'Fashions of the Future': Fashion, Gender, and the Professionalization of Industrial Design

摘要

As sociologists David Wang and Ali O'llhan theorized in Design Issues in 2010, the profession of industrial design is held together by a "sociological wrapping" constituted and performed through consumer choices that include fashion and interior decoration." The February 1939 issue of U.S. Vogue is a revealing source through which to "unwrap" the image of the industrial design profession and to initiate a discussion about the gendered relationship between fashion and industrial design as sites of cultural production, identity, and work. Fashion media functioned as a promotional platform for the design profession in multiple ways and with ever more pervasive use throughout the twentieth century. By mid-century, magazines predominantly read by women, with titles like Homes & Gardens, Taller, and Harper's Bazaar, elevated the visibility and status of the designer in the eyes of the consumer. This material is familiar to any historian who has accessed designers' personal archives, in which press cuttings-compiled by a designer's press department or by the designers themselves-were assiduously documented and preserved. This rich and largely untapped source material includes an array of varying types and styles of mediation. These materials include "advertorial" features, in which their status as so-called "taste-leaders" was used to directly sell a specific product or lifestyle; personality profiles and interviews; and "At Home with..." photospreads, where the aspirational "designer lifestyle" was displayed and glamorized for the reader.74 Fashion magazines are thus a highly visible and potent site through which to examine the designer's position as a cultural intermediary or "middle man" between industrialist and consumer.