hired the industrial designer Raymond Loewy to redesign its inelegant Coldspot refrigerator. Redesigned products alone didn’t end the Depression, which lasted 10 years, but they did sell. “How do you get someone to buy a new car? You curve the headlights, change the color.” “ didn’t reengineer how a refrigerator worked or how a car drove, but they changed the design to make it look better,” says Sarah Lichtman, a professor of design history at New York’s Parsons School of Design. It came to the fore when the economy tanked, as corporations looked for new ways to inspire customers to shop. Industrial design, which concerned itself with elevating the look of mass-produced consumer goods like kitchen appliances, was still a relatively new profession during the 1920s. More than a decade out from the start of the Great Recession, standing on what some believe is the precipice of another recession, we’re in a position to examine the ways in which it shaped design and led to the aesthetics of the present moment.ĭuring the Great Depression, design was meant to lift the United States out of an economic pit. The ways we adorn ourselves and our homes - and the ways brands dress themselves up to get our attention - speak to our personal and national relationships with money. It’s impossible to separate the aesthetics of consumer goods from the economic circumstances under which they were created. “The mere fact of those rumors reflected people’s response: that it was suddenly so uncool to look rich.” “It doesn’t even matter whether it was true or not,” Binkley says. (Some research debates that this was uniformly true throughout the fashion industry.) There were rumors that the French luxury brand Hermès, maker of the coveted Birkin bag, was letting self-conscious customers carry their purchases out in demure brown shopping bags, rather than the usual bright orange ones. The wealthiest shoppers still bought luxury goods during the Recession, but Frasch recalls pushback against items with noticeable logos, while more subtle designs gained respect. Store buyers became more conservative, stocking less inventory and focusing on items that had performed well in the past. In November 2008, Saks sent shockwaves through the fashion industry when it slashed prices by 70 percent in an effort to clear out inventory competitors like Barneys and Neiman Marcus quickly followed suit, torpedoing their profit margins. Millions of people lost their jobs, and with so many consumers cutting back on spending, retailers got pummeled. What happened was the Great Recession, which started in late 2007 and officially ended in June 2009, though many Americans are still feeling its effects today. “Fashion had been really loud and it was a huge party, and then that shifted literally overnight.” There was bling on clothing, jewelry, accessories,” says Christina Binkley, who covered fashion for the Wall Street Journal. “It was colorful, it was sexy, it was obvious,” recalls Ron Frasch, who was president and chief merchandising officer of Saks Fifth Avenue in 2007. It was an era of ruffled miniskirts and low-rise jeans, of rhinestones on everything. Enough time has passed that it’s possible to look back on the fashions of the aughts with some fondness.
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