The lighter side of Loewy

After we took a look at the futuristic concepts Raymond Loewy came up with for the 1939 New York World’s Fair last week, ehdubya pointed us to the Hagley Museum and Library‘s digital archives, which included many later Loewy designs and renderings. While browsing through it, however, we also came across a number of car-related cartoons that Loewy penned, apparently for Cosmopolitan magazine in the mid- to late 1940s. This was well before Helen Gurley Brown arrived and reshaped Cosmopolitan from a literary magazine known for serializing fiction into the Mix-A-Lot-lampooned women’s mag that it is today.

From the Loewy ‘toons, we see that – like his contemporaries – he was quick to point out the excesses of the age, from the concept of the Blister 6, above, “for the exclusive person who prefers to stew in his own juices” to the “Inflationary type of designing” illustration.We may accept these things now, 60 years later, but it’s interesting to see how bizarre Loewy found certain trends as he watched them emerge and evolve.