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This exhibition has been made possible through a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts as part of the American Masterpieces program.

Raymond Loewy was the most prominent industrial designer of the 20th century. As he once said, his firms created everything from lipsticks to locomotives. Raymond Loewy: Designs for a Consumer Culture showcases his work, placing it in the wider context of the shaping of a modern look for consumer culture. His career is brought to life by an array of original drawings, models, products, advertisements, photographs, and rare film footage of Loewy at work.

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 emerging field of industrial design in the 1920s. His eventual success made him the best-known industrial designer in the world.

Loewy spent more than five decades streamlining and modernizing silverware and fountain pens, supermarkets and department stores. He and his teams designed Air Force One, the John F. Kennedy memorial stamp, the Greyhound Scenicruiser, and the interiors for NASA’s Skylab. Clients included such icons as Coca-Cola, Exxon, and Lucky Strike cigarettes, and a national magazine said of him in 1950, “Loewy has probably affected the daily life of more Americans than any other man of his time.” Many of his designs are still in use today.

Raymond Loewy: Designs for a Consumer Culture originally appeared at the Hagley Museum in 2002–2003, where the Philadelphia Inquirer called it “captivating and nostalgia-rich.” The exhibition draws heavily on Loewy’s personal archives, a treasure collection of images and information not previously available to researchers or the public.