Visual and Performing Arts
Like A 'Girl in a Bikini Suit' and other stories: The Herman Miller Furniture Company, Gender and race at mid-century
Document Type
Article
Abstract
This article examines storage furniture and chair designs created for the Herman Miller Furniture Company by the offices of George Nelson and Charles and Ray Eames in the 1940s and 1950s. Using corporate publicity images, alongside contemporaneous texts, this article investigates how these objects-fundamentally abstract with their bright colours, industrial materials, and geometric forms-were positioned for their original consumers in the postwar period. In particular, the article considers how these iconic objects engaged questions of gendered and racial identities in the postwar decades. While it is methodologically problematic to assert that gender or race intrinsically inheres in the design objects themselves-the article contends that there is, ultimately, no essentially 'feminine' line or 'white' form-gendered and racialized narratives can be found through a close reading of the visual and verbal frames that surrounded these objects. These designs were used to cultivate economies of vision and power that recapitulated the chauvinistic gender ideologies of postwar American culture as well as the dominant racial ideology of whiteness as distinct, and all colour as other. They were successful, ultimately, because they resonated with the dominant ideologies of their status-conscious consumers.
Publication Title
Journal of Design History
Publication Date
5-1-2015
Volume
28
Issue
2
First Page
161
Last Page
181
ISSN
0952-4649
DOI
10.1093/jdh/epv006
Keywords
Charles and Ray Eames, gender, George Nelson, Herman Miller, marketing, race
Repository Citation
Wilson, Kristina, "Like A 'Girl in a Bikini Suit' and other stories: The Herman Miller Furniture Company, Gender and race at mid-century" (2015). Visual and Performing Arts. 33.
https://commons.clarku.edu/faculty_visual_performing_arts/33
