Raymond Loewy: Designs for a Consumer Culture showcases the work of Loewy and his talented associates, placing it in the wider context of design’s role in shaping a new, modern look for the consumer society of the last century. A fascinating array of original drawings, models, products, advertisements, photographs, archival documents, and rare footage of Loewy at work over five decades, brings to life the career of the prolific and influential figure who did much to define our culture of consumption.

Raymond Loewy was born in France in 1893 and immigrated to the United States in 1919. After a successful career in commercial illustration, he turned to the new field of industrial design in the late 1920s. He crafted a signature style by blending the traditional with European modernism.

Loewy’s firms created everything from lipsticks to locomotives. The look that his work personified combined beauty, function, and simplification, dominating design from the 1930s into the 1950s. His redesign of the 1935 Coldspot refrigerator for Sears, Roebuck sent the company’s refrigerator sales skyrocketing. Loewy’s success and showmanship made him the best known industrial designer in the world and earned him a place on the cover of Time Magazine in 1949.

The local showing of the exhibition was made possible by the generosity of the Dr. Charles Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences and The Seattle Times.