Raymond Loewy: a message from a grand old man

Interview with the man who invented industrial design. Raymond Loewy is 87 on 5 November this year

He’s in excellent form though, speaks quite slowly but with little hesitation, and sports a dashing mauve blazer with a NASA emblem on the top pocket. Plus, of course, a shirt and cuff links monogrammed with RL. Just about the first thing he says is ‘Death doesn’t scare me, but it does bore me terribly’.

Loewy is caustic about a number of current product design trends. ‘I want to see more simplicity, reliability and maintainability and less clever technology. Today design means design for the masses, so quality and quality control are matters that relate to a manufacturer’s sense of social responsibility. The customer isn’t supposed to be a guinea pig. When General Motors recalls half a million vehicles for checking, it makes a big song and dance about its integrity in so doing. It shouldn’t. It should spend less on advertising and more on making sure its components don’t go wrong.

‘The point about microelectronics is it doesn’t mend easily. It has to be failsafe or it’s no good. As for the trend towards “black box” design: I think the reaction against it, the “retro” style, will only last five or ten years or so. After that l think we’ll see a turn back to essentials’.

Though Loewy plays a purely consultative role to the London and Fribourg, France offices of Raymond Loewy International, he speaks enthusiastically of the group’s plans to establish a two man technology reconnaissance unit on America’s West Coast. It is part of his credo to keep in touch with the world by traveling widely: ‘Too many captive designers – ones who work in house – live in small towns, do a nine to five and take boring vacations. I’m not sure that British designers move around enough, or that their minds are open when they do. Look at the simplicity you can learn from Japan, the sense of colour you can acquire from a place like Peru’.

Loewy is sympathetic to the French design profession’s efforts to make up for its late arrival on the international design scene. Some 90 per cent of the staff in his group’s French offices are French born and Loewy feels they are doing excellent work – particularly as the recession has driven some of their local competitors to the wall. Loewy is less charitable towards the Germans: ‘they take the electronic look to the threshold of non acceptance’.

About his remarkable career he can be disarming. ‘In the thirties it was very exciting to be the first to prove that giving something a pleasant appearance made it have a higher commercial value. I remember when Roosevelt came on television to talk about the slump. He told us that all we had to fear was fear itself. I took him at his word, went round telling manufacturers that they had to take design seriously, and never looked back.

‘Then as now, you had to put yourself in the customer’s place. One time, when I was riding on a locomotive and working out how to redesign it, I had to relieve myself: I discovered you had to climb out of the driver’s cab onto the coal tender and use that as a toilet. So I decided the cab needed a proper toilet of its own, otherwise you could lose your life at just the wrong moment when you passed through a low tunnel. I got letters from the railway workers’ union months after that.’

Loewy does tend to be expansive about his clients. He says that though the recent furore over Afghanistan has made his work for the USSR harder to organise, the Kremlin has called to say how it wants to resume collaboration once the whole thing has blown over. (The Russians are particularly pleased about a tractor Loewy designed for them. It ploughs at both ends and has a dual control system which drivers just swivel their chairs round to face when they are at the end of a furrow. That way they don’t have to turn their machines round. Loewy says the effect on agricultural productivity in the USSR has been a significant one.)

He waxes lyrical about his friendship with John Kennedy. ‘The President liked the carpets I designed for his room in the White House. He said “what else can you do?”. I said “well, let’s redesign America”. He thought that was a great idea.’ But, as Loewy recounts, with some sadness, JFK’s plan never came to fruition: ‘He put James Schlesinger on to it. We had a meeting and talked to 9pm. We agreed to draw up an ambitious programme. But two days later Kennedy was dead.’

His instructions to young designers today? ‘Have a sense of humour. Be curious. And meet good looking girls. They’re proof that God exists’.