![]() Chapter five, ‘Consumer Research: Constructing the Ideal Consumer and a Popular and Modern Aesthetic, 1930-1945’, investigates NBG & Company’s consumer surveys and resulting design recommendations which sought to promote a modern, popular and technologically progressive style aimed at purchasers with average tastes and middle incomes. The chapter explores Bel Geddes’s flexible streamlined aesthetic, which alternately foregrounded mechanical and natural aspects, depending on the era and the requirements of the design. Chapter four, ‘Streamlining: Both a Mechanical and Organic Aesthetic’, investigates Bel Geddes’s streamlined designs (19) of vehicles and other products and their accompanying rhetoric. These designs were intended to promote Bel Geddes and his clients as progressive, modern and far-sighted, and presented the machine as both rational and non-rational, with the ability to both order society and provide it with a spiritual basis. The chapter looks at Bel Geddes’s designs (1929-1945) of a factory development, a petrol station, and a mass production house. Chapter three, ‘Industrial Architecture: The Factory, Petrol Station Design and the Mass Produced Home’, explores the rhetoric and designs which expressed Bel Geddes’s belief in the material benefits of industrial production and the symbolic value of the machine. Such architectural designs were meant to impress, excite and transform their audiences – to encourage emotional, psychological or ideological change. In the creation of these designs Bel Geddes was informed by his knowledge of drama, psychology and audience behaviour. Chapter two, ‘Shaping the Audiences of Dramatic Design’, explores Bel Geddes’s move from advertising and stage design in the 1910s and 1920s to architectural design, investigating in particular his designs (1928-1932) of theatres, window displays, an advertising agency auditorium, and a restaurant for the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933. This dual discourse was offered in Bel Geddes’s monograph Horizons – the central focus of this chapter. ![]() Chapter one, ‘Both Artist-Engineer and Practical Visionary: The Imaging of Industrial Design in Horizons (1932)’, investigates how Bel Geddes sought to present the field of industrial design as one of logic and foresight, by promoting himself, and by proxy all industrial designers, as rational and imaginative artist-engineers. Through such projects and their emphases on art, desire, intuition, spirituality, order, and science, Bel Geddes fasshioned his image as a ‘practical visionary’. The study investigates Bel Geddes’s designs of stage sets, architecture, products, and world fair exhibits, and the rhetoric he used to promote such designs. The aspects of modernity explored include: modernism, mass culture, consumption, production, identity and gender. My study investigates his designs and rhetoric as rational and non-rational expressions of modernity. ![]() ![]() The article concludes by suggesting that Simons’ nomination at one of the most prestigious of the Parisian fashion houses and global luxury brands positions him as heir to the artistic and architectural strand of the couturier’s legacy, making him instrumental in Dior’s projection of its design heritage.ĪBSTRACT Norman Bel Geddes (1893-1958) was one of America’s most prominent industrial designers working between 19. Drawing on archive material at the MoMu Fashion Museum in Antwerp and the Dior Impressions exhibition at the Christian Dior museum in Granville in 2013, this article further argues that a cross- gender dynamic is perceptible in Simons’ later designs, part of his for- mal or “neo-modern” preoccupation with shape, color, and technology. This article examines the interdisciplinary relationship between Simons’ designs and their contextual influences, documenting how his signature, first established in menswear, has been transformed through his womenswear collections for Jil Sander (2005–12) and since 2012 for Christian Dior, where he has reinterpreted the house’s couture heritage. Since the launch of his menswear label in 1995, Belgian designer Raf Simons has consistently caught the zeitgeist of contemporary fashion, supplying menswear with a range of styles, shapes, and symbols that articulate ideals of masculinity, influenced by European pop music, youth subcultures, mid-century fine art, modernist architecture, and interior design. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |