Speech by Raymond Loewy,Essen (Germany), 1955 (Draft)

French-born Raymond Loewy was among the first and most recognized industrial design professionals in the United States. After the war, Loewy and his company retained extensive contacts with as well as design offices in Europe. In many ways, Loewy became the face of American industrial design for Europeans. In this 1955 speech before German design professionals in Essen, Loewy comments on the increasingly integral role of design in consumer marketing. He consciously invokes the interwar design movements of the Bauhaus and the Werkbund as important influences, but also calls for a more democratic as well as business-minded approach to the “aesthetic reeducation” of the “mass market.”