. Ideally, the units should approach a hyperbolic paraboloid
shape (like a saddle), which makes them stronger and gives better tension throughout.18
It is similar to Gaudi’s catenary arch, but stretches dynamically in multiple
directions.
To date, Net of Woods (2009) at the Hakone sculpture park in Sapporo, Japan, is
MacAdams’ most well-known work.19 The large open-air pavilion designed by Takaharu
180 Design History Beyond the Canon

Figure 11.8 Nest of the Baya Weaver.

& Yui Tezuka of Tezuka Architects of Tokyo forms a frame from which the nets hang.
Despite its shape being reminiscent of a primitive dwelling or beaver’s mound, the
stacked horizontal lintels of the outer pavilion frame were designed with the aid of
structural analysis tools, CAD software, and numerically controlled milling equipment.
However, the brightly colored nets that hang within were entirely knitted by hand.
Concentric rings of color form around a hole large enough for a small person to crawl
through. These rings join together forming a surface, like crocheted squares form a
blanket. Players can bounce and perform daring flips on this surface or lay down and
daydream. This area is contained within nets that stretch to the wooden dome,
providing a safe boundary so children cannot fall from the edge of the surface. When a
child enters one of the rings, she enters a semi-private netted pod that hangs from the
surface toward the floor like nests of the Baya Weaver (Figure 11.8). From here, players
can crawl to another pod or out of openings in the net to the floor of the wooden
pavilion. Suspended from the net above, the player can hang or swing from one of the
suspended balls or lounge on inflated seats covered with a knitted mesh in the form of
a torus.
A structural engineer who admired the complexity of the work asked MacAdam
how she had done the mathematical calculations; she responded, “I could not give him
an answer; it was all in my head.”20 The weight, elasticity of the nylon material, and knit
geometry form her parameters, but she lets intuition generate the shape of the nets as
she knits them by hand. Because of this method, she cannot delegate the act of making
to assistants and often knits the entire work alone during ten-hour days.

Adventure play in video games

Though the risk of real injury is non-existent in video games, adventure play is relevant
because it carries the same sense of wonder, trial and error, and satisfaction in mastery
in the physical space. The video games Windosill and Journey do not explain themselves
 Adventure play in physical and virtual spaces 181

or their goals, or even how to play with them. They invite experimentation and one
player interaction leads to another interaction through curiosity, like child’s play. These
games have a minimalist approach to serve both aesthetic and functional purposes—
less detail and animation mean faster processing time and better resolution on a
smaller scale (such as on an iPhone screen).
In a virtual world, a maker must program gravity, material physics, or seismic
events. Virtual worlds have no building codes, wildlife refuges, or NIMBYs (“Not In My
Back Yard” neighborhood organizations bent on curtailing activities that might
decrease future property values). Therefore, experimental forms should flourish.
However, the majority of video game designers do not venture to create new worlds,
but recreate our world instead—or a fantasy or historical version of it. Despite its status
as an emerging field, the video game industry is remarkably conservative, catering to
the same demographics that had access to program video games and the leisure time to
play them in the 1950s and 1960s, that is, middle-to-upper class, well-educated, white
males.21 This demographic has favored outcome-based, first-person shooter games.
Even among the non-violent games, most games are not exploratory, but outcome-
driven (win or lose). However, as games have become readily available on multiple
devices (smartphones, tablets, computers, television, and game consoles), the focus on
game development for a perceived profitable demographic is ending.22 A larger gaming
audience playing on more platform types has created opportunities for the small game-
makers to execute and find niche audiences for a wider variety of game types, such as
narrative-driven, non-combative, exploration, or art games.
As with physical spaces, such as the City Museum and Net Play Works projects,
adventure play in the video game experience is open and varies greatly with each play.
Game developer Phil Fish describes the difference between the original 1986 version of
The Legend of Zelda (adventure play) and more recent versions of Zelda (outcome-
based play):

The first Zelda just drops you into that world and it’s a completely open, non-linear
world. It’s dangerous and it’s hard and you have to learn from your mistakes and
figure things out. There are these secrets, and these secrets are not obvious at all,
which makes them secret and interesting. And then you play the latest Zelda and
[it’s like a] straight corridor . . . just holding your hand the whole time. All the
secrets have an arrow pointing at them. . . . All the surprise and magic and danger
and mystery is just gone completely because of an obsession with tutorials and
making sure the player knows about everything.23

Most video games that include narratives do not use the interaction of the player
with the game to tell the story. Action sequences and narrative sequences are separate;
game play must stop for the narrative to be told in a more traditional cinematic way.
Experiential games such as Windosill and Journey differ from these narrative games
because they use the player interaction with the environment to tell the story. The play
experience is the narrative adventure where the objective of the game is discovery, not
objective-oriented (win or lose). These games have no points and you cannot die. They
prioritize adventure play and interactivity while experiencing an engaging narrative.
182 Design History Beyond the Canon

Vecktorpark’s Windosill (2009), a puzzle video where the player interacts with
objects on a windowsill to move through eleven rooms, is a pioneer in the experiential
subgenre of video games (Figure 11.9). Windosill maker Patrick Smith explained that
young people are more willing to “just start touching things and playing around. People
above a certain age will look for clues before they do anything.”24 Though the player
interacts with Windosill through the computer, sound and the physical response of
objects within the environment, like the reaction of a string that is pulled or the way
that a toy car bounces away from a wall, give the game a tactile quality. The game has
unexpected and humorous reactions to this interaction. The player can knock over
letters, for instance, and a large arm comes out and puts them upright. A player may
push a button to start a motor that causes dots to fly around like bugs. The unexpected
and humorous response to the players’ actions create the narrative contributing to the
emotional experience of the game and structures this experience as adventure play.
ThatGameCompany advertises their game Journey as an interactive parable where
the goal is to get to the mountain top, while you discover “who you are, what this place
is, and what is your purpose. Travel and explore this ancient, mysterious world alone,
or with a stranger you meet along the way. Soar above ruins and glide across sands as
you discover the secrets of a forgotten civilization.”25 Unlike most of the games available
in 2012, Journey aimed to make an emotional experience that fosters a feeling of
connection, as Creative Director Jenova Chen recalled, “Either you are killing each
other or killing something together. There was just a lack of connection between

Figure 11.9 Patrick Smith, first room in Vectorpark’s Windosill computer game, 2009.
 Adventure play in physical and virtual spaces 183

Figure 11.10 ThatGameCompany, Journey computer game, 2012. Top: The landscape;
Bottom: The character.

people.”26 The makers set Journey in a minimalist, pastel landscapes, including deserts,
snow covered mountains, and ruins. Places throughout the world were reimagined in a
minimalist aesthetic to be familiar yet unknown (Figure 11.10). The lonely landscapes
help to focus the player on the avatar (called “the character” by makers) and strengthen
the connection that player feels when the character travels with the stranger.
In a talk given at the Game Developers’ Conference in 2013, art director Matt Nava
explained that the evolution of “the character” began as a person with a face that would
communicate only with eyes, and had arms, hands, and fingers. However, the team
wanted the figure to be anonymous because, “we wanted people to play with each other
no matter who they were. It was a subtractive process.”27 As the character developed,
Nava removed everything that was not essential to game play. To this new minimalist
character, Nava added a dynamic piece of cloth. The cloth adds to the experience of the
world—it lifts up and trails behind as the character runs or glides down snow-covered
slopes, flutters with the movement of the wind, swirls around the character’s body
when flying, and grows in length as the character gains wisdom and experience.
184 Design History Beyond the Canon

Although Nava refers to the avatar using masculine pronouns and calling him “guy” in
his presentation, the final character is anonymous and gender neutral. The fact that
Nava corrects himself during his presentation reveals the intention of creating an
avatar which allows the player to play without preconceived ideas of gender and
promotes the players empathy and ability to identify as the character.
Because Journey has no dialogue or text, the entire story unfolds through visuals
accompanied by music with a similar emotional arc. The environmental color scheme
evolves with the visual story as the character journeys through a desert with warm
colors to a brightly colored desert with pink dunes and green skies, through a dark,
misty underground passage to ultimately arrive on snowcapped mountains where the
player finally sees blue sky. When the fog is farther away, the scene is clear and the
mood happy. When the fog is near there is more danger.28 The flying snakes and kites
(or fish) add an ethereal element to the lonely landscape. In one of the scenes, the
character meets a stranger. The player learns nothing about this stranger or the purpose
of his or her presence, yet their presence presents the simple joy of being together
playing together, if this is what the player chooses. If the character travels with the
stranger, they will get a different experience than if they traveled alone.
Play and narrative in Journey create an experience of adventure play. Through the
character, the player sand-surfs, soars, leaps, and floats. The player does not simply
navigate through a predetermined experience; each repeated play offers different
experiences. After the first completed game, your character comes back as the stranger
and helps guide a new character through the world. Even the musical score of the game
changes as the player makes choices. For instance, when you are with the stranger, the
harp and the viola are added to the music and these instruments get louder in volume
as the character and the stranger get closer to each other.29 At another point in the game,
the character might release a caged kite-animal. If you are playing alone, you will hear a
flute solo and some percussion. If you are with the stranger, you will hear the harp and
viola again. If you do not release the creature, you hear ambient sounds. Just like
adventuring through the City Museum or climbing into a knitted net-pod, the structure
of play in Journey is determined by the player. Though much of Journey has a tone of
mystery and delight, there are aspects of fear and danger. The caves are dark with an
ominous score and have dragons that will tear off part of your staff if you are spotted.
Mathew Dyason in Game Score Fanfare eloquently summarized the core idea
behind Journey at the end of the game. After apotheosis, the player returns to play the
game again with

the knowledge of the game that you can bring to other people and help them
through it. And that’s the core idea behind Journey: To make your experience in life
a blessing for other people. To bestow your knowledge onto others as a boon in
order to help them through their own life. The purpose of your journey is that you
can make other people’s journeys easier, even if they are a complete stranger. And
this is told through every aspect of the game: It’s built into the gameplay, as
travelling alongside someone else will refill both of your scarves’ flying power. And
even the art-style, as multiple play-throughs will grant you the white robes worn
by your ancestors, thus making you the spiritual guide for others.30
 Adventure play in physical and virtual spaces 185

In video gaming, the player’s psychological connection with the avatar allows the
player to experience the same emotional thrill and at times worrisome experiences that
players can experience in physical spaces.
Today, adventure play is gaining momentum in child development fields because of
the relationship between risk-taking and resilience. Some psychologists have correlated
the decline of opportunities for children to play freely without adult control and in
risky situations with an increase in childhood mental disorders, especially emotional
disorders.31 Yet as Susan Soloman, author of American Playgrounds, states “there is this
sense that if you talk about [risky play], that is enough. There’s this very real reluctance
to get involved in anything that might at least potentially cause an injury.”32 For all the
excitement players at the City Museum experience, it has true risk: falls resulted in two
serious head injuries (an eighteen-month-old girl and a ten-year-old boy) and a
woman lost two fingers.33
Current responses to adventure play that spur creativity without the liability include
David Rockwell’s Imagination Playground near the South Street Seaport in New York
City, which eschews physical risk and puts creative risk back into childhood play. A key
component of this playground is the giant foam blocks of various shapes, tubes, mats,
wagons, and crates that can fit together or stack in an endless number of arrangements
(Figure 11.11). In 2012, the National Building Museum opened PLAY WORK BUILD,
a permanent exhibition designed in collaboration with Rockwell Group. Rockwell
Group has marketed this a portable playground, and it has become part of play spaces
in schools and museums across the United States.34 Though these building toys foster
creativity and cooperative play, creative risk lacks the sense of drama and elation found
in adventure play spaces.
The next generation of games that use virtual reality with haptic experience to
simulate the sense of touch, such as VRTouch, will create an experience much more like
those on MacAdam’s nets or Cassilly’s City Museum, though with fewer bruises and
lawsuits. Imagine the thrill of feeling the grit of sand beneath your feet as you sand-surf
or the flapping of fabric as you soar on the back of a dragon as Journey’s character!

Figure 11.11 Rockwell Group (David Rockwell, designer), Imagination Playground,

portable modular playground, 2011.
186 Design History Beyond the Canon

With this emerging technology, the video game environment will provide a space for
adventure play where psychological risk merges with a tactile sense that can give the
user/player the same arousal as adventure play with the physical and psychological
benefits and no injury or litigation.
I advocate adventure play for children (and adults) because it allows players to test
their limits in a context where they are comfortable, and in doing so gain confidence in
their abilities (at whatever level they play). Adventure play spaces can take many forms
even if the makers do not designate their space as an adventure play space. Video
games can currently provide a psychological adventure play and as haptic technology
develops, it will provide players with an immersive experience like those that can be
experienced at the City Museum or in MacAdam’s Net Play Works.

Notes
1 My family made this visit to the City Museum in July 2017.
2 After seeing Sørensen’s “junk playground” in Endrup, Denmark, prominent English
landscape architect and president of the World Organization for Early Childhood
Education Margory Allen (Lady Allen of Hurtwood) promoted adventure playgrounds.
Today, there are approximately a thousand adventure playgrounds (mostly in Europe
and Japan). For the history of adventure playgrounds and the contradiction between
free play and play as an instrument of social policy, see Roy Kozlovsky, “Adventure
Playgrounds and Postwar Reconstruction,” in Designing Modern Childhoods: History,
Space, and the Material Culture of Children, edited by Marta Gutman and Ning de
Coninck-Smith (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008).
3 “Point Person: Our Q&A with Ellen Sandseter too-safe playgrounds,” Dallas News,
August 2001 (https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2011/08/05/
point-person-our-qa-with-ellen-sandseter-too-safe-playgrounds)
4 Deborah Bishop, “Structured Play,” Dwell, January 1, 2009. https://www.dwell.com/
article/structured-play-8cd1a3a1, accessed February 20, 2018.
5 Rebecca Mead, “State of Play : How Tots Lots Became Places to Build Children’s Brains”
The New Yorker, 86(19) (July 5, 2010): 32.
6 Dattner’s Adventure Playground in Central Park, New York City, was renovated in
2009. See Jeff Byles, “Adventure Central,” The Architect’s Newspaper, November 4, 2009,
https://archpaper.com/2009/11/adventure-central/#.VnnFs8ArKi4, accessed December
12, 2017.
7 In the 1960s introduction, the entire fifty-two-second introduction is a montage of
children play with one exception, a single shot of a seal at a zoo. The 1970s
introduction devotes two seconds to a shot with Big Bird and a little girl. The 1980s
introduction devotes twelve seconds to Big Bird. The 1990s introduction has a puppet
character in every scene in the montage with a marked reduction in the scenes of
children’s play and no adventure playgrounds.
8 On May 21, 1972, while on his honeymoon with first wife Cecilia Davidson, Bob
Cassilly wrestled the crazed Laszlo Toth (who vandalized Michelangelo’s Pieta with a
hammer) to the ground. See “Honeymoon Highlight—Punch for Pieta,” St. Louis
Post-Dispatch, August 11, 1972.
9 Jeannette Cooperman, “Deconstructing Bob Cassilly,” St. Louis Magazine, January 25,
2012, https://www.stlmag.com/Deconstructing-Bob-Cassilly/ accessed August 3, 2017.
 Adventure play in physical and virtual spaces 187

10 Ibid.
11 Sam Peltzman, Professor Emeritus from the University of Chicago has been writing
about risk compensation since 1975 across industries. The Pelzman Effect is observed
in automobile safety, sports safety equipment, unmanned aircraft, and shared spaces for
automobiles and pedestrians without traffic lights.
12 Cooperman, “Deconstructing Bob Cassilly.”
13 Vanessa Quirk, “Meet the Artist behind Those Amazing, Hand-Knitted Playgrounds,”
in Archdaily, November 28, 2012, http://www.archdaily.com/297941/meet-the-artist-
behind-those-amazing-hand-knitted-playgrounds/, accessed on March 29, 2018.
14 Paige Johnson, “Playground Crochet by Toshiko Horiuchi” Playscapes, November 18,
2011, http://www.play-scapes.com/play-art/playgrounds-by-artists/playground-
crochet-by-toshiko-horiuchi/, accessed March 29, 2018.
15 Quirk, “Meet the Artist behind Those Amazing, Hand-Knitted Playgrounds.”
16 NetPlayWorks Website, http://netplayworks.com/NetPlayWorks/Home.html, accessed
on March 29, 2018.
17 Quirk, “Meet the Artist behind Those Amazing, Hand-Knitted Playgrounds.”
18 Elizabeth Cummins, “Art as Playspace: Interview with Toshiko & Charles MacAdam,”
in How to Grow a Playspace: Development and Design (ebook), ed. Katherine
Masiulanis and Elizabeth Cummins (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2017), pp. 195–207.
19 Toshiko Horiuchi MacAdam with Interplay Design & Manufacturing, Inc. (design
and fabrication), Norihde Imagawa, T.I.S. & Partners (structural engineering),
Takaharu & Yui Tezuka (architects), Hakone Open Air Museum, Kanagawa,
Japan, 2009.
20 Cummins, “Interview with Toshiko & Charles MacAdam.”
21 Anna Anthropy, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs,
Artists, Dreamers, Dropouts, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back
an Art Form, (New York: Seven Stories, 2012), pp. 5–6.
In 2009, Rob Auten, who ran video-game production for 20th Century Fox, said,
“Our industry is probably more risk-averse than Hollywood. It is extremely difficult to
break the patterns of the establishment.” See Joshuah Bearman, “Can D.I.Y Supplant
the First-Person Shooter?” The New York Times Magazine, November 13, 2009:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/magazine/15videogames-t.html?pagewanted=
all&_r=1&), accessed March 29, 2018.
22 In the United States, forty-nine percent of the adult population report playing video
games. Men and women play games in equal numbers, though men are more than
twice as likely to call themselves “gamers.” About half of US adults report playing video
games, and whites, blacks, and Hispanics are equally likely to report playing. See
Monica Anderson, “Views on Gaming Differ by Race, Ethnicity,” Pew Research Center,
December 17, 2015; and Maeve Duggan, “Gaming and Gamers,” Pew Research Center:
Internet and Technology, December 15, 2015: http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/12/15/
gaming-and-gamers/, accessed March 29, 2018.
23 Phil Fish made this statement in the context of comparing recent Japanese games with
Western games at the Game Developer Conference in 2012, after insulting a Japanese
game developer and saying “Japanese games just suck.” The cultural aspect of his
statement is not related to my argument. Quote from the documentary film Indie
Game: Life After, directed by Lisane Pajot and James Swirsky (2016; Vancouver:
BlinkWorks Media).
24 Kyle Vanhemert, “I Wish More Games were as Weird as This Guy’s Interactive
Alphabet,” Wired: Design, February 12, 2015.
188 Design History Beyond the Canon

25 ThatGameCompany Development team: Kellee Santiago, Jenova Chen, Nicholas Clark,

John Edwards, Martin Middleton, Robin Hunicke, Matt Nava, Bryan Singh, Aaron
Jessie, John Nesky, Chris Bell, Ke Jiang, Rick Nelson, Michael Peddicord, Selijl Tanaka,
Dallas Robinson, Austin Wintory, Steve Johnson, Aaron Grommesh (http://
thatgamecompany.com/games/journey/).
Journey was created in three years. See Dean Takahaski, “An Interview with Jenova
Chen: How Journey’s Creator Went Bankrupt and Won Game of the Year,” VentureBeat,
February 8, 2013 (https://venturebeat.com/2013/02/08/an-interview-with-jenova-
chen-how-journeys-creator-went-bankrupt-and-won-game-of-the-year/).
26 “The Art of Journey—Hardcover Art Book Reveal,” YouTube Video, 9:14 posted by
“PlayStation,” August 27, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTTY7P8ukx4,
accessed August 1, 2017.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid.
29 See 04:32 in “The Story in Journey’s Music” YouTube Video, 12:40 posted by Game
Store Fanfare on July 6, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeKnkaB0MBE,
accessed March 1, 2018.
30 Ibid.
31 Peter Gray, “Risky Play: Why Children Love It and Need It,” Psychology Today, April 7,
2014: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201404/risky-play-why-
children-love-it-and-need-it, accessed March 29, 2018.
32 Susan G. Solomon, American Playgrounds: Revitalizing Community Space (Lebanon,
NH: UPNE, 2005). See also John Tierney, “Can a Playground Be Too Safe?” The New
York Times, July 18, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/science/19tierney.
html?_r=0, accessed on March 29, 2018; and Nicholas Day, “Tear Down the Swing Sets:
and the Plastic Forts. Here’s How to Put the Play Back into Playgrounds” Slate, January
28, 2013, http://www.slate.com/articles/life/family/2013/01/loose_parts_are_having_a_
moment_putting_the_play_back_in_playgrounds_with.html, accessed March 28, 2018.
33 Diane Toroian Keaggy, “Trial over City Museum Accident to Open Monday,” St. Louis
Dispatch, January 1, 2010, http://www.stltoday.com/news/trial-over-city-museum-
accident-to-open-monday-fall-damaged/article_54c54f99-ec44-5819-ae1f-
685cf91ff25b.html, accessed on March 28, 2018; and Conor Dougherty, “This Museum
Exposes Kids to Thrills, Chills and Trial Lawyers,” The Wall Street Journal, May 1, 2010:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304159304575183463721620890,
accessed on March 28, 2018.
34 Rockwell Group Website: http://www.rockwellgroup.com/projects/imagination-
playground, accessed August 12, 2017.
 The case of William Pahlmann: Challenging the
canon of modern design
Marianne Eggler, Erica Morawski, and Sara Desvernine Reed

In an advertisement for Lord Calvert whiskey in 1949 (Figure 12.1), interior decorator
William Pahlmann (1900–1987) sits in a well-appointed room in tones of beige with a
bulldog at his feet and a tag line that reads, “For Men of Distinction. . . .” The
advertisement belongs to a series in which Lord Calvert featured various distinguished
professional men, all smartly dressed and meant to evoke a sense of stateliness in their
demeanors, thereby affording their product a similar air of sophistication. This image,
along with the tagline, situates Pahlmann as a man of taste, but also affirms Pahlmann
as an admired and accepted professional in the field of interior design. Already in
1948, The Washington Daily News described him as “one of America’s most famous
decorators.” And, Pahlmann masterfully capitalized on a shifting cultural climate and
burgeoning economy in the US during the postwar period to become a household
name. However, despite this success, Pahlmann is excluded from the canon of “high”
design history, and generally goes unmentioned in surveys of the modern interior.
Utilizing William Pahlmann’s understudied papers at the Hagley Museum and
Library Archive in Wilmington, Delaware, this chapter offers an alternative approach to
teaching a design history survey or design studies course which uses William Pahlmann
as a case study, broadening the canonical understanding of modernism at mid-century
and underscoring its diverse, multifaceted nature during this period. We first look at
Pahlmann’s successful harnessing of multiple design fields, creating a mutually beneficial
relationship between interior design and decoration, graphic design, and industrial
design in order to provide a unified visual language for his clients while cultivating
innovative branding methods and fostering design networks. We then present him as a
representative of interior decorating, underscoring his unique vision—one in
considerable contrast to the Museum of Modern Art’s notion of “good design”—as he
worked to professionalize interior decorating despite the fact that it was constructed as
a lesser “other” to canonical, “high” modernism. We consider the bias against ornament
and decoration and its relationship to gender and sexuality in the mid-twentieth century
through a comparison between two popular New York restaurant interiors he worked
on—the Four Seasons and the Forum of the Twelve Caesars. Finally, we look at
Pahlmann’s engagement with other cultures to enliven more mainstream modern décor,
analyzing the interest in “international,” “exotic” design themes and its ramifications. The

189
190 Design History Beyond the Canon

Figure 12.1 William C. Pahlmann pictured as Calvert whiskey’s “Man of Distinction”

in the Steinbach’s living room at their home in Rye, New York (image used in Calvert
whiskey advertisements), c. 1949.

case of William Pahlmann provides a productive way to enrich discussions of design

(and architectural) history by critiquing formulations of “high” versus “low” design and
the nature of taste, designers’ engagement with other cultures, the roles that gender and
sexuality have played in the construction of the canon, and the ways in which branding
and media manipulation can be traced back to much earlier pioneers like Pahlmann.

William Pahlmann: The man and his brand

This section focuses on Pahlmann as a brand-maker, successfully marketing himself

and his brand nationally and internationally during the postwar period. Between 1945
 William Pahlmann: Challenging the canon of modern design 191

and 1960, United States’ per capita income grew by thirty-five percent, and the number
of people with discretionary income doubled during the 1950s. By 1960, over 75 percent
of American families owned their own home.1 Not only was homeownership on the
rise, but an emphasis on the nuclear family was central to societal attitudes. A rise
in homeownership and the commodification of the nuclear family aligned with an
increased emphasis on domesticity and the professionalization of the field of interior
design.2 Pahlmann took advantage of the building boom to champion the field of
interior design, along with his own burgeoning practice.
Design historian Grace Lees-Maffei identifies several factors that contributed to
professionalization around the turn of the nineteenth century, including maturation of
manufacturing industries and processes of industrialization, the rise of the US as a
leading manufacturing nation, and the development of psychoanalysis and its influence
on marketing and advertising.3 Although these elements were present much earlier, the
intense economic growth during the middle of the twentieth century further amplified
the conditions for the professionalization of interior decoration and design during the
postwar period. As president of the New York chapter of the American Institute of
Decorators, Pahlmann helped to professionalize the field, and even agitated for
changing the American Institute of Decorators to the American Institute of Designers,
which was finally achieved in 1961. This seemingly simple nominal change had great
significance in formalizing the field. And serving at the forefront of leading
organizations allowed Pahlmann to demonstrate his expertise. However, it was his
ability to exploit mass media that helped to catapult his career.
Design historian Penny Sparke describes the period after 1940 as one in which
branding had become integral to all business practice, and Pahlmann successfully
utilized his signature in his advertising and promotional materials, creating a unified
brand. The personal signature, which had long been used by fashion designers such as
Paul Poiret, implies a personal touch in an era of mass production and standardization.4
One of Pahlmann’s book plates includes an elaborate logo with the image of a fenced-
in unicorn, his initials, and his full signature (Figure 12.2). The image is an allusion to
the early Renaissance-era “The Unicorn in Captivity” from the Unicorn Tapestries
(1495–1505), given by John D. Rockefeller, for the opening of The Cloisters in 1938.5 By
utilizing this classical allusion, Pahlmann situates himself as a pedigreed man
possessing exceptional and sophisticated taste with a classical foundation.
Establishing himself as an arbiter of good taste was central to his brand. To that end,
Pahlmann wrote several articles and even a well-received book of interior design
(1955). His syndicated advice columns, including his thrice-weekly series “A Matter of
Taste” (1962–1973), belong to a history of domestic advice dating back to the nineteenth
century, and its emphasis on domesticity, with writers like Catherine Beecher and Elsie
de Wolfe responding to a new socially mobile class of homeowners who no longer had
servants. In After Taste: Expanded Practice in Interior Design, Penny Sparke discusses
how greater disposable income, manufacturing capabilities, and greater social mobility
created the need for taste-makers in the late nineteenth century.6 Like de Wolfe’s The
House in Good Taste (1913), Pahlmann underscored taste as a marker of education,
which also served to elevate the importance of an interior decorator in achieving a
successful interior. While he advocated for good taste and functional interiors, he also
192 Design History Beyond the Canon

Figure 12.2 William Pahlmann book plate.

pushed for the need for a professional designer in creating a successful space. One of
his articles, “It Takes Two Minds to Create One Perfect House,” cites the value of using
both an architect and an interior decorator, thereby aligning the two professions.7
Pahlmann’s interiors were often featured in popular magazines because of their
theatrical and dramatic qualities, stemming from his early career designing model
rooms at Lord and Taylor, where he was head of interior décor. His background in
merchandising helped him to understand the consumerist attitude and psychology for
buying. He wrote, “good interior decorating is also good merchandising.”8 He created
entire room arrangements for the department store, which was an innovative idea and
contrasted dramatically with typical department store aisles at the time.9 Instead of
rows of furnishings by period, Pahlmann’s model rooms acted as stage sets with a
mixture of antiques and modernist forms, especially drawing from his recent travels.10
Indeed, Pahlmann’s eclectic curation of these model rooms was commended for
exemplifying good taste, underscored in this quote from Country Life in 1936: “The
mere listing of the different types and nationalities of furniture and accessories makes
it evident that to create the impression of harmony which is the paramount feeling of
the room, there must have been a presiding genius of extraordinary taste.”11 This
 William Pahlmann: Challenging the canon of modern design 193

understanding of the power of staging helped him to create interior vignettes for his
subsequent promotional materials.
A supreme salesman, by mid-century, Pahlmann was indeed a celebrity. When he
purchased a country home outside of New York City in Westchester County in 1955,
news reports as far as Roanoke, Virginia, and Dayton, Ohio, featured the headline
“Unique House Stuns Friends of Decorator.”12 Pahlmann entertained often in his
Manhattan apartment and his new country home. When he completed the interior
décor for his home in Bedford Village, which he called “Pahlmannia,” he bussed in his
friends and colleagues to mark the occasion. The home’s interior was featured in several
magazines, including one spread that showcased models wearing the fashions of the
Canadian designer Arnold Sacco, in various rooms of his home.13
Pahlmann took advantage of the public’s desire for experts and aptly filled the role
by endorsing products for the home. One advertisement reads “William Pahlmann
says Amtico Rubber Flooring is out of this world.”14 In addition to print endorsements,
Pahlmann also appeared on television. This new medium was particularly suited to
Pahlmann’s demeanor; an aging bachelor who was charming and articulate, he created
a particular persona that helped to elevate the design profession, giving it the gravitas
lacking in the previous decades.15 In the closing commercial for Ivory Soap for Lowell
Thomas on CBS, the opening copy from Compton Advertising, Inc. reads, “A rising star
in the field of interior design is Mr. William Pahlmann of NYC.” And, it further states
that Pahlmann recommends delicate oil paints for which ivory soap should be used to
sponge walls.16
Pahlmann’s network of friends and colleagues helped to shape his career and
catapult him to fame. An understanding of this multifaceted network of writers, editors,
designers, publicists, and advertisers helps to form a more accurate and expansive story
about design at mid-century. Pahlmann’s clients were often elite Manhattanites, and
these commissions appeared in popular shelter magazines of the time.17 In addition,
Pahlmann also successfully networked with those within the magazine industry,
including various magazine editors such as Elizabeth Gordon at House Beautiful and
Betty Pepis, home editor for The New York Times. His relationship with Margaret
Cousins, editor of Good Housekeeping, grew into a lifelong friendship, and Pahlmann
designed her country house in Dobbs Ferry, New York, in 1951. Although she had a
more limited budget than many of his other clients, he often cited her home as
exemplary of a modern, informal, and flexible approach in keeping with the client’s
personality, and he featured it in print publications as well as his public lectures.
Cousins, a respected writer, was also a sporadic ghost writer for Pahlmann’s popular
series “A Matter of Taste.”18
Although Pahlmann successfully mastered his public persona and achieved great
personal success through his carefully crafted brand, it was perhaps his ability to
capture the sentiments of his era that made him most successful. In his acclaimed book
The Pahlmann Book of Interior Design (1955), he states, “In our mechanized civilization,
there is an increased yearning on the part of most people to create something for
themselves.”19 Rather than a strict adherence to rules or a particular formula, he
provides an overview of the principles of design, utilizing terms like “simplicity,”
“functionality,” and “comfort” as guiding principles that in many ways mirrors Museum
194 Design History Beyond the Canon

of Modern Art curator Edgar Kaufmann, Jr.’s description in “What Is Modern Design?”
(1950).20 The next section of this chapter delves more meaningfully into Pahlmann’s
design choices in relation to the modernist canon.

Parallel universes: Architecture, interior decorating,

interior design, and the canon(s) of modernism, or,
What happened to William Pahlmann?
A look at William Pahlmann’s 1987 New York Times obituary is revealing in terms of
the uneasy relationship that continues to exist between interior design and interior
decoration. The headline: “William C. Pahlmann, Decorator Known for Eclectic Designs,
Dies,”21 specifically identifies Pahlmann as a “decorator” rather than a “designer.” This
specific terminology: “decorator” and “eclectic,” signals a way of thinking—a modernist
code of sorts—which positions Pahlmann in contrast to a canonical understanding of
modern design as reductive, abstract, timeless, and even heroic.
The term “interior decorator” was first used in the United States in the early twentieth
century, to describe practitioners who, as the advocacy group IDLNY (Interior Designers
for Legislation in New York) has noted, generally lacked academic training, “. . . but the
best of them had a combination of good taste, common senses [sic], and natural talent to
interpret and address the issues, such as scale and proportion.”22 Elsie de Wolfe is
recognized as the first professional interior decorator, and her influential 1913 publication
The House in Good Taste is considered the first book on the subject. She was followed by
Dorothy Draper, the first documented commercial interior decorator, establishing her
design firm in 1923.23 These pioneering female innovators defined the field from a
specifically gendered perspective.
But as Joel Sanders convincingly argued in his 2002 essay “Curtain Wars: Architects,
Decorators, and the Twentieth-Century Domestic Interior”:

While historians have described how decorating came to be considered a woman’s

pastime, they have yet to account for its emergence as a gay profession. One likely
explanation is that interior design—like two allied design fields, fashion and
theater—attracts a disproportionate number of gay men because gay men, already
marginalized for their apparent femininity, are less reluctant to assume occupations
that have traditionally been deemed feminine.24

Sanders examines the canonical view that situates architecture at the very top of the
hierarchy and interior decorating (ephemeral, superficial, tainted by the whims of
fashion, and saddled with its relationship to femininity and homosexuality) at the
bottom. Like Philip Johnson and many other colleagues, William Pahlmann’s “bachelor”
persona was a discreet cover for a gay lifestyle during a period when the pressure for
hetero-normative behavior was intense.25
But as the language of canonical, “high” modernism gained currency in the 1920s
and 1930s, in particular as promoted by the Museum of Modern Art’s 1932 influential
“Modern Architecture, International Exhibition,” decoration became increasingly
 William Pahlmann: Challenging the canon of modern design 195

taboo. The exhibition, curated by Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock,

popularized a reductive, “less is more” approach to architecture and design, which,
furthered by subsequent MoMA curators like Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., became the
dominant aesthetic. With this development came an ever-more uneasy attitude toward
the decorative, as evidenced in the change in name of the professional organization
founded in 1931 as the Association of Interior Decorators (AID), which in 1936
became the American Institute of Interior Designers, taking its cue from the term used
in the magazine Interior Design and Decoration in the 1930s. In 1975, the AID, together
with the National Society of Interior Designers (NSID), was absorbed into the
American Society of Interior Designers (ASID), today the leading professional
organization for the field.26
Returning to Pahlmann’s obituary, the Times obituary proclaimed that he “. . . was
responsible for the theme and décor of the Forum of the Twelve Caesars Restaurant in
Manhattan, as well as the Four Seasons, a celebrated late-modern masterpiece in Mies
van der Rohe’s Seagram Building (1958), said to be the costliest restaurant ever, when
it opened in 1959,”27 curiously not mentioning Philip Johnson, normally credited with
the restaurant’s famous design, at all. Even more remarkable is the juxtaposition of the
two restaurants; the design of the Forum of the Twelve Caesars (Figure 12.3) was in
highly questionable taste according to modernist orthodoxy, with a concept which
came from a collection of portrait paintings of the Roman Caesars in Pahlmann’s own
collection. Its “authentic” Roman motifs created a unique if non-canonical
Gesamtkunstwerk which included Fortuny fabric-covered walls, a pictorial wall mosaic,
and waiters and busboys in appropriate costume. The restaurant was a huge hit.28 For
Pahlmann, God was in the details.
In fact, both restaurants were the productions of Restaurant Associates, managed by
legendary restaurateur Joseph Baum, and Johnson and Pahlmann would seem to have
been professional colleagues—albeit in parallel universes. By 1998, in Joe Baum’s
obituary, the Times gave Philip Johnson exclusive credit for the Four Season’s design
and repeated this assertion in a 2015 article lamenting the venerable restaurant’s
eventual demise.29 What accounts for this lack of consistency over authorship, and why
does it matter?
The fact is that the canon of architectural modernism, despite the best efforts of
scholars over the last two decades, whose methodological approaches to the history of
modern design are enriched by feminism, queer theory, postcolonial theory, and other
critical analyses, continues to privilege architecture and interior design over interior
decoration. This is to a great extent perpetuated by available design survey texts and
their focus on the canonical figures. When the Four Seasons re-opened under a
different name in 2017, a large photograph of a grimacing Philip Johnson was installed,
facing cheekily into the women’s bathroom. Johnson seems to get the last laugh,
considering the fact that he is today a conspicuous part of the dominant narrative,
situated at the pinnacle of the modernist canon (a canon which he, in the United States,
to a great extent created), while Pahlmann’s legacy is tenuous, present primarily in
specialized texts on interior decoration.
This privileging of a master narrative in which Johnson, basking in the glow of
Mies’s genius, could nearly purge Pahlmann from the historical record suggests that a
196 Design History Beyond the Canon

Figure 12.3 Interior of the Forum of the Twelve Caesars restaurant, 1957.

great deal was at stake. Both Johnson and Pahlmann were arguing for their specific
approach to “good design,” and ultimately it became a matter of taste, with the Bauhaus/
Mies/Le Corbusier-centric MoMA version of “high modernism” trumping a more
eclectic, colorful, and one could say populist, approach like William Pahlmann’s.
Indeed, the fact that Johnson scorned Art Deco design as not truly modern, resulting
in the absence of Art Deco design in MoMA’s collection, underscores that bias.30 That
 William Pahlmann: Challenging the canon of modern design 197

Pahlmann chose those very words, “A Matter of Taste,” for the title of his syndicated
column suggests that he was well aware of the aesthetic battleground in which he was
operating.
In the recent and exciting explosion of interest in the interior several critical texts
have appeared which present revisionist approaches to the subject and provide a much-
needed historiographic foundation for the field of interior design history and theory,
particularly welcome for the purposes of pedagogy.31 And yet, there is nary a mention
of William Pahlmann in any of these revisionist studies, even though his was a
household name in the mid-twentieth century as “one of America’s most famous
decorators.”32 What accounts for this continued slight? The bias against the decorator is
evident in an examination of the scant literature on William Pahlmann. There is, in
fact, an “alternate canon” of modern design history for specialized readers, which
presents the history of design and decorating in a somewhat binary fashion.33
For example, Pahlmann is reduced to two brief passages in John Pile’s A History of
Interior Design, the second of which, introduced by the heading “Interior Decoration:
The Reaction to Modernism” describes Pahlmann as one of several “versatile designers
working in a variety of styles” whose “. . . floridly elaborate model rooms for the Lord
and Taylor department store in New York became well known . . . .”34 The first mention,
relatively benign, states that the Four Seasons restaurant “was designed by Johnson in
collaboration with the decorator William Pahlmann.”35 The idea that modern design
was the opposite of “florid” or “elaborate” seems in line with established canon, and yet,
if one considers one of Pahlmann’s primary areas of inspiration, Surrealism, the
importance of recognizing the existence of a wide variety of “modernisms” becomes
critical.36
Even in this “alternate canon,” however, Pahlmann’s career is not given substantial
attention, and these texts continue to perpetuate the sense of tension between “interior
design” and “interior decoration” to a new generation of students. It is clear that
Pahlmann deserves greater academic attention, as does his relationship with Philip
Johnson, and although it is not chronicled in the canonical literature, some light is shed
in the popular press. Influential food critic (and Four Seasons habitué) Mimi Sheraton,
in an article celebrating the Four Seasons’s fortieth birthday, describes Philip Johnson
as a pragmatist and his relationship with Pahlmann as difficult.37 She writes that
Pahlmann was brought in by Joe Baum “much to Johnson’s consternation.” According
to Sheraton, Johnson acknowledged: “ ‘I was given the restaurants to oversee by Mies,
and I only cared about the Grill. I hated Pahlmann’s work, but I told him to do the big
dining room. The pool was his idea and, I must say, a good one’ ” (idem). This anecdote
seems to suggest that Johnson was scornful of interior decoration as being beneath his
professional level (with perhaps a touch of jealous admiration there as well). But
further complicating this discussion is an overlooked statement written by Johnson
and Hitchcock decades before, in MoMA’s seminal 1932 “International Style” show
catalog. Surprisingly, they describe architect Mies van der Rohe as, among other things,
“a decorator in the best sense.”38 While subsequent scholars have recognized the
decorative qualities in Mies’s interiors—his choice of richly patterned marble, his love
of exuberantly striped, precious wood grain, and his use of sumptuous fabrics like
velvet and silk (all designed, during Mies’s Weimar period, in conjunction with Lilly
198 Design History Beyond the Canon

Reich),39 these were not the aspects of “high modernism” that became codified in the
canon. Further, if Mies was a “decorator in the best sense,” does that make Pahlmann a
decorator in the worst sense? Were Johnson and Hitchcock making a specific jab at the
field of interior decorating in the International Style catalog? And what does the fact
that Johnson himself, who enjoyed a long, if not uncontroversial, career, veered later in
life from modernist orthodoxy into a postmodernism which challenged the very
foundations of the “International Style” he had helped to popularize, add to this
equation? The notion that the work of Mies van der Rohe was characterized by issues
of the decorative is not often included in the normative, canonical presentation of
modern architecture and design to students. And yet, this mention of “a decorator in
the best sense” suggests that decoration—specifically interior decoration—was a point
of contention, even at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932. William Pahlmann’s success
and his penchant for the decorative, along with his rampant historicism and eclectic
borrowing from “exotic” cultures (the topic of the following section), were problematic
in the construction of the “high” modernist canon, and yet he remained a powerful
force to be reckoned with.

Enlivening modern interiors with the “Other”

In his practice of promoting an eclectic version of modernism, William Pahlmann

turned to other cultures, specifically those constructed as more exotic. Memos,
advertisements, exhibition catalogs, newspaper clippings, and The Pahlmann Book of
Interior Design, reveal that Pahlmann engaged with what was considered exotic or
international design as a way to enliven mainstream modern décor and used certain
themes of the exotic other as the driving motif for room decoration. Pahlmann’s love
of eclecticism meant engagement with other cultures in design, which was not only
welcome, but a fitting way for families to express their interests and tastes vis-à-vis the
commodification of the nuclear family.40 He used his position as an established and
influential designer to promote the idea of the Other as a design source.
While Pahlmann encouraged the use of design from other cultures more broadly,
his engagement with the Other was particularly focused on folk and/or indigenous
aspects of Iberian and Ibero-American culture and the “Far East.” This section looks at
how Pahlmann capitalized on these other cultures, and how this functioned to reaffirm
his cultural superiority as a designer who was well versed in global design, thanks to his
extensive travels.
Pahlmann’s engagement with the Other for design purposes began before the
founding of William Pahlmann Associates. As a model room designer for Lord &
Taylor department store, Pahlmann unveiled the “Pahlmann Peruvian” group of model
rooms in November 1941, inspired by a five-week trip he took to South America
(Figure 12.4). After returning, Pahlmann’s declaration that, “South America is North
America’s newest design source,” effectively reduced the entire southern hemisphere of
the Americas to mere source material that exists for the purpose of providing designers
in the US with inspiration.41 By expressing this sentiment in the popular magazines of
House and Garden and House Beautiful, Pahlmann, through his authority as interior
 William Pahlmann: Challenging the canon of modern design 199

Figure 12.4 “Pahlmann Peruvian” model room designed by Pahlmann at Lord &
Taylor, showing a modern interpretation of a Peruvian-inspired living room,
promotional photograph, November 1941.

decorator, legitimized the adoption of elements of Ibero-American culture in the

decoration of interiors for an audience that was, by and large, unversed in the
particularities of this culture.
Through his travels to South America, Pahlmann located a number of visual
elements to capture the essence of “Peruvian” and used these in his designs. He
designed a line of fabrics and rugs for Schumacher & Company, and the prints depict
such expected and essentializing iconography as Indian masks, Incan ruins, and
colonial wrought ironwork. While the “Pahlmann Peruvian” rooms were didactic in
how to decorate, the accompanying exhibitions that Pahlmann put together were
meant to educate to an even deeper degree. Pahlmann curated and installed exhibits
in nearby spaces featuring authentic Peruvian artifacts, such as clothing and decorative
objects. Needless to say, this quasi-anthropological display comes freighted with a long
tradition of representing the less civilized Other, and its location in a department
store raises interesting questions about the intersection of educational display,
commercialism, and consumption.42
Once working for his own firm, Pahlmann continued to use his international travels
as source materials for his designs. His interest in Iberian culture spurred a six-week
200 Design History Beyond the Canon

trip to Portugal to study folklore and customs in order to develop the “Pahlmann
Portugal” line of Everglaze fabrics for the Cyrus Clark Company and to collect objects
for use in design projects, which were highly publicized before and after the trip.43
Although a trip to Europe often conjures images of Parisian fashion houses or styles of
furniture named after any number of monarchs, Pahlmann focused on the folksy and
historic aspects of the “Old World,” presenting an image of Portuguese culture as rustic
and quaint.44 Different patterns were named after Portuguese cities and towns, at once
intimating Pahlmann’s conquest of these sites and suggesting place specificity to those
who would incorporate these textiles into their interiors.
Pahlmann’s interest in the folk and indigenous was not particularly unique at this
time and warrants comparison to other more canonical mid-century designers. Textile
designer Alexander Girard not only designed projects drawing on these sources, such
as La Fonda del Sol Restaurant in New York (1960) and Braniff International Airways
(1965), but amassed an extensive collection of folk art, which he ultimately donated to
the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico.45 Perhaps even better
known is the collection of folk art in Ray and Charles Eames’s house in Los Angeles,
knowledge of which was spread profusely through photographs of the interiors.46
Pahlmann continued to create Everglaze fabrics with his “Path of the Sun” line, which
was the result of a two-month trip around the world that included visits to Japan, Hong
Kong, India, and Lebanon (Figure 12.5). Like the “Pahlmann Portugal” line, his trip was
publicized to the media beforehand as a means to build interest in the resulting designs.47
Although the trip was around the world—it followed the path of the sun—the fabric line
was designed around Asian motifs. An advertisement for the line notes Pahlmann’s
incorporation of the “simple, basic designs of the Far East,” positioning Asian civilization
as a more simplistic, less civilized Other.48 The same ad admits the desire for exoticism
by describing the fabric as conveying “a wanderlust for far-off places.” Similar to his work
with Ibero and Ibero-American sources, Pahlmann’s Asian-inspired designs were based
on essentializing iconography such as shoji screens, bamboo, rice paddy flowers, and
Japanese characters. Interestingly, his othering of Asian culture is done without any
reference to people. Rather than constructing the exotic Other through the representation
of a person, these cultures and their societies are reduced to mere material objects in
their textile representation, such as plants and man-made objects.
The “Path of the Sun” line was just one facet of a broad and sustained interest in
Asian design on the part of Pahlmann. He relied upon Asian antiques to help create
themes of the exotic other in interior spaces. One need not look much further than
Pahlmann’s own country home to see this approach in action. With its Moorish and
Persian-inspired rooms, Pahlmann utilized his country home as publicity material to
promote himself and his belief that Asian themes would be a lasting trend.49 Here, it is
useful to consider Pahlmann’s engagement in orientalism, as defined by Edward Said as
the acceptance in the West of the “basic distinction between East and West as the
starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political
accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, ‘mind’, destiny, and so on.”50
Through his deployment of Asian themes to create exotic and fantastical ambiances,
Pahlmann offers a clear example of the way we can think of orientalism in design and
in popular culture in the post-World War II period.51
 William Pahlmann: Challenging the canon of modern design 201

Figure 12.5 Living room showing different patterns from the “Path of the Sun” line
of Everglaze fabrics. A model room designed for Pahlmann Previews, exhibited at
William Pahlmann and Associates studios, promotional photograph, Spring 1954.

In The Pahlmann Book of Interior Design, Pahlmann proposed the categories of

modern, contemporary, and traditional, but each one was just a base upon which to
display different cultural themes. Other cultures could be incorporated in any one of
these categories in the form of textile patterns, furniture, artworks, and accessories.
Pahlmann also includes visual examples of successful displaying techniques for one’s
202 Design History Beyond the Canon

collection of African masks, pre-Columbian artifacts, and Chinese pewter objects.52

Besides displaying objects of the Other, Pahlmann also encouraged the repurposing of
objects from foreign countries to meet the needs of the mid-century American. For
example, in a room designed around a seventeenth-century Japanese screen, Pahlmann
incorporated a traditional hibachi to serve as a nut bowl.53 A functional object for
cooking in Japanese culture, the hibachi is repurposed to serve as little more than a
decorative touch, its Japanese aesthetic meant to enhance the overall theme of the room.
Pahlmann serves as a useful antidote to conceptions of mid-century design as
homogenous and offers opportunity to investigate questions of individual expression
through the use of the other in a period known for conformity and repression.54 Despite
the perceived universality of modernism at mid-century, Pahlmann shows us that mid-
century design was not stripped of reference to unique cultures. His engagement with
other cultures reinforced predominant conceptions of US exceptionalism during the
Cold War, reinforcing a sense of US superiority through his emphasis on the folksy and
regional aspects of Europe and Western superiority through the reification of constructs
of an exotic non-Western Other. Pahlmann’s designs offer an opportunity to explore the
ways in which designers capitalize on other cultures. It raises questions about how
design is informed by and reinforces unequal power relations between the designer/
consumer and the other cultures, and how that reflects contemporaneous foreign
relations and geopolitics.

Conclusion: When worlds collide—interior decoration

as Modernism’s Other
While the overarching truism that modern design is timeless, elemental, universal, and
honest has long been deconstructed, a last taboo stubbornly remains, at least in terms
of the ways in which design history is taught in the United States: interior decorating.
This remains the case despite the best efforts of revisionist histories mentioned above.
If interior decorating constitutes Modernism’s Other—that side narrative for which, in
an undergraduate design history survey, there is insufficient class time—then what is at
stake when choosing, as many of us do, to focus on such material as Kaufmann, Jr.’s
“Good Design” series (1950–1955)55 and his well-known books What Is Good Design?
(1950) or What Is Modern Interior Design? (1953), rather than, say William Pahlmann’s
bestselling The Pahlmann Book of Interior Design (1955)?
There is much to gain in constructively joining seemingly incompatible figures like
Pahlhmann, Johnson, and Mies in a course on the history of modern design;56 a
comparison of their respective debt to Neoclassicism, for example, or a study of the
decorative in Modernism, are just two possible routes of inquiry. Not simply a matter
of “high” versus “low,” this approach offers the opportunity to elucidate the canon, to
introduce alternate ones, and to understand their interdependence. Beyond issues of
formal style, a comparative study of William Pahlmann in relation to the canonical
figures in modern design history offers a variety of possibilities for constructive
dialogue in the classroom. A study, for example, of Pahlmann’s syndicated column in
relation to readings from Kleinman, Merwood-Salisbury, and Weinthal’s text After
 William Pahlmann: Challenging the canon of modern design 203

Taste: Expanded Practice in Interior Design offers rich potential for canon-challenging
discussions. Pahlmann’s consummate use of media sources to further his artistic and
commercial interests makes him a model for a study of contemporary branding.
William Pahlmann as case study offers the opportunity to explore how artistic
figures negotiated their Otherness in an era of political, social, and cultural repression.
Such an approach offers the opportunity to study the role of progressive ideals of
tolerance and inclusion in modern society. However, the fact that Pahlmann also
actively Othered non-Western cultures, and actively mined them for his own personal
artistic inspiration, warrants close study, pointing as it does to the complexities inherent
in Modernism and, indeed, its myriad forms.

Notes
1 Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap
(New York: Basic Books, 1992), pp. 24–5.
2 Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar
America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), p. 195.
3 Grace Lees-Maffei, “Introduction: Professionalization as a Focus in Interior Design
History,” Journal of Design History, 21(1) (Spring 2008): pp. 2–3.
4 Penny Sparke, An Introduction to Design and Culture: 1900 to the Present, 3rd edn.
(New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 107. For a closer look at the use of the signature in
fashion brands, see Nancy Troy, Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion
(Boston: MIT Press, 2003).
5 James J. Rorimer, “New Acquisitions for the Cloisters,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Bulletin, 33(5), part 2 (May 1938): pp. 14–17, cover illustration.
6 Penny Sparke, “Taste and the Interior Designer,” in After Taste: Expanded Practice in
Interior Design, ed. Kent Kleinman, Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, and Lois Weinthal
(New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2012), p. 16.
7 Pahlmann seemed to be a great opportunist, taking advantage of the growing furniture
industry by starting his own line for Hastings Square. And yet, he also responded to the
popular do-it-yourself trend by advertising his own do-it-yourself designs.
8 Gina Marie Raimond, “ ‘A Matter of Taste’: The Interior Designer William C. Pahlmann
and the Creation of an American Style in the Post-World War II Era,” master’s thesis,
the Smithsonian Associates and the Corcoran College of Art + Design (2010), p. 36.
9 Ibid.
10 Beverly K. Grindstaff, “William Pahlmann and the Department Store Model Room,
1937–1942,” in Architectures of Display: Department Stores and Modern Retail, ed. Anca
I. Lasc, Patricia Lara-Betancourt, and Margaret Maile Petty (New York: Routledge,
2018), pp. 78–9.
11 Ibid., p. 82.
12 Syndicated columns appeared on October 10, 1957, in the Cincinnati Enquirer, and
October 9, 1957, in the Dayton Journal Herald. Courtesy Hagley Archive.
13 Milwaukee Journal, December 29, 1957. Courtesy Hagley Archive.
14 House Beautiful, June 1951 and May 1951; House and Garden, May 1951. Courtesy
Hagley Archive.
15 Pahlmann’s public persona, gender, and sexuality will be discussed in greater detail in
the following section of this chapter.
204 Design History Beyond the Canon

16 William Pahlmann Papers, Series II, Publicity Materials, 1935–1977, Hagley Museum
and Library.
17 Ibid.
18 Raimond, p. 68.
19 Pahlmann, p. 2.
20 In Kaufmann, Jr.’s “What Is Modern Design?” he gives examples of four main traits of
modern rooms: “comfort, quality, lightness and harmony.” As the first section of this
chapter attests, expanding on MoMA’s Good Design series to include a discussion of
Pahlmann’s similar principles offers a more expansive and eclectic definition of “good
design.”
21 Albin Krebs, “William C. Pahlmann, Decorator Known for Eclectic Designs, Dies,” New
York Times, obituaries, November 11, 1987, n.p. http://www.nytimes.com/1987/11/11/
obituaries/william-c-pahlmann-decorator-known-for-eclectic-designs-dies.html,
accessed August 6, 2018.
22 https://www.idlny.org/history-of-interior-design/, accessed February 28, 2018.
23 Ibid.
24 Joel Sanders, “Curtain Wars: Architects, Decorators, and the Twentieth-Century
Domestic Interior,” Harvard Design Magazine, 16 (Spring/Summer 2002), n.p., http://
www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/16/curtain-wars, accessed August 6, 2017.
25 Pahlmann and his associate A. Jack Connor (“Jack”), a long-time colleague at the firm,
also shared a more personal partnership; their relationship is indicated in the
photographic record as well as in a 1989 interview, in which Conner explained: “He
[Pahlmann] loved Mexican things. That’s why we had a house in Mexico.” Interview
with Jack Connor by Gayle Gibson, December 6, 1989, 18. Collection Case File 2188,
William Pahlmann Papers, Courtesy Hagley Archive.
26 https://www.idlny.org/history-of-interior-design/, accessed Feburary 28, 2018. In fact,
Pahlmann himself preferred to be called an “interior designer” rather than an “interior
decorator,” so as not to be confused with, as he put it, “one of the little ladies who throw
out a piece of chintz and never worry about the architectural background.”
“Viewpoints: Interview with William Pahlmann, F.A.I.D.,” Interior Design (September
1972): 143–50, 150; cited in Raimond, p. 98f2.
27 Krebs, n.p.
28 Although the Forum closed in 1975 during New York’s economic downturn, it is
memorialized in an episode of the popular television series Mad Men. “The Suitcase,”
Mad Men: Season 4, Episode 7, AMC, New York City, September 5, 2010.
29 William Grimes, “Joseph Baum, American Dining’s High Stylist, Dies at 78,” New York
Times, obituaries, October 6, 1998, n.p., http://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/06/us/
joseph-baum-american-dining-s-high-stylist-dies-at–78.html, accessed August 6, 2017.
30 Encouraging in this regard was MoMA’s 2017 exhibition “Frank Lloyd Wright at 150:
Unpacking the Archive,” in which the curators focus on Wright’s ornament and the
decorative quality of his oeuvre, suggesting that an unpacking of MoMA’s historic
biases is finally being done.
31 These include Interior Design and Identity, ed. Susie McKellar and Penny Sparke
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); Intimus: Interior Design Theory
Reader, ed. Mark Taylor and Julieanna Preston (Chichester: Wiley, 2006); Designing
the Modern Interior: From the Victorians to Today, ed. Penny Sparke, Anne Massey,
Trevor Keeble, and Brenda Martin (London: Bloomsbury 2009); Toward a New
Interior: An Anthology of Interior Design Theory, ed. Lois Weinthal (New York:
Princeton University Press, 2011); The Domestic Space Reader, ed. Chiara Briganti and
 William Pahlmann: Challenging the canon of modern design 205

Kathy Mezei (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012); and After Taste: Expanded
Practice in Interior Design, ed. Kent Kleinman, Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, and Lois
Weinthal (New York: Princeton University Press, 2012). Along with this efflorescence
of critical texts was the founding of the Modern Interiors Research Centre at Kingston
University (MIRC) in 2005.
32 Washington Daily News, 1938. Courtesy Hagley Archive.
33 Included here are survey texts like John Pile and Judith Gura’s, A History of Interior
Design, 4th edn. (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2014); Jeannie Ireland’s History of Interior Design
(London: Fairchild Books, 2008); Stanley Abercrombie and Sherrill Whiton’s Interior
Design and Decoration (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2007); and others. While
Ireland does devote a chapter section to “The Interior Designer” which includes Elsie
de Wolfe, Dorothy Draper, and others, Pahlmann is absent. Pahlmann fares
considerably better in Abercrombie and Whiton’s survey; he is mentioned, albeit briefly,
as one of a group of talented practitioners of a “new eclecticism” (p. 585) and receives
double billing along with Johnson for the Four Seasons restaurant (p. 592). Pahlmann
fares best in hagiographic books for a popular audience like Legendary Decorators of
the Twentieth Century (1992) by decorator Mark Hampton and, of course, when he is
authoring his own narrative; however, these are not scholarly and are rarely used in
academia.
34 Pile and Gura, p. 391.
35 Ibid, p. 388.
36 Pahlmann was exposed to Surrealism in Europe when, after enrolling in 1927 at the
New York School of Fine and Applied Arts (later, the Parsons School of Design) and
studying design for two years, he left for Paris to study in their Paris Atelier. The
absence of Surrealist interior design and decoration in Pile’s book is thus particularly
unfortunate. See “Biographical Note,” William Pahlmann papers (Accession 2388),
Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, DE 19807: http://findingaids.hagley.org/xtf/
view?docId=ead/2388.xml.
In Interior Design of the Twentieth Century (1990), Anne Massey succeeds in
communicating the rich diversity (and even the quirkiness) of the field, for example, in
her examination of Surrealism’s impact on interior design. She recognizes Pahlmann,
describing his aesthetic as “baroque” while avoiding value-judgments. Massey points
to the theatrical aspect of Pahlmann’s oeuvre, and the evident tension between
“modern” and “popular,” “taste” and “camp” (a tension that Pahlmann appears to have
gleefully and successfully exploited).
Joel Sanders discusses the concept of performing identity in relation to the gay
decorator, who is often forced to “perform” one reality while, in private, living another.
See Sanders, ibid. Pertinent to this discussion is the fact that Pahlmann was himself a
professional performer as a young man; he supported his studies in New York by
dancing in Broadway shows.
37 Mimi Sheraton, “Seasons in the Sun,” Vanity Fair, August 1999, n.p. http://www.
vanityfair.com/news/1999/08/four-seasons-199908, accessed August 6, 2017.
38 Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Modern Architecture, International
Exhibition (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1932; reprinted 1969, Arno Press),
p. 117.
39 On the decorative in Mies’s work, see Marianne Eggler, “Divide and Conquer: Ludwig
Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich’s Fabric Partitions at the Tugendhat House,” Studies
in the Decorative Arts, XVI(2) (Spring/Summer 2009): 66–90. See also Robin
Schuldenfrei, “Sober Ornament: Materiality and Luxury in German Modern
206 Design History Beyond the Canon

Architecture and Design,” ed. Gülru Necipoğlu and Alina Payne, Histories of Ornament:
From Global to Local (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), pp. 334–45.
40 See previous section of this chapter, as well as Elaine Taylor May, Homeword Bound:
American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), pp. 165–7; also
“Decorating Means Good Merchandising: William Pahlmann, Lord & Taylor’s, also
feels mass produced furniture is better; Speaks to Boston Fashion Group,” Retailing,
December 2, 1940. Accession 2388, William Pahlmann and Associates Records, Series
8, Book 1, Hagley Museum and Library.
41 William Pahlmann, “South America—Modern Design Source,” House and Garden,
April 1947; “South America’s Imprint,” House Beautiful, September 1941. Accession
2388, William Pahlmann and Associates Records, Series 8, Book 2, Hagley Museum
and Library.
42 For studies of issues surrounding exhibitions of the other, see, for example, Tony
Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (New York: Routledge, 1994);
Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International
Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). In addition, and
relevant to Pahlmann’s work in textile pattern design, see Ann Marguerite Tartsinis, An
American Style: Global Sources for New York Textile and Fashion Design, 1915–1928
(New York: Bard Graduate Center and Yale University Press, 2013).
43 William Pahlmann Associates wrote press releases to publicize his upcoming trip.
William Pahlmann Associates, “Pahlmann Portugal,” press release, June 26, 1952.
Accession 2388, William Pahlmann and Associates Records, Series 8, Book 8, Hagley
Museum and Library.
44 Everglaze fabrics, Cyrus Clark Company. “Pahlmann Portugal,” advertisement, c. 1952.
Accession 2388, William Pahlmann and Associates Records, Series 8, Book 8, Hagley
Museum and Library.
45 Monica Obniski, “Selling Folk Art and Modern Design: Alexander Girard and Herman
Miller’s Textiles and Objects Shop (1961–1967),” Journal of Design History, 28(3)
(April 2015): pp. 254–74.
46 On the Eames’s use of folk art and exhibition in their home, see Pat Kirkham, Charles
and Ray Eames: Designers of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA, and London:
MIT Press, 1995) and Colomina, Domesticity at War.
47 Raimond, p. 40.
48 Everglaze fabrics, Cyrus Clark Company. “Path of the Sun,” advertisement, c. 1953.
Accession 2388, William Pahlmann and Associates Records, Series 8, Book 9, Hagley
Museum and Library.
49 Raimond, p. 36.
50 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), pp. 2–3.
51 On Asia in the popular imagination in this period, see Christina Klein, Cold War
Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2003).
52 Pahlmann, pp. 134–5.
53 Pahlmann, p. 38.
54 Such books as Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963); William H. Whyte, The
Organization Man (1955); David Reisman, The Lonely Crowd (1950); and John Keats,
The Crack in the Picture Window (1957) are great primary resources related to
this topic.
55 For a critical analysis of Edgar Kaufmann, Jr.’s “What Is Good Design?” books,
published by MoMA and, specifically, his What Is Modern Interior Design? (1953), see
 William Pahlmann: Challenging the canon of modern design 207

Jennifer Tobias, The Museum of Modern Art’s What Is Modern? Series, 1938–1969,
doctoral dissertation, City University of New York Graduate Center, 2012.
56 Although outside the scope of this chapter, pertinent to this discussion is the artistic
collaboration of German architect/design Lilly Reich with Mies van der Rohe’s Weimar
period interiors and the key role she played in their projects. Lilly Reich is another
figure who has often been lost to the canon. On Reich’s work, see Sonja Günther, Lilly
Reich 1885–1947: Innenarchitektin, Designerin, Austellungsgestalterin (Stuttgart:
Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1988); and Matilda McQuaid, Lilly Reich: Designer and
Architect (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1996). See also Esther da Costa
Meyer, “Cruel Metonymies: Lilly Reich’s Designs for the 1937 World’s Fair,” New
German Critique, 76, Special Issue on Weimar Visual Culture (Winter, 1999): 161–89;
and Eggler (2009).
208
 “I was not a woman designer . . . I was a designer
who happened to be a woman”
Russell Flinchum

MaryEllen Dohrs1 stands out as the first woman hired by General Motors’ Styling
Division to move beyond the realm of automotive design to work as a professional
industrial designer at a major firm, Sundberg-Ferar. The “model”2 seated in the Le
Sabre prototype that appears so frequently in publications on General Motors (GM)
(Figure 13.1) is none other than Dohrs, who recalls that she was in fact photographed
in the full-size wood and metal buck of the design before the completion of the fully
functional automobile that would become Harley Earl’s personal ride during the 1950s.
Thus, her image is familiar to millions who have no idea of her identity, much less that
she was employed at GM as a designer. There were no “Damsels of Design” to speak of
in 1950–1952; this team of women designers would be recruited around the time of the
completion of the GM Technical Center in Warren, Michigan, in 1956.3 MaryEllen
Dohrs was an exceptional figure for the time, and her cogent and insightful observations
made to me over numerous conversations has driven my desire to examine her
professional career, from her graduation from Pratt Institute with a degree in Industrial
Design in 1950 (Figure 13.2) to the full realization of her goal of working as an
industrial designer at Sundberg-Ferar, following two important years at the corporation
she refers to occasionally as “Generous Motors.”4
Design history and the history of technology remain somewhat preoccupied by
“firsts” to their detriment. To frame the question properly, it is not “who was the first
female automotive designer?” but rather “who was the first professionally trained
woman to make a recognizable and significant contribution to the profession of
automotive design?” It is within this framework that the importance of Dohrs to the
design profession becomes clearer, whatever competitors she may have for this coveted
title.5
In researching the career of Dohrs, it became clear that looking at her work solely in
terms of what she achieved at GM between 1950 and 1952 was severely limited and was
in itself unrepresentative of her greater contribution as an industrial designer where
she worked within a major design firm, Sundberg-Ferar, and made key contributions
there as well, a welcoming environment where her talents found even greater
appreciation by her new bosses Carl Sundberg and Montgomery Ferar, as well as her
new colleagues. But it was in fact Harley Earl, the first vice-president of design in a
major American corporation, who gave Dohrs her first job upon graduation.

209
210 Design History Beyond the Canon

Figure 13.1 Contemporary publicity photograph of MaryEllen Dohrs seated in

wood and metal buck full-scale model of the Le Sabre, 1951.

Dohrs found herself involved with special projects like the customized Cadillac
Eldorado created for Hopalong Cassidy, near the peak of his fame at a time “when there
wasn’t much on television besides old cowboy movies and wrestling,” as Dohrs recalled.
In time, she had the responsibility of creating illustrations for the scrapbook that
Earl kept for his personal friends in the Buhl family. Earl was not noted for lavish
praise, but there were few designers who worked under him who doubted his visual
sense, no matter how strange the pursuit of the final form might have been.6 Earl did
not draw to express ideas, he dictated changes to designers using full-scale tape
“drawings” that could be easily altered in the occasionally indiscernible manner he
directed . . . to lower a line a quarter of an inch was not untypical. Thus, to be entrusted
with such an intimate and demanding task with personal significance for “Mistearl” (as
designer Strother MacMinn stated Earl’s name was pronounced at GM among his
contemporaries) would have been seen by Dohrs’s colleagues in the interiors studio as
not a particularly enviable job in the quest to realize their talents as automotive
designers, but such approval from on high could hardly have escaped their notice as
being exceptional, and in fact enviable, because it was not unheard of for Earl to have
an employee dismissed the same day that he was particularly displeased with one of
their efforts.
This is not a story about the capacities of a designer to find her place in the world as
a wife and mother while maintaining a career.7 I cannot, in this summary, adequately
explore the startling discovery of her work in the world of military intelligence
 “I was a designer who happened to be a woman” 211

Figure 13.2 MaryEllen Dohrs at display board, Interiors studio, General Motors,
Detroit, 1950.

following the debacle of Francis Gary Powers’ crash and survival (along with the
components of his U-2 spy plane) while conducting aerial surveillance over the
USSR. The US was “blind” in terms of such aerial spying until the launch of the
first satellites capable of taking photographs from outer space in the early 1960s.
When MaryEllen Green married geographer Dr. Fred E. Dohrs in 1955, she was also
212 Design History Beyond the Canon

marrying a colonel in the military intelligence reserves with a superb cover as the
head of his academic department—geographers must travel to compare notes and
attend conferences. She helped identify a Soviet military and manufacturing installation
from memory in a “double-blind” case in which she was never told what she was
to identify; only to observe, while traveling through Siberia, the appearance of a
structure she would see looking south from the train at a certain milepost. Upon
her return to the United States, Dohrs was debriefed by being asked to draw the
architectural features of the building from memory, allowing experts to identify the
purpose of the facility. It is difficult to assess the impact of a single episode such as this
in the scheme of the Cold War. It should be noted, however, as this may help establish
the outlines of the involvement of the industrial design community with national
defense beginning in World War II and continuing throughout the Cold War, an
important narrative that is yet to be fully assembled. This episode is perhaps even more
significant in the context of this chapter because it speaks volumes about her visual
memory and ability to draw, showing a remarkable economy of line well documented
in her book Sketches of the Russian People (1959) (Figure 13.3), and the book by Victor
Herman and Fred E. Dohrs that she illustrated, Realities: Might and Paradox in Soviet
Russia (1982).

Figure 13.3 MaryEllen Dohrs, Water Wagon (1958), from Sketches of the Russian
People (Detroit: Garelick Gallery, 1959).
 “I was a designer who happened to be a woman” 213

To speak with MaryEllen Dohrs today is to experience first-hand the “can do”
attitude and work ethic of a generation that came to maturity during World War II.
She is vibrant, thoughtful, and opinionated, and there is no puffery about her
achievements. She still drives between Michigan and Florida, where she maintains
residences. She was a few years younger than the American GIs who fought in Europe
and Asia and who were her classmates at Pratt Institute between 1947 and 1950. Prior
to graduation, Dohrs was extended an offer from General Motors that was arranged
between none other than Earl and Alexander Kostellow, the legendary instructor at
Pratt and head of the industrial design program. Pratt Institute was the most important
school for industrial design on America’s East Coast, and probably nationally prior to
World War II, and was a significant source of automotive designers through the next
two decades.
As a child, Dohrs was precocious; she recalled making a table well before she was six
years old. “It was not a very good table,” she has noted, but this gives a great insight into
the volition and drive that characterized her career. The wood and nails for this project
she scavenged from a construction site near her home. She became proficient in three-
dimensional design early and was crafting model planes while still a child. In an
interview with Marjorie Eddington, she described these years concisely:

At age 6, I began building stuff—model airplanes, boats from kits. I also began
processing film and printing pictures at that age. There was no TV, so I drew
pictures in big newsprint “scrap books” for hours at a time. After [attending]
Hollywood High School (I was born and raised in Los Angeles), I went to New York
and Pratt Institute, hoping to go into Advertising. But I switched at the last moment
to do all that I ever wanted . . . to MAKE things! I graduated with a degree in
Industrial Design, which is a combination of engineering, invention, convenience,
comfort, and above all, beauty. It usually means making a “skin” for a product, which
can be marketed successfully, used easily, and brings pleasure to the user. Then
General Motors hired me to be the first woman in GM Styling.8

Dohrs recalled the following incident from much later in her career when she spoke
at the eightieth anniversary for the firm Sundberg-Ferar in 2015.9 While on a train trip
to Poughkeepsie for IBM, she shared breakfast with her boss Carl Sundberg, who
founded the firm with Montgomery Ferar in 1934 when both were fired on the same
day and decided, in one of those quirks of the Great Depression with huge repercussions,
to go into business for themselves.10 In their conversation, Dohrs discovered that
Sundberg had designed a plastic shaker cup for Ovaltine as his first industrial design
job (there was a commercial tie-in with Little Orphan Annie which made this part of a
national campaign). Dohrs was taken aback for a moment. One of those shaker cups
“had been my most cherished childhood possession,” Dohrs recalled. She remembered
its beige plastic body and orange lid, and that it had to be used over the sink because it
leaked. Sundberg laughed at her recollection and confessed that it had been his first
effort on behalf of the new partnership, and it wasn’t a very good design. This anecdote
is worth examining. Dohrs was part of a new generation for whom designed objects,
while still exceptional, were becoming part of the everyday environment. She found a
214 Design History Beyond the Canon

point in common with a designer from the “bootstrap” generation of the late 1920s and
1930s. It certainly was no “passing of the baton” (Dohrs had no doubt that Sundberg
and Ferar were her bosses), but it was a point of connection between a generation of
designers who had created the profession of industrial design and the product of a
sound education in the new profession that had been unavailable before the 1930s.
Finally, the fact that a designed object, using plastic and a bright color, made an indelible
impression on someone so young shows an incredible relation to three-dimensional
form and appearances.11
Dohrs’s father, John Lawrence Green, known in the automotive sales profession as
“Larry,” grew a career as a key importer of European cars beginning during the Great
Depression. Eventually, he enjoyed the exclusive rights to market Austin, Renault,
Peugeot, and Fiat automobiles nationally in the US. Dohrs, then six, recalled watching
delivery of 1,100 Fiat Topolinos at San Pedro, California, probably the last shipment to
reach the US from Mussolini’s Italy. Green’s journey into the marketing of European
automobiles began in 1934 when he drove an Austin from British Columbia to Los
Angeles, put it on public display, and promptly sold it. The postwar British Austin 8, a
somewhat modest and economical vehicle, offered a distinct alternative to the ever-
increasing size and bulk of American cars (for which partial credit or blame can be
given to Harley Earl, who designed cars up to twenty-two feet long prior to the end of
his reign at GM in 1958). Immediately following the war, the Austin 8 was one of the
few automobiles that could be acquired new. Green felt that there was a considerable
market for a car so different that it could appeal to the “lunatic fringe,” as he characterized
these potential customers many times to his daughter. He was particularly enamored
of the luxury of the leather upholstery of the otherwise simple and tiny Austins.
Automobiles, and their interiors, were part of his daughter’s childhood education.
Growing up during World War II, Dohrs was an enthusiastic participant in the
ethos of “use it up/wear it out/make it do/or do without.” Historians have written a
great deal about the accomplishments of this “Greatest Generation,” to use journalist
Tom Brokaw’s phrase. Less explored has been the mobilization of the civilian populace
of the United States and the impact on their psyche and work ethic. Out of the caldron
of struggle, loss, and eventual victory taking place around the world, an independence
of mind in terms of individual action was coupled with an ethos of the power of the US
as “the Arsenal of Democracy,” and the demonstrated power of group action. It is a
longing for this unity of effort that seems to have become the touch point among
political activists of many stripes, for that moment when the nation moved, with
considerable difficulty, from isolationist complacency to that of an attitude of “we did
it before/we can do it again,” in the words of a popular song of the time. This work ethos
aided Dohrs as the only female student in Pratt Institute’s Industrial Design program.
There were female students enrolled at Pratt before 1947, but Dohrs had found her way
into one of the school’s programs that was populated solely by male students. Alexander
Kostellow, director of the program, would begin his class sessions with the greeting,
“Good morning boys and girl” in his pronounced Persian accent. A contemporary
photograph shows Kostellow lecturing to a crowded classroom where Dohrs’s back is
turned toward the camera, but it seems evident that he is addressing her (or looking at
the photographer behind her) (Figure 13.4).
 “I was a designer who happened to be a woman” 215

Figure 13.4 Alexander Kostellow addresses the Industrial Design class of 1950 at
Pratt Institute; Dohrs’s back is to the camera in the front row.

It was an enviable education with instruction from Rowena Reed Kostellow for
studies in line and volume; Robert Kolli, who taught “glass and other manufacturing
areas and shapes;” Ivan Rigby, the instructor for three-dimensional design; and Eva
Zeisel, whose “Museumware” for the Museum of Modern Art had recently been
produced.
Harley Earl was always in search of new talent, and even during the Depression was
desperate for trained designers. Earl had decided that he needed a woman in the
Interiors studio at GM; what prompted his decision seems to be known to Earl alone.
Pratt had been a “go-to” source for educated new talent for years, and the contact
between GM and Kostellow was frequent. The letter offering Dohrs a job at GM is
dated May 8, 1950, and informs her she will be paid $275 per month, and inquires
when she will be able to relocate. As Dohrs did not turn twenty-one until September of
1950 (the age of majority at the time), she could not begin working in the Interiors
studio until then. She quietly worked on Interiors projects while clocking in with the
employees in the secretarial pool and even joined their bowling team. But from the
start, her work involved Interiors’ projects, amid some secrecy. For a product of Los
Angeles educated in Brooklyn, she adapted to Detroit readily.
Dohrs was not uncomfortable with an all-male environment, but initially found the
atmosphere in the Interiors studio somewhat exclusionary. She recalled that “the girlie
mags” would come out at the same time each month, and some of the employees would
216 Design History Beyond the Canon

return to the studio with these publications and make purposefully audible comments
on the relative attractiveness of the models. It is hard to imagine this as anything but
alienating to a single twenty-one-year-old who was the only female present. With a
sense of planning and wit that characterizes her nature, Dohrs went out one day and
returned with a male body-building magazine, and began her own commentary on the
“beefcake” displayed within. At this, the ice seemed to be broken and the head of the
studio clapped her on the back and assured her “you’re all right kid” (or something to
that effect), and Dohrs found herself more fully integrated into the office’s work. While
there were “dream jobs” like the special-order Cadillac for Hopalong Cassidy, there was
also plenty of routine work.12 Interior fabrics may have been relatively plush for top of
the line models for each division, but below that the quality fell off quickly to wool
fabrics Dohrs described with some distaste as being akin to “mouse fur.” Synthetic
fibers had yet to make an impact, and when Nylon was introduced, it was discovered its
durability came at the cost of wear to the driver’s and passengers’ clothes. It is in this
context that the exceptional quality of her later work on the 1955 Packard Caribbean
should be seen, for it was not until 1957 that a marked change in industry standards for
interior finishes occurs. That was largely the province of Earl’s new “Damsels of Design,”
whose work dominated GM’s 1958 Motorama. Dohrs had moved on long before and
was working with Sundberg-Ferar in 1953.
Dohrs had arrived. One secret of her success was her ability to accurately draw the
human figures that populated the drawings depicting proposed new vehicles in various
architectural settings. Many of her male contemporaries were excellent draftsmen but

Figure 13.5 MaryEllen Dohrs’s sketch of a proposed modular kitchen with female
figure for Whirlpool, undated.
 “I was a designer who happened to be a woman” 217

lacked her training and competence with the human figure. Once it was discovered
that she had this facility, co-workers began to ask if she “could drop a few turkeys13” in
a drawing they had done (in other words, she was asked to add human figures to
provide scale and interest to these sketches while maintaining the perspective imposed
by the creator: Figure 13.5). This built their confidence in Dohrs as a colleague, and her
talents were rewarded with regular increases in pay.14 To move from “Generous Motors”
to Sundberg-Ferar, and to be compensated for being a true industrial designer, dealing
with designs from children’s tricycles to kitchen equipment and layouts, the full range
of product design that had enticed her away from advertising to “making things,” was
Dohrs’s personal achievement. She personally undertook work for major clients such
as IBM and Samsonite (Figures 13.6, 13.7, and 13.8).
In addition to industrial design, Dohrs’s familiarity with automotive design meant
that she was responsible for bringing the Packard account to Sundberg-Ferar because
she was a contemporary of Dick Teague while at GM, who now headed Styling for
Packard. He contacted Dohrs personally; she referred him to the expansive Carl
Sundberg, who sold Teague on a much broader consultation than interiors alone that
resulted in changes to the exterior styling of the 1955 Packard line (Figure 13.9), as
well as what Dohrs would characterize as her most enduring work, the interior of
the Caribbean. She said, in summary, “of all the things I designed for Sundberg-Ferar,

Figure 13.6 MaryEllen Dohrs’s Food Mill for Landers, Frary Clark, designed while
employed at Sundberg-Ferar, 1953–1956.
218 Design History Beyond the Canon

Figure 13.7 Advertisement for “Kid-Size” folding table and chairs designed by
MaryEllen Dohrs and manufactured by Samsonite, a Sundberg-Ferar client.

this was exceptional.” Dick Teague, best known to the public for his later work
for American Motors, was fully confident of his own talent, but said of Dohrs’s
treatment of the Caribbean interior: “I wish I had done it myself.” The back of the seat
had a new profile and kicked in where it met the robe rail (Figure 13.10). This was more
than choosing fabrics and finishes; this was the actual shaping of the interior
components themselves.
 “I was a designer who happened to be a woman” 219

Figure 13.8 MaryEllen Dohrs, “Medallion” luggage for Samsonite, undated.

The Caribbean has become a classic, and its popularity among historic vintage
automobile collectors ensures that it will endure versus the more ephemeral products
Dohrs designed in the age of planned obsolescence. It is a witness to her career in
industrial design that she remains happy with after sixty-three years.
In the 1950s in the US, perhaps two dozen women were involved in automotive
design who had an education in industrial design. Few went on to work as industrial
designers as the Society of Industrial Designers then defined its membership (requiring
designs to have been produced in three different areas), effectively eliminating most
automotive designers, male or female (Figures 13.11 and 13.12). In this, she was
exceptional. While industrial design firms like those headed by Henry Dreyfuss,
Raymond Loewy, and Walter Dorwin Teague employed women in large numbers, few
were designers (Dreyfuss’s wife Doris Marks was his business partner; the first Mrs.
Loewy, Jean Bienfait, remained a partner within the firm after their divorce, and her
role in the construction of Loewy’s career remains unexamined). It is possible that
Dohrs’s name change in 1955 has thrown some earlier researchers off the trail.15
Dohrs is a figure deserving of further research, and luckily has been interviewed by
GM Archives and recorded informally by others.16 She is certainly more than a
precursor to the more celebrated “Damsels of Design.” Her success proves that a woman
220 Design History Beyond the Canon

Figure 13.9 Advertisement for the 1955 Packard Caribbean, showing inset
illustration with seating designed by Dohrs (the horizontal element at chest height is
the “robe rail,” dividing the seat into tripartite elements complementing the three-
color interior and exterior color themes, and also providing hand-holds for
passengers in the rear seats).
 “I was a designer who happened to be a woman” 221

Figure 13.10 MaryEllen Dohrs, rendering of interior scheme for a 1955 Packard
hardtop featuring her designs.

industrial designer was still exceptional in the post-World War II era, but not an
impossibility.17 Her exposure to the Soviet Union and her illustrations of life behind
the Iron Curtain should not be viewed as a break with her career, even though 1963
brought an end to her industrial design work, because at the core, she was still working
as a visual artist, and her drawing skills were such that they stand on their own as fine
art. Today, working as a sculptor and teaching others to sculpt, she is pursuing her love
of “making” still, and that making embraces her enthusiasm for creation. To be
personally exposed to her appreciation for good design or artwork of any stripe is a
lesson in seeing. Her accounts of her career are riveting for their incredible detail and
recollection and insights into the personalities of those she worked with. While the Le
Sabre was not painted to match her hair, as one source claimed (it was originally
painted a copper color: Figure 13.13), this red herring is an appealing fiction as it
captures an influential female designer at the dawn of her career, a thorough professional
at the beginning of her post-Pratt education.
222 Design History Beyond the Canon

Figure 13.11 MaryEllen Dohrs, jukebox for Seeberg, designed while employed at
Sundberg-Ferar, 1955.

Figure 13.12 Mary Ellen Dohrs, sketch of a proposed modular kitchen showing
color and finishes for Whirlpool.
 “I was a designer who happened to be a woman” 223

Figure 13.13 Harley Earl [top] and MaryEllen Dohrs [middle image] with the Le
Sabre in its original copper finish. From Cleveland Plain Dealer Magazine, December
31, 1950, p. 11.
224 Design History Beyond the Canon

Notes
1 MaryEllen Green, born in Hollywood, California, on September 20, 1929, married Fred
E. Dohrs, PhD, in 1955, and has referred to herself professionally as MaryEllen Dohrs
since that date. Her name appears as MaryEllen Dohrs throughout this chapter.
2 Confirmation is found at the official General Motors website: https://www.
gmheritagecenter.com/enthusiast-links/Enthusiasts/2015_August_Dohrs.html.
3 Constance Smith, another Pratt graduate with a career in automotive interior design at
GM, recently published Damsels in Design: Women Pioneers in the Automotive Industry,
1939–1959 (Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing, 2018). A great deal of new information is
brought to light in her book, especially on Helene Anne Rother Ackerknecht (most
often referred to as “Helene Rother” in contemporary accounts), an especially
important “first” in the profession of automotive interior design (much of this evidence
comes from Smith’s collection). There are some internal inconsistencies between
captions and text that bear keeping in mind, and while extensively researched, it is
difficult to accept this account as factually definitive on the subject.
4 MaryEllen Dohrs, presentation at Burns Auditorium, NC State University College of
Design, October 26, 2016 (https://vimeo.com/189181700) will provide the reader with
Dohrs’s own account of many of the anecdotes related in this chapter. A telephone
conversation between Dohrs and the author on March 9, 2018, was conducted to verify
factual contents of this chapter. Any errors of fact or interpretation lie with the author.
5 This is not to belittle the achievements of other women designers; we can hope for an
assessment of the involvement of designers such as Helen Dryden at Studebaker, who
goes unnoted in Smith’s book. Helene Rother at GM, Betty Thatcher (later Oros) at
Hudson were important pre-war figures, not to mention a contingent of women
working with E. T. “Bob” Gregorie at Ford in the years prior to the war and immediately
following; all the latter were gone by 1948, displaced by returning servicemen. Women
would not play a role at Ford in this capacity again until the 1960s.
6 The best description of Earl’s working process and its development over his thirty-year
career with GM remains C. Edson Armi’s The Art of American Car Design: The
Profession and Personalities (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State Press, 1988).
7 Dohrs took on these roles as well and worked part-time for Sundberg-Ferar from 1957
to 1963 after working full-time between 1953 and 1957. At this point, extensive foreign
travel with her husband, whose specialty was the geography of the lands behind the
Iron Curtain, made continuing as a practicing industrial designer untenable.
8 Eddington, Marjorie F., MaryEllen Dohrs, Artist: http://www.biblewise.com/living/
guests/maryellen-dohrs.php
9 MaryEllen Dohrs, address at Sundberg-Ferar’s eightieth anniversary celebration
(MaryEllen also corrects host to confirm she worked at Sundberg-Ferar full-time from
1953 to 1957): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aw5NvZaybx0
10 Per Dohrs, it was a perfect marriage of opposites: Sundberg was an unforgettable
presence, a natural salesman who drank whiskey and smoked cigars freely. Ferar had
trained as an architect and was reserved by nature, and luckily also understood finance.
11 Dohrs sculpts and teaches sculpture today in West Palm Beach, Florida; aiding her
students in a quest to “learn to see,” versus merely looking, remains a perpetual
challenge in her dialogue with them.
12 Smith reproduces six important images of the Hopalong Cassidy Cadillac from the
GM Archives on p. 46 of Damsels in Design. Dohrs was present at the event held on
August 9, 1950, at Research “B” Building, 465 W. Milwaukee, Detroit. The unique
 “I was a designer who happened to be a woman” 225

vehicle was on display at the Styling Section Auditorium on the 11th Floor, and “single
children living at home” were invited to attend by Harley Earl.
13 The origin of this nomenclature remains undetermined. The jargon of automotive
designers is notoriously exclusionary to those outside the field, perhaps of reflection of
the very strict security that was part of Earl’s system of locked studios for each division
in Styling at GM; Cadillac, Buick, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, and Chevrolet designers did not
“talk shop” with their counterparts in the other divisions, and non-disclosure
agreements were the norm upon hiring.
14 Nevertheless, after some time in the Interiors studio, Dohrs compared take-home pay
with a male co-worker at the same rank and found she made $72.00 to his $107. She
philosophically viewed her time at GM as an unrivaled opportunity to continue her
education, and advancement through a move to Sundberg-Ferar was not far away.
15 Dohrs stated in one email, “I go by MaryEllen Dohrs, not MaryEllen Green-Dohrs and
not MaryEllen Green. You won’t find my work (my sculpture) under MaryEllen Green.
There’s nothing there.”
16 The acknowledgment of her contribution at General Motors is found at https://www.
gmheritagecenter.com/enthusiast-links/Enthusiasts/2015_August_Dohrs.html. The
author thanks Ms. Dohrs for providing a transcript of her interview with GM’s
archivist, as well as the bulk of the illustrations accompanying this chapter.
17 To demonstrate how forward and novel Industrial Design was as a profession at
that time, Alfred Hitchcock introduced Eva-Marie Saint in the movie North by
Northwest with the shocker, “I’m an industrial designer.”
226
 Epilogue
Beyond the canon—building the case for and cases for
interdisciplinary design history
Stephanie E. Vasko

Introduction

As a formally trained chemist with little exposure to design history, attending the
National Endowment for the Humanities “The Canon and Beyond: Teaching the
History of Modern Design” Summer Teaching Institute in 2015 was pivotal in shifting
the course of my research and giving me the confidence and tools to truly embrace
becoming an interdisciplinary design history scholar. This experience crystallized
for me that a “beyond the canon” approach to design history was one that put scholars
from different disciplines in conversation with one another and with institutions
(e.g., universities, colleges, archives, museums) to provide multi-, inter-, and trans-
disciplinary perspectives. An interdisciplinary approach to design history is a way of
getting beyond the canon that enables design history to create comprehensive narratives
in conversation with other disciplines.1
In this epilogue, I call for an interdisciplinary approach to design history. I offer an
example of how my own interdisciplinary background influences my work by
introducing to two nascent, in-progress case studies of different technology companies
in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These case studies bring perspectives from
the disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) together
with other disciplines including, but not limited to, business history and philosophy.
Finally, I conclude with ways that scholars can find support for their interdisciplinary
scholarship.

Design history and interdisciplinarity

Design is a collaborative practice that occurs between designers, scientists, engineers,
and other professionals. Moving to a fully interdisciplinary notion of design history
serves as a smart, proactive move to begin capturing full and complete narratives of
design. With examples ranging from Intel engineers and fashion designers working
together to create wearable electronics to Nike’s self-lacing shoes involving designers,
engineers, and shoe archives, understanding the methods, processes, and ephemera
used by a wide range of disciplines creates the conditions for a design history that

227
228 Design History Beyond the Canon

captures the reality of current and future design processes.2 Interdisciplinary approaches
to design are also gaining ground in initiatives like the Leading Strand, “. . . a TED
Residency-backed multidisciplinary initiative founded by Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya
to bring the disparate worlds of design and science together to deepen our understanding
of what’s possible.”3
Academic interdisciplinary design programs have also cropped up at a multitude
of colleges and universities. Additionally, these programs have received attention from
national funding agencies. In 2009, the National Science Foundation held a two-
day workshop on interdisciplinary graduate education programs, whose conference
proceedings contained suggestions on advancing interdisciplinary design activities,
enhancing interdisciplinary design programs, and supporting interdisciplinary design
research.4
This call for an interdisciplinary approach to design history is not new. In his
introduction to the 2001 book Graphic Design History, Steven Heller argues: “While
design historians must use cultural and political histories as backdrops, ultimately the
stories they tell must be rooted in issues of design . . . .”5 Heller’s view, which may be a
reflection of the field at the time, seems to foreground the design in design history in
place of the interdisciplinary story. But we see a shift in this thinking even as early as
Fallan’s introduction to Design History: Understanding Theory and Method, where he
states that “design history today is no longer primarily a history of objects and their
designers, but it is becoming more of a history of the translations, transcriptions,
transactions, transpositions, and transformations that constitute the relationships
among these things, people, and ideas.”6
Echoing Fallan’s sentiment, Townsend and Armstrong state in the introduction to
the “Design and Academe” section of a 2017 issue of Design and Culture that “design
research does not spring full-grown from the minds of academics; instead, the
conditions, contexts, and values of our discipline, programs, and faculty, lead to a wide
spectrum of investigations.”7 The interdisciplinary envelope for design history gets
pushed even further by Johanna Drucker’s Graphesis, described by Harvard University
Press as “an interdisciplinary study fusing digital humanities with media studies and
graphic design history [whereby] Drucker outlines the principles by which visual
formats organize meaningful content.”8 Drucker’s interdisciplinary work in this
subfield of design history is therefore used as a selling point for its innovativeness.
Canonical design history journals have also gestured in the direction of accepting
interdisciplinarity. The Journal of Design History has notably published a series of
special issues over the years working on expanding notions of design history and
including other fields in joint discussion with design history. For example, “Design
Dispersed” was described by the editors as “. . . part of a rising tide of literature
dedicated to design in the discipline of anthropology.”9 Other journals, such as Design
and Culture, publish articles that push design history “beyond the canon” by focusing
on ephemera, perspectives, and methods (including interdisciplinary methods) not
previously considered. Some of these articles and reviews are written by authors not
considered “traditional” design history scholars.
New journals have also embraced interdisciplinary approaches to design history,
most notably She Ji, which describes itself as “a peer-reviewed, trans-disciplinary design
 Epilogue 229

journal with a focus on economics and innovation, design process and design thinking.”
In explaining their scope, the She Ji website states, “Innovation requires integrating
ideas, economics, and technology to create new knowledge at the intersection of
different fields. She Ji provides a unique forum for such inquiry.”10
The number of visible practitioners working at interdisciplinary intersections or in
interdisciplinary collaborations within design history is still small, but growing. Prominent
examples include Regina Lee Blaszczyk, whose University of Leeds faculty biography page
states “Professor Blaszczyk likes to do things differently!” and highlights her vast array of
experiences that have allowed her to author and edit such interdisciplinary volumes as
Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning (2002), Producing
Fashion: Commerce, Culture, and Consumers (2009), The Color Revolution (2012), and
Bright Modernity: Color, Commerce, and Consumer Culture (2017).11
Our 2015 NEH Summer Institute also served as an incubator for several scholars
whose research is inflected by a more interdisciplinary approach, including scholars
bringing together topics and methods from architecture, fashion, American culture,
non-Western history, graphic design, product design, and design practice, among other
domains.

Building expertise and experience for creating interdisciplinary

case studies
As mentioned above, I am interested in the history of technology and history of
innovation as they entwine with design history during the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries in the United States. In the vein of Dr. Blaszczyk, who brings business history
in dialogue with the formal conceptions of design history, I seek to bring the history of
technology and innovation, as well as scientific knowledge, into dialogue with design
history. As I have previously argued in my work on fashion design and chemistry:

Deciphering the intertwined histories of chemistry and fashion design requires an

interdisciplinary approach . . . includ[ing] studying the archival records of synthetic
fibers and their design applications, discussions between fiber producers and the
fashion industry, advertisements to the public and to design-related industries,
adjacent industries in the chemistry-design nexus such as the dye industry and the
life cycle of synthetics and their impacts on the environment.12

While I have traced part of my evolution as a scholar elsewhere, here I would like
to provide an expanded understanding. Completing a PhD in chemistry and
nanotechnology equipped me with the facility to understand scientific concepts,
jargon, and the types of ephemera associated with STEM research.13 An interest in
nanoethics and the ethics of emerging technologies in graduate school and during my
first postdoctoral appointment led me to the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at
Arizona State University’s 2014 Winter School on Anticipatory Governance of
Emerging Technologies, where I learned about responsible innovation and developed
an interest in the history of innovation. My initial work on craft and STEM, as well as
230 Design History Beyond the Canon

mentorship from scholars in the humanities, empowered me to apply for the 2015
NEH Summer Institute, which for me was an introduction to both canonical and non-
canonical design history, as well as to archival research. It also exposed me to specific
places where I could conduct archival research both as part of the program (e.g.,
Hagley Museum and Library) and as part of my free-time explorations of the resources
at Drexel University (the NEH Summer Institute’s host institution) and in Philadelphia,
including the Chemical Heritage Foundation (now known as the “Science History
Institute”).
These experiences have formed the basis of two case studies I am currently pursuing
that look at the advertisements of STEM-focused companies. The first case study
focuses on a series of advertisements for the construction of a dye plant in Toms River,
New Jersey, by Ciba. This case study has previously received attention through Dan
Fagin’s 2014 Pulitzer Prize-winning historical investigation Toms River.14
I received an exploratory research grant from the Hagley Museum and Library
entitled “Weaving a History of Innovation: An Examination of Fiber Development
and Responsible Innovation,” which combined my scientific training, responsible
innovation experience, and my exposure to archival research during the NEH Summer
Institute. During a visit to the Hagley archives to explore primary resources related to
this grant topic, I came across a series of advertisements for the construction of Ciba’s
Toms River plant in American Fabrics magazine, a former trade journal for the fashion
industry. I had not previously seen these ads, nor were they included in Toms River, and
so to deepen this historical case, I shifted my attention to the intersections of graphic
design history (in the form of advertisements), trade journals, and the history of
innovation. An introduction to this case study, including the rationale for using trade
journal advertisements in design history, was published in the summer of 2017 in
Chemical & Engineering News, the magazine for members of the American Chemical
Society.15
Pushing this initial research forward requires bringing together multiple disciplines
in constructing both the historical perspective of the advertisements and the analysis
of their content and images. I am especially interested in putting their visual and
textual content in dialogue with concepts of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and
responsible innovation (RI), as well as with the evolution of types of advertisements. In
order to unpack CSR and RI, I have needed to use the introduction to these topics
gained at the ASU winter school to delve into the literature on the history of business
and on the establishment of RI, including through the recently launched Journal of
Responsible Innovation. From the geographical and historical perspectives of the
project, I need to consider the history of chemical industries in New Jersey and the
history of dye technology in general.
Examining the content of these advertisements requires expertise with methods
such as content analysis and grounded theory. Initial explorations of the corpus built
from the text of the advertisements has included using techniques from digital
humanities (DH), including text-mining, word frequency, word correlation, and
topic modeling.16 The application of these DH techniques to design history also
requires an exploration of their applications to the parameters of this case study,
specifically that there is a small corpus derived from advertisements. In terms of the
 Epilogue 231

ethical implications of the graphic design of the advertisements and their content,
bringing in notions of expanded STEM ethics, including the embedded ethical issues,
and the philosophy of design can also potentially enhance the case study.17
When working at the intersection of design history and history of technology, it is
also occasionally necessary to go on a “treasure hunt” to find pieces of ephemera that
complete or enhance the story. Finding new ephemera in new places (specifically,
online venues) has influenced scholarship in historical geography, studies of cultural
and biographical texts, and even design history, as covered by several authors including
the NEH Summer Institute’s own Matthew Bird in both Design and Culture and in this
volume.18 The types of materials researchers may need to bring into dialogue also make
the case for more interdisciplinarity. Working with these new materials may require
bringing new scholarship on the types of ephemera or their interpretation into dialogue
with a researcher’s existing work.
The discussion of a collection of blended ephemera leads into my other case study,
an in-progress effort focusing on the history of Intel’s technological advancements and
advertisement campaigns, with a focus on their Patrick Nagel-based graphic design
campaigns and current (post-2010) campaigns.19 My work on this Intel case study
began when I found a picture of unknown provenance on Pinterest, and has expanded
into an exploration of online artifacts and posts, museum collections, and oral histories.
Comparing my two large case studies, Ciba is limited to advertisements in the form
of print advertisements, while the Intel case study includes print, video, television,
mobile, and live events. These additional formats require the consideration of literature
and methods in new disciplines. Additionally, this exploration of how technological
advances at Intel influenced (or were influenced by) advertisements allows me to bring
my knowledge of semiconductor nanofabrication and advances in nanofabrication
techniques into a dialogue with design history.
The combination of fields I use in these case studies is unique, and it is this unique,
interdisciplinary perspective that not only allows me to tell two fascinating stories at
the intersection of design history and the history of innovation, but also allows me to
disseminate my works in progress to philosophy and chemistry departments and at
new conferences, publish in non-traditional formats, and author manuscripts and
book chapters, such as this one, for more traditional academic venues.

Enabling interdisciplinary scholarship in order to push design

history beyond the canon
This section of my epilogue reflects my greatest hopes for the future of an interdisciplinary
design history. For me, design history moves beyond the canon by exploring non-
canonical places for publishing or talking about design history. For me, this movement
has manifested through talking about design history when I teach electronic textiles
workshops at makerspaces, writing both academic articles and articles that reach the
general public rather than specialists (popular press writing, books written for the
public, or publishing in professional association journals, and giving talks in departments
outside of design history about design history topics).
232 Design History Beyond the Canon

Interdisciplinary centers have an extremely important role to play in helping to

expand design beyond the canon. Institutions like Michigan State University’s Center
for Interdisciplinarity (C4I) can help faculty form research partnerships, receive
encouragement and mentorship across the career spectrum, aid in grant preparation,
and provide places for scholars to exchange ideas. The NEH Summer Institute was
a great start to a conversation about design history outside of the canon. Hopefully,
as centers like C4I evolve, partnerships between universities, museums, archives,
businesses, practitioners, and funding agencies can grow and involve a wider audience
in discussion, learning, and support, like those of us who attended the summer school
received.
Language in recent NEH funding opportunities also indicates a shift towards
interdisciplinarity. The “Humanities Connections Planning Grants” summary states,
“Competitive applications will demonstrate . . . that faculty and students will benefit
from meaningful collaborations in teaching and learning across disciplines as a result
of the project.”20 The “Research and Development” program “recognizes that finding
solutions to complex problems often requires forming interdisciplinary project teams,
bringing together participants with expertise in the humanities; in preservation; and in
information, computer, and natural science.”21
Online discussion forums also play a large part in supporting interdisciplinary
design history scholarship. The Facebook group and listserv for our 2015 NEH Summer
Institute has allowed me to continue to share resources, post questions, and receive
peer mentoring from my fellow participants. The Design Studies Forum listserv is a
low barrier to entry resource for finding out about special issues, opportunities, and
conferences that might resonate with interdisciplinary scholars.
That is not to say that interdisciplinarity is not without its faults. For those in
academia, the types of articles mentioned above can also be a source of tension when
it comes to retention, promotion, and tenure, which is a much larger issue that is
beyond the scope of this short chapter. There have been reports over the past few years
about the costs of interdisciplinary scholarship, especially to junior faculty. However, it
is my hope that as funding agencies place a greater focus on interdisciplinarity, as the
number of interdisciplinary journals grows, and as academic programs listen to advice
on interdisciplinary retention, promotion, and tenure, that these costs will diminish.22
In the words of Meredith Davis, at the conclusion of her discussion of design research
in “Tenure and Design Research: A Disappointingly Familiar Discussion,” “it is time for
schools and their measures for faculty performance to catch up.”23

Conclusion

The NEH Summer Institute was an amazing celebration of diverse, interdisciplinary

thought in design history, but our work cannot stop there. Interdisciplinary approaches
to design history, such as those I pursue in my case studies, can create new and
exciting ways to explore design history. Interdisciplinary approaches to design history
also allow researchers to capture the interdisciplinary design processes happening
in companies and universities. Therefore, scholars must continue advocating for
 Epilogue 233

interdisciplinary approaches through articles and projects, and the journals and
institutions that support design history. Additionally, design historians must keep
pace with the changing research world as well. While there are inherent risks in
doing so, the ultimate rewards include a richer, more inclusive design history.

Notes
1 As I will use it in this piece, “interdisciplinary” is meant as a generic term for
multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, or transdisciplinary.
2 S. Lawson, “How Intel’s Ayse Ildeniz Got Fashion Designers and Engineers To Play
Nice,” Fast Company, June 25, 2015: https://www.fastcompany.com/3047630/how-
intels-ayse-ildeniz-took-got-fashion-designers-and-engineers-to-play-nic. S. Eden,
“The Secret Lab Where Nike Invented the Power-Lacing Shoe of Our Dreams,” Wired,
October 2016: https://www.wired.com/2016/09/nike-self-lacing-design-hyperadapt/
3 The Leading Strand, “About,” https://www.theleadingstrand.org/about-me-shift/#bio
accessed on March 28, 2018.
4 T. W. Simpson, S. T. Hunter, C. Bryant-Arnold, M. Parkinson, R. R. Barton, D. Celento,
and J. Messner, NSF Workshop, 2009, in San Diego, CA.
5 Heller quoted in Teal Triggs, “Designing Graphic Design History,” Journal of Design
History, 22(4) (2009): 329.
6 Kjetil Fallan, Design History: Understanding Theory and Method (London: Berg, 2010),
p. viii.
7 S. Townsend, and H. Armstrong, “Introduction: The Value of Design in an Academic
Context,” Design and Culture, 9(1) (2017): 68.
8 Harvard University Press, “Graphesis,” http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.
php?isbn=9780674724938, accessed on February 5, 2018.
9 P. Garvey and A. Drazin, “Design Dispersed: Design History, Design Practice and
Anthropology,” Journal of Design History, 29(1) (2016): 1–7.
10 Shi Ji, https://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-
innovation/, accessed March 28, 2018.
11 Dr. Blaszczyk was a visiting scholar for the NEH Summer Institute. “Regina Lee
Blaszczyk,” https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:UhWWy31fWzkJ:
https://www.leeds.ac. uk/arts/profile/20030/1153/regina_lee_blaszczyk+&cd=1&hl=
en&ct=clnk&gl=us, accessed October 19, 2018.
12 S. E. Vasko, “Perspectives: The Intertwined Histories of Chemistry, Fashion, and
Advertising,” Chemical & Engineering News, August 7, 2017: 24–5.
13 Ibid.
14 Dan Fagin, Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation (New York: Bantam, 2013).
15 Vasko, “Perspectives: The Intertwined Histories of Chemistry, Fashion, and
Advertising.”
16 Blending design history and digital humanities is also finding its way into the
classroom, see K. Garza’s talk abstract, “Design History Meets Digital History: A
Classroom Experiment for the Texas Digital Humanities Conference 2015,” which can
be accessed at https://uta-ir.tdl.org/utair/bitstream/handle/10106/25692/Garza.
jpg?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
17 E. Schienke, N. Tuana, D. A. Brown, K. J. Davis, K. Keller, and J. S. Shortle, “The Role
of the National Science Foundation Broader Impacts Criterion in Enhancing
234 Design History Beyond the Canon

Research Ethics Pedagogy,” Social Epistemology, 23 (2009): 317–26. N. Tuana,

“Embedding Ethics in the Practices of Science: Bringing Humanities to the
Sciences,” Synthese, 190(11) (2013): 1955–73. Glenn Parsons, The Philosophy of Design
(Cambridge: Polity, 2015).
18 D. DeLyser, R. Sheehan, and A. Curtis, “eBay and Research in Historical Geography,”
Journal of Historical Geography, 30 (2004): 764–82. K. D. Good, “From Scrapbook to
Facebook: A History of Personal Media Assemblage and Archives,” New Media &
Society, 15(4) (2012): 557–73. M. Bird, “Design History Research in the Digital Age,”
Design and Culture, 6(2) (2014): 243–9.
19 S. E. Vasko, manuscript in process, 2018.
20 National Endowment for the Humanities, “Humanities Connections Planning Grants,”
https://www.neh.gov/grants/education/humanities-connections-planning-grants,
accessed February 8, 2018.
21 National Endowment for the Humanities, “Research and Development,” https://www.
neh.gov/grants/preservation/research-and-development, accessed February 8, 2018.
22 J. T. Klein and H. J. Falk-Krzesinski, “Interdisciplinary and Collaborative Work:
Framing Promotion and Tenure Practices and Policies,” Research Policy, 46(6) (2017):
1055–61.
23 M. Davis, “Tenure and Design Research: A Disappointingly Familiar Discussion,”
Design and Culture, 8(1) (2016): 130.
 Notes on the contributors

Nancy Bernardo is an award-winning designer whose design work has been recognized
by the Society of Typographic Arts, PRINT Magazine, HOW Magazine, Design
Observer, AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Artists), Designers and Books,
Creative Quarterly, and AIGA Western New York. She is an Associate Professor of
Graphic Design at Rochester Institute of Technology.

Matthew Bird brings his professional experience as a product and exhibition designer
into the classroom at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where he teaches
design and design history. His knowledge of manufacturing techniques and materials
informs his teaching and writing about design history. He also curates shows that
introduce design to fine-art museums.

Maria Elena Buszek is Professor of Art History and President’s Teaching Scholar at the
University of Colorado Denver. Her publications include the books Pin-Up Grrrls:
Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture (Duke University Press, 2006), Extra/Ordinary:
Craft and Contemporary Art (Duke, 2011), and with Hilary Robinson she co-edited the
collection of new writing A Companion to Feminist Art (Wiley, 2019). Dr. Buszek’s
current book project, Art of Noise, explores the ties between contemporary activist art
and popular music.

Karen L. Carter is Professor of Art History at Kendall College of Art and Design,
Ferris State University. Her research on nineteenth-century French posters has been
published in Le Magasin du XIXe siècle, Journal of Design History, Nineteenth-Century
French Studies, and Yale French Studies among others. She co-edited Foreign Artists and
Communities in Modern Paris, 1870–1914: Strangers in Paradise with Susan Waller
(Ashgate, 2015 and Routledge, 2017, paperback).

Marianne Eggler is an art and design historian and educator at the Fashion Institute
of Technology and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She received a BA from
the University of Rochester and did her doctoral studies at the City University of New
York Graduate Center, focusing on German modern architecture and design.

Russell Flinchum took BA and MA degrees at the University of North Carolina and
his PhD in Art History at the Graduate School of the City University of New York in
1998. He has written Henry Dreyfuss, Industrial Designer (1997) and American Design
(2008). He joined the faculty of North Carolina State University’s College of Design as
Associate Professor in December 2013.

235
236 Notes on the contributors

Carma Gorman is Associate Professor in the School of Design and Creative

Technologies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her recent writing focuses on how
the USA’s distinctive laws, regulations, and standards have shaped the national
character of American industrial and graphic design.

Gayle L. Goudy, Instructor at the College of Charleston, earned her PhD in the History
of Art and Architecture at the University of Oregon and a BFA in Industrial Design
from the University of Kansas. She researches the human–machine integration (digital
technologies) in art, architecture, and education.

Brockett Horne is a writer, designer, and educator. She teaches Graphic Design at
Maryland Institute College of Art and Northeastern University and is Co-Director of
the People’s Graphic Design Archive.

Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler is an Associate Professor of Design History at Purdue

University in West Lafayette, Indiana. She earned her MA in the History of Design
from the RCA/V&A and her PhD from the University of Wisconsin. She is the author
of the book Open Plan: A Design History of the American Office (Bloomsbury, 2021).

Yelena McLane is a faculty member in the Department of Interior Architecture and

Design at Florida State University. Her current research focuses on Soviet design
history and technical aesthetics after World War II, exhibition design, and the
intersection of spatial configurations and social uses in historic and contemporary
architectural settings.

Erica Morawski is Assistant Professor of Design History at Pratt Institute. She received
her doctorate from the University of Illinois-Chicago. Her work considers how design
mediates relationships between state and populace through approaches that give
agency to under-represented voices and expand the canon. Her work currently focuses
on the Hispanic Caribbean.

Victoria Rose Pass is an Associate Professor of Design and Art History at the Maryland
Institute College of Art. She co-edited the volume Women’s Magazines in Print and New
Media with Noliwe Rooks and Ayana Weekley (Routledge, 2016) which included her
essay “Encountering Africa in Vogue: Irving Penn’s African Essays.” Her essay “Racial
Masquerades in the Magazines: Defining White Femininity Between the Wars” was
published in the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies in 2020. She received her PhD in
Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester.

David Raizman (1951–2021) was Distinguished University Professor Emeritus in the

Westphal College of Media Arts and Design at Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA.
Dr. Raizman was the author of History of Modern Design (Laurence King and Pearson
Publishing, 2nd edn. 2010) and Reading Graphic Design History: Image, Text, and Context
(Bloomsbury, 2021).
 Notes on the contributors 237

Sara Desvernine Reed, PhD, is an adjunct professor in the Department of Interior

Design at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA, where she teaches
undergraduate- and graduate-level courses in the history and theory of interior
environments.

Stephanie E. Vasko received her PhD in Chemistry and Nanotechnology from the
University of Washington. She is currently a Senior UX Researcher for MESH Research
at Michigan State University. Her research interests include the intersections of sound
production, archival work, performance, and augmented reality.

Christopher S. Wilson, PhD, teaches architecture and design history at Ringling

College of Art and Design, Sarasota, Florida. Dr. Wilson has earned three different
degrees on three different continents: B. Arch, Temple University, USA; Master of Arts,
Architectural Association, London, England; and PhD, Middle East Technical
University, Ankara, Turkey.

Emily Wolf is an adjunct lecturer in Historic Preservation at Boston Architectural

College. A graduate of the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania
School of Design, she formerly served as the Boston Landmarks Commission’s
Architectural Historian. Her current research focuses on intersections between
architectural history and heritage conservation.
238
 Index

Numbers in italics indicate illustrations

Acme Attractions 99 “Ambassadeurs” poster (Lévy) 138

adventure play 171–2 American Society of Interior Designers
in physical spaces 172–80, 185 (ASID) 195
in video games 180–6 Ancient Egypt 149, 150, 152
advertisement. See also branding Anglomania 105
dye plant, Toms River 230–1 appropriation. See also Mangbetu
Futurama lipstick 117 coiffeur
home modernization 50–1, 52, 53, 54–5, African culture 130, 131, 134–5, 137
57–62 Black Lives Matter 139
Intel 231 detournement 90
print ads 115–18 Native Americans 140
racial stereotypes 129–30, 135, 138, punk 89, 97
139–40 architectural tourism 84
Scotch tape dispenser 118 architecture 194, 195. See also commercial
Soviet Union 19–20, 24 architecture; modern architecture
TV ads 114 aesthetics 78
William Pahlmann 189, 190, 193, 200 Armstrong’s Idea House 50
aesthetics Art Deco 134, 152–4, 158, 196
Afro-futuristic aesthetic 163–5 Asian design 200, 202
architecture 57, 78 Association of Interior Decorators (AID)
Mangbetu women 151–2 195
radios 22 auction house websites 113
affordability 119 Aunt Jemima 129–30, 137, 139
affordances 44–5 Austin 8 214
“Affording Meaning” (Almquist and automotive design
Lupton) 44–5 General Motors (GM) 209–10, 216
Africa 154, 157, 162. See also La Croisière Packard Caribbean 217–19, 220
Noire (The Black Crossing)
African-American artists 163–5 Baker, Josephine 132–7, 150, 156, 157, 159,
African-American culture 131 164
African-Americans 129–30, 138. See also Baum, Joseph 195
Baker, Josephine Baya Weaver nest 180
Afro-futuristic aesthetic 163–5 Beaufort Market 99
After Taste: Expanded Practice in Interior Best magazine 106
Design (Sparke) 191 “Better Homes Contest” (Better Homes &
Agnès 155–6, 158–60 Gardens magazine) 52, 54
Albertine, Viv 87–8, 94–5, 97 Better Homes in America 52
Almquist, Julka 44–5 Better Housing News Flashes (FHA) 54,
amateurs 113–14 57–8, 61

239
240 Index

Beyoncé 163, 164, 170 n. 75 Congo. See also Mangbetu coiffeur;

bias 1–2, 8–9 Mangbetu people; Mangbetu women
Black Crossing, The (La Croisière Noire) consumerism 17
145, 147–9, 150 consumers 5
film 145, 148, 150, 153, 156, 159–60 control 36, 43–4
Black Panther, The (film) 163, 165 Coon, Caroline 87, 89, 94, 96–7, 103, 104
Blaszczyk, Regina Lee 6, 229 cosmetics 155
bondage 100 cost 119
bondage suit 95–6, 98 Cousins, Margaret 193
bondage trousers 97 Creem magazine 89
“boss key” feature 40 Crowd, The (film) 35
Bowie, David 89 cultural appropriation. See appropriation
brand identity 129–30, 145, 154–5 cultural goods, Soviet Union 17–18
branding and cultured masses 18–20
Agnès 148 and design 20–1
Daché, Lilly 161 end of 30–2
Soviet Union 32 kul’ttovary store 18
William Pahlmann 190–4, 203 musical instruments 26–7
British Library, Punk 1976–78 exhibition photography 25–6
87, 88 radios 22–3, 24
building types and styles 81 record players 23–5
business 9–10 sports equipment 27–9
toys 29, 30
canon 1–2 cultured masses 18–20
Caribbean. See Packard Caribbean “Curtain Wars” (Sanders) 194
caricatures 143 n. 33 Curtis, Williams J. R. 73
cars. See automotive design; Citroën cyberloafing 40
Carter, Ruth E. 165
Cassilly, Bob 172–5 Daché, Lilly 161
Celotex Corporation 62–3 danse sauvage (savage dance) 133, 134
Center for Interdisciplinarity (C4I), Dattner, Richard 172
Michigan State University 232 de Wolfe, Elsie 194
“Charles R. Runkin Building” 74–5 Design and Culture (journal) 228
chemistry 229 design history
Cherry, Neneh 99, 101 canonical approach 1–2
children 172, 175, 177, 179 definitions of good design 122–3
Citroën 145, 147, 148, 154 diversity 3, 10–11
City Museum 173–5, 184 interdisciplinarity 11–12, 227–33
Clash, The 93, 101–2, 102–5, 106 role of 3–4
CLOTHES CLOTHES CLOTHES designers 7–8. See also individual
(Albertine) 87–8 designers
Colin, Paul as corporate ethnographers 36–7
La Revue nègre 134, 135 detournement 90–1
Le Tumulte noir 134, 136 digital resources 111–12
Colonial Williamsburg 63 amateurs 113–14
colonialism 130, 137, 147 combined use 120–2
commercial architecture 78–9 images 112–13
computer games. See video games online inflation calculators 119
computers 40 patent searches 119–20
 Index 241

print advertisement 115–18 fashion design 229

video 114 fashion intermediaries 6
diversity 3, 10–11, 45–6, 131 Federal Housing Administration (FHA) 54,
DIY ethos 98–9 57–8
DIY movement 56, 63 feminism 93, 96–7, 100
Dog Day Afternoon, A (film) 73 Field Museum, Chicago 150, 167 n. 27
Dohrs, MaryEllen 209–21 film 114, 148, 150
childhood 213, 214 Black Panther, The 163, 165
education 214–15 Crowd, The (film) 35
Food Mill for Landers 217 Dog Day Afternoon, A 73
General Motors (GM) 209–10, La Croisière Noire 145, 148, 150, 153,
215–17 156, 159–60
interior scheme for Packard 221 Lemonade 163, 164–5, 170 n. 75
jukebox for Seeberg 222 racial stereotypes 134–5, 150
“Kid-Size” folding table and chairs for Taxi Driver 73–4
Samsonite 218 Fish, Phil 181
Le Sabre 209, 210, 223 Fitch, James Marston 49, 63
“Medallion” luggage for Samsonite 219 Flickr 113
military intelligence 210–12 folk art 198, 200
Packard Caribbean 220 Food Mill (Dohrs) 217
sketch of modular kitchen 216, 222 Forum of the Twelve Caesars Restaurant
Sundberg-Ferar 209, 213–14, 217–19 195, 196
Water Wagon, 1958 212 Four Seasons restaurant 195, 197
“Don’s Boss Page” 40, 41 France 133–4, 135, 137, 147
Douglas, Aaron 152, 154–5, 163 Frith, Simon 89
Draper, Dorothy 194 Futurama lipstick 114–17
Dunand, Jean 158, 169 n. 56 futuristic aesthetic 163–5
Dundes, Alan 39
Dyason, Mathew 184 Game Score Fanfare (Dyason) 184
gaming. See video games
Earl, Harley 209–10, 214, 215, 223 Garner, James 71–2
eBay 113–14, 120 Gaudí, Antonio 176
education 30 inverted catenary arch model 177
Elliott-Said, Marianne Joan. See Styrene, gay culture. See queer culture
Poly gender 130. See also women
environmental justice 2–3 General Motors (GM) 209–10,
ethno-eroticism 133, 134, 149–50, 151, 215–17
155, 162 Girard, Alexander 200
ethnographic imagery 147–51 globalization 139
aesthetic appeal 151–2 Goldman, Vivienne 99, 101
as brand identity 154–5 good design 122–3, 196
stylization 152–4 Google 119
exoticism 200 Google Images 112, 120
Granny Takes a Trip 90
fabrics 200 graphic design 130–1
Fallan, Kjetil 228 racial stereotypes 134–40
fashion 11. See also punk fashion Graphic Design: A New History (Eskilson)
Lemonade (film) 164 130
racial othering 155–61 Green, John Lawrence 214
242 Index

Haardt, George-Maris 145, 148, 149, 150 Jarman, Derek 93

hairstyles. See Mangbetu coiffeur jazz 157–8, 169 n. 52
Harper’s Bazaar 159 jewelry 158
hats 155–6, 157, 158, 159–61 Jim Crow Laws 131, 132
Lemonade 170 n. 75 Jim Crow Museum 137–9
Hebdige, Dick 89 Johanna Drucker 228
high modernism 196 Johnson, Philip 195–6, 197, 198
historic preservation 50, 51, 57, 61–4 Jordan (née Pamela Rooke) 93–4, 95–6
History of Interior Design, A (Pile) 197 Journal of Design History 228
Hoffman, Malvina 150–1 Journey (video game) 180–1, 182–4
“Home Improvement Pictorial, The” jukebox for Seeberg (Dohrs) 222
(Celotex Corporation) 62–3
home modernization 49–51 “Kaleidoscape” (MacAdam) 175
government programs 54 Keck, George Fred 58
market for 52–4, 54–6 Kendall College of Art and Design (KCAD)
mediated modernism 57–61 130–1
as preservation 61–4 “Kid-Size” folding table and chairs (Dohrs)
Home Modernization Bureau 52 218
homebuyers 61 King Mob group 90–1
homeownership 51–2, 56, 191 knitted spaces 175–80
Horne, Brockett Kostellow, Alexander 214, 215
notebook sketch 2 Ku Klux Klan 132
visual presentation of the book 4 kul’ttovary 17–18
“house of tomorrow” 58, 59 and cultured masses 18–20
Housing Home and Finance Agency 61 and design 20–1
end of 30–2
identity 8–9 kul’ttovary store 18
image-first browsing 112–13, 120 musical instruments 26–7
images. See ethnographic imagery photography 25–6
Imagination Playground (Rockwell) 185 radios 22–3, 24
Imagining Consumers (Blaszczyk) 6 record players 23–5
inclusion 124 sports equipment 27–9
income 191 toys 29, 30
industrial design 214–15, 217–19. See also
product design La Croisière Noire (The Black Crossing)
inflation calculators 119 145, 147–9, 150
Intel 231 film 145, 148, 150, 153, 156, 159–60
interdisciplinarity 11–12, 227–9 La Revue nègre 132–4, 135
case studies 230–1 Laktionov, Aleksandr 31
future 231–2 Le Sabre 209, 210, 223
interior decorating 194–8, 202–3 Le Tumulte noir (Colin) 134, 136
interior design 191, 192, 195 Legend of Zelda, The (video game) 181
intermediaries 6–7 Lemke, Sieglinde 133–4
internet 111–12, 139. See also digital Lemonade (film) 163, 164–5, 170 n. 75
resources Lenin, Vladimir 18, 22
internet usage 40–2 Les Jolly Koon’ess poster (Lévy) 138
Levine, Alison Murray 148
Japan 176–80 Lévy, Emil 137
Japanese culture 202 “Ambassadeurs” poster 138
 Index 243

Lichtman, Sarah 130 Moving to a New Apartment (Laktionov)

Linder Sterling 97 31–2
lipstick 114–17 Mugler, Thierry 162–3
litigation 172, 175 Muller-Munk, Peter 119–20, 153
London 89–90 Multiple Hammock No. 1 (MacAdam)
Los Angeles 72, 73, 74, 78, 81 177
“Loves/Hates T-shirt 91–2, 93 multiple modernisms 84
Lunarcharskiy, Anatoliy 20 museum collections 112
Lupton, Julia 44–5 museums. See City Museum
music 25, 90, 157–8
MacAdam, Toshiko Horiuchi 175–80 musical education 27
MacDonald, Freda Josephine. See Baker, musical instruments 26–7
Josephine
managerial control 36 National Endowment of the Humanities
Manchester 90, 97 (NEH) Summer Institute 1, 232–3
Mangbetu artists 155 National Geographic 148, 150
Mangbetu coiffeur 148–9, 152, 154–5 National Historic Preservation Act 1966
African-American artists 163–5 63
European designers 162–3 “National Home Improvement Year” 56
hats inspired by 155–6, 157, 158, 159–61 National Housing Act 1934 54
Mangbetu people 145, 148–9 National Science Foundation 228
Mangbetu women 147, 149, 150–1, 156, Nefertiti 152
162. See also Nobosodru nest of Baya Weavers 180
McLaren, Malcolm 90, 91–3, 98–9, 100 Net of Woods (MacAdam) 179–80
“Medallion” luggage (Dohrs) 219 New York 73–4
mediated modernism 57–61 Nobosodru 145, 146, 149, 150
Megg’s History of Graphic Design (Megg aesthetic appeal 151–2, 156, 158, 161–2,
and Purvis) 130 163
Michigan State University 232 appropriation 165
Michon, Alex 97, 100–1, 102–5 as brand identity 154–5
Best magazine 106 stylization 152–4
Microsoft Windows 40 non-work 35, 38–42. See also sabotage
military intelligence 210–12
misuse 38–44 Obama, Barack 138
versus use 44–6 office design 35, 36–8, 45
modern architecture 72–8 office technologies 38
multiple modernisms 84 alternative uses 44–6
vernacular modernism 78–83 misuse 38–43
modern design 122–3 “Oh Bondage! Up Yours! (Poly Styrene)
modernism 10 99, 100
mediated 57–61 Olympic Games 29
multiple modernisms 84 online inflation calculators 119
vernacular 78–83, 84 online patent searches 119–20
modernization of homes 49–51 online resources. See digital resources
government programs 54 open plan offices 36, 37
market for 52–4, 54–6 Opportunity Magazine 152
mediated modernism 57–61 organizational control 36, 43–4
as preservation 61–4 organizational misbehavior 35, 38–43
Montgomery Ward plumbing catalogue 55 organizational power structures 37–8
244 Index

othering punk
in fashion 155–61 definitions 89
Mangbetu people 145, 147, 149, 150, 151 feminism 96–7
in modernism 202–3 origins 89–90
William Pahlmann 198–202 women 87, 88, 93, 94, 96, 102–3
Punk (magazine) 89
Packard Caribbean 217–19, 220 Punk 1976–78 exhibition 87, 88
Pagter, Carl 39 Punk: Chaos to Couture 105
“Pahlmann Peruvian” model rooms 198–9 punk fashion 88–90
Pahlmann, William 189 Alex Michon 102–5, 106
as brand-maker 190–4 Poly Styrene 99–100
versus the canon 202–3 Westwood and McLaren 90–6, 97–9,
interior decorating 194–8 100
other cultures 198–202 punk rock 89
Surrealism 197, 205 n. 36 purchase price 119
Paris 133, 135, 137
patents 21, 119–20, 120–1, 122 queer culture 89–90
lipstick case 116
“Path of the Sun” fabrics 200, 201 race 99, 130, 131
Pavlish, Don 40 “Races of Man” exhibition, Field Museum,
Peltzman Effect 174 Chicago 150, 167 n. 27
personal computers 40 racial stereotypes 129–31, 150. See also
personal hygiene 19–20 ethnographic imagery; Nobosodru;
personal signatures 191 othering; primitivism
photocopiers 39–40 contemporary advertisement 139,
photography 25–6 140
La Croisière Noire (The Black Crossing) Jim Crow Museum 137–9
145, 146, 147, 150 La Revue nègre 132–4, 135
physical play 172–80, 185 Le Tumulte noir (Colin) 136
Pile, John 36–7, 197 racism 156
Pinterest 113 radios 22–3, 24
PLAY WORK BUILD 185 Ratton, Charles 161, 169 n. 66
playgrounds 171–2, 185. See also adventure record players 23–5
play Reed, Lou 89
pop boutiques 90 Reinecke, Jean Otis 120–1, 122
pornography 42 restaurants 195, 196, 197
Portugal 200 Revlon lipstick 114–17
“Post-Modern Architecture” 73 Rhodes, Bernard 91–2, 93, 101–2
Pratt Institute 214–15 Robertson’s Jam Company 129
preservation. See historic preservation Rockford Files, The 71–2
price 119 modern architecture 72–8
primitivism 130, 141 n. 11, 145–7, 148, 151 multiple modernisms 84
print advertisement 115–18 vernacular modernism 78–83
Processed World 42–3 Rockwell, David 185
product design. See also industrial design Rooke, Pamela. See Jordan (née Pamela
definitions of good design 122–3 Rooke)
Soviet Union 17–18, 20–1 Rosen, Jeff 151
propaganda 17, 22, 25, 27, 138 “Runkin Building” 74–5
public health 19–20 Russia 17. See also Soviet Union
 Index 245

sabotage 42–3 streamlining 154

Saint Laurent, Yves 162 Strummer, Joe 102, 105, 106
Sanders, Joel 194 Styrene, Poly 99–100
“Santa Monica County Building” 75, 76 Sundberg, Carl 209, 213, 217
Savage, Jon 93, 94, 97, 103, 105 Sundberg-Ferar 209, 213–14, 217–19
savage dance (danse sauvage) 133, 134 Surrealism 197, 205 n. 36
Schildkrout, Enid 147, 149, 155, 156, surveillance 36
168 n. 42
school supplies 30 Taking of Pelham One Two Three, The
Scotch tape dispenser 115, 118, 120–2, 73
122–3 “Takino Rainbow Nest” (MacAdam)
sculptures 150–1, 155 176
Seditionaries 93 tape dispensers 115, 118, 120–2, 122–3
segregationism 131, 132 taste 191
SEX (shop) 91, 93 Taxi Driver 73–4
Sex Pistols 89, 93, 94 Teague, Dick 217, 218
SEX T-shirt 91–2, 93 technology 148. See also video games
sexuality. See ethno-eroticism television 22, 114, 193. See also Rockford
Shaginyan, Marietta 23 Files, The
Shah Mosque, Ishfahan 177, 178 textile spaces 175–80
Shaw, Greg 89 tile work 177, 178
She Ji 228–9 time theft 35. See also non-work
Sheraton, Mimi 197 “Tits T-shirt” 94–5
signatures 191 Toms River 230–1
Simonon, Paul 102, 103 Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die 90, 91.
Siouxsie Sioux 90 See also SEX (shop)
Situationist International (SI) movement Toshi Net (MacAdam) 175
90–1 tourism, architectural 84
skull elongation 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 156 Townsend, S. and Armstrong, H. 228
social justice 2–3 toys 29, 30
social media 112 turbans 155–6, 157, 158, 159–61
Soliwoda, Gail 173, 174 typewriters 38, 39–40
South America 198–9
Soviet Union “Uncle Tom” 130
cultural goods 17–18, 20–1, 30–2 use 44–6. See also misuse
cultured masses 18–20 user-generated content 113–14
kul’ttovary store 18 users 5, 45–6
musical instruments 26–7
patent system 21 van der Rohe, Mies 197–8
photography 25–6 vernacular modernism 78–83, 84
radios 22–3, 24 Victor, Sally 161
record players 23–5 video 114
sports equipment 27–9 video games 180–6, 181, 187 n. 22
toys 29, 30 Vogue 158, 159
Sparke, Penny 191
Specht, George 145, 152, 153, 154 Waring blender 119–20
sports equipment 27–9 Water Wagon (Dohrs, 1958) 212
stereotypes 143 n. 33. See also racial web resources. See digital resources
stereotypes Weimar Republic inspirations 89–90
246 Index

Westwood, Vivienne 90, 91, 93–4, 98–9, women. See also individual women
100 Mangbetu women 147, 149, 150–1, 156,
bondage suit 95–6, 98 162
bondage trousers 97 in punk 87, 88, 93, 94, 96, 102–3
feminism 93, 97 work. See non-work
SEX T-shirt 91–2, 93 work ethic 214
“Tits T-shirt” 94–5
What Is Modern Design? (Kaufmann) Yost, L. Morgan, modernization scheme 60
122–3 YouTube 114
Windosill (video game) 180–1, 182
With Heritage So Rich 63 Zelda (video game) 181