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The creation of the Art and Color Section at GM was one of a flu ry of design events in 1927 that indicated profound changes in U.S. in-dustry. That same year, Egmont Arens left his position as managing editor of Creative Arts Magazine to devote himself full time to design-ing a line of Art Deco lamps. His choice was not as strange or trivial as it might at firs seem.In August,Arens’s future employer, Earnest Elmo Calkins, president of Calkins and Holden Advertising,published an in-flu ntial article in Atlantic Monthly,to which he was a regular contrib-utor. “Beauty: The New Business Tool” popularized the growing trend toward professional product design.

Historians usually trace this trend to the influ nce in America of the 1925 Paris Exhibition (officia ly named the Exhibition Internationale

des Arts Décoratifs), and especially to the beautiful glass pavilion ex-hibits by René Lalique. But the influ nce of the Paris Art Deco show was actually part of a larger design awareness in America following World War I. In 1924, a full year before the Paris show, the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science devoted a spe-cial issue to “Scientifi Distribution and Modern Selling.” This widely read collection included a piece by Huger Elliot, head of Philadelphia’s School of Industrial Art.

In what was really a manifesto calling for professionalism in indus-trial design, Elliot described how America’s city planners, architects, textile workers, furniture designers, and silversmiths could “contrib-ute to the daily increase of beauty” and raise the visual standards of Americans.Clearly,Elliot had a democratic vision: “These producers create for the man who cannot afford to buy ‘museum pieces’—the ob-jects which will enable him to create beauty in his home—the furniture and silver with good, simple lines, the rugs and hangings fin in color.

How important is the mission of these designers. How necessary that they be well trained! How imperative that they realize the great part they play in forming the taste of a nation!”²⁸

Calkins’s article appeared three years later, in 1927. It was a con-temporary observation of the transition then taking place in American design sensibilities. “Back in the mauve decade, or the gay nineties,”

Calkins wrote, “when a manufacturer produced a machine . . . it never occurred to him to . . . make his device pleasant to look at as well as ef-fici nt.” Calkins blamed “the persistent influ nce”of the Puritans in cre-ating suspicions about beauty and encouraging the widespread belief that ugliness guaranteed technological integrity. America has changed, Calkins noted: “We enjoyed our era of the triumph of the machine, we acquired wealth, and with wealth education, travel, sophistication, a sense of beauty; and then we began to miss something in our cheap but ugly products. Effici ncy was not enough. The machine did not sat-isfy the soul . . . And thus it came about that beauty, or what one

conceived as beauty, became a factor in the production and marketing of goods.”²⁹

Calkins took specifi aim at Henry Ford as a symbol of the oldfashioned, anti-aesthetic style of manufacturing:

In those days . . .Henry Ford began making his famous car.It was an honest piece of work, a motor car that functioned at an unbe-lievably low cost, thought it did violence to three senses, sight, hearing and smell; but people in those days were unable to forget long enough their wonder that the thing should be to mind the in-trusion of more ugliness into a world that was losing peace and si-lence and the beauty that inheres in old things.And so the Ford car was put out, and chugged along faithfully on all our roads. The public laughed at it and christened it “Lizzie,” but bought it and used it in increasing numbers, and Mr. Ford rested secure in his belief that he had solved one of the major problems of human ex-istence and that there was nothing more to be done.

Months before Sloan created GM’s Art and Color Section and right after Ford Motor Company had closed its Model T assembly line to re-tool for the Model A, Calkins provided his analysis of how Ford lost the battle to psychological obsolescence. Style had become the newest and most important selling feature of the day: “What has happened, apparently, is that many more people have become conscious of style and the style idea has been extended to many more articles . . . People buy a new car, not because the old one is worn out, but because it is no longer modern. It does not satisfy their pride . . . You cannot make people substitute a new car that runs well for an old car that runs well unless it has some added quality.The new quality must be borrowed from the realms of good taste,smarter lines, newer design,better color, more luxurious upholstery, more art, or at least more taste.”

Calkins was an advertising executive with an uncanny marketing sense. Despite his shift to the word “taste” in the fina sentences of this

passage, the keyword for obsolescence of style in this passage is really

“pride.”Manipulationist theories of consumption are not as popular among sociologists today as they once were, but few would deny that psychological obsolescence was a strategy designed to put the con-sumer into a state of anxiety based on the belief that whatever is old is undesirable, dysfunctional, and embarrassing, compared with what is new.

Obsolescence of style—a specialized kind of psychological obsoles-cence—focuses consumer attention on the visual or design features of conspicuously consumed personal items, ranging from cars, cell phones, clothing, hats, jewelry, laptops, lighters, and luggage to PDAs, pens, pocket knives, purses, shoes, sunglasses, and watches. In a con-sumer culture, people size one another up continually to establish status hierarchies based on disposable income and taste. If a person has money to purchase the latest items of self-presentation, he or she seems superficia ly more afflu nt and therefore presumably more so-cially successful, more desirable. From a salesman’s perspective, such people are also the best prospective customers. Because they willingly bought previous models, they are much more likely to purchase newer and newer consumer items.

The other side of this pride and self-presentation equation is shame, or more precisely the anxiety about feeling shamed that creates a state of watchfulness in American consumers for whatever is new. The basic idea in shame-based advertising is that the desire not to lose face can be manipulated to produce conspicuous consumption. This idea is as old as the sumptuary laws that became the basis for the emergent seventeenth-century fashion industry.

Thorstein Veblen firs formulated what would become known as con-spicuous consumption in 1899. It is important to remember, however, that Veblen’s formula concerned the “vicarious” consumption of the leisure class. In Veblen’s model, aristocratic men created wealth, which their wives consumed and displayed. In a society based on

vicarious consumption, the wealth producer is distanced from the shame the consumer (his wife) experiences whenever she appears un-fashionable in society.³⁰But by 1920 Americans were confronted with such an abundance of goods that conspicuous consumption could not remain vicarious. This abundance came about in part because electri-city had begun to replace steam as the driving force of industry. Dur-ing the next quarter of a century, capital productivity would increase 75 percent, while labor productivity would grow at an even faster rate.³¹

The habit of conspicuous consumption in order to either feed one’s pride or reduce one’s shame is frequently referred to as “product ad-diction.” One of the few industrial designers to write openly about America’s product addiction was Frank Lloyd Wright’s most famous apprentice, Victor J. Papanek. Tragically, in the United States product addiction begins early, Papanek observed: “Latent product junkies firs get hooked when they are still babies. Toddlers playing with shoddily made, badly designed toys learn that things exist to be thrown away and replaced by anything ‘new’ . . . There is nothing wrong with chil-dren playing with dollhouses, small cars or baseball cards. What is dis-turbing is the hard-core advertising that uses these toys to encourage children to own, collect, and ultimately risk becoming product addicts.”

Papanek went on to say that while American products once set in-ternational standards for quality, consumers of other nations now avoid them due to shoddy American workmanship, quick obsoles-cence, and poor value. Scant resources and increasing pollution were making the American practice of consumer waste a destructive strategy that was costly to pursue. Papanek also saw immense human costs to force-fed repetitive consumption that were much more difficul to quantify: “Millions of people have substituted the satisfaction of owning things and spending money for any meaningful reward in life.

Most things are not designed for the needs of people, but for the needs of manufacturers to sell to people.”³²

Papanek was writing in 1983. Today, such explicit statements about the costs of product addiction are almost as rare as insights into its mechanics. Analyses of how advertisers and designers collude to ma-nipulate consumers into buying new goods are now very difficul to find even in modern advertising textbooks. This was notthe case in the1920s,when the basic techniques of “manipulationism”were being developed. Back issues of Printer’s Ink and Advertising and Selling abound with practical advice from which many contemporary copy-writers and graphic artists benefi ed. They often included caveats, like the following warning about being too heavy-handed: “Such subjects are delicate ones to attack in an advertisement. If there is a single carelessly chosen word, there is apt to be resentment at the intrusion, the covert insinuation.”³³

This same article from 1928 recounts how silver manufacturers mounted a cooperative advertising campaign to “shame the prospect into buying the latest model of a venerably old product.” American newlyweds’ habit of prizing their heirloom silver was preventing repet-itive consumption, so “it was obviously necessary for us to make the people who cling to the old sets realize just how out of date they are.

Ridicule of the past from which the silver was handed down proved to be the best plan. Any manufacturer of a quality product will tell you that the article that refuses to wear out is a tragedy of business.” An example of how shame was used to market wristwatches can be found in the Elgin series of magazine advertisements: “The objective of this entire campaign was to cause owners of old-style watches to be self-conscious concerning them and to go out and buy the latest type of watch. The copy was by no means afraid to suggest discarding an an-cient Elgin, by the way.”

This self-conscious concern about being out-of-fashion is the key feature of psychological obsolescence. Anything that is unfashionably

dated is psychologically obsolete, but psychological dating can depend on features other than style or design. Businesses that sell an experi-ence, such as watching a movie, rather than an item to be taken home and used have had to push product dating beyond the limits of style-based marketing. This fact became obvious when America’s entertain-ment industries looked for strategies to encourage psychological obsolescence.