COMPAGNIE DE L’ESTHETHIQUE INDUSTRIELLE

In 1952 Loewy founded a separate firm in postwar France, a difficult setting for consultant industrial design because of Europe’s relatively closed markets and hostility to American design’s greater emphasis on profitability. Many Europeans saw design much more as an artistic and social activity than as a commercial one. The traditions of the Arts and Crafts movement, the Bauhaus, and the postwar German design school at Ulm all emphasized improving society more than selling products. The CEI’s designs had a European modernist sensibility and were more avant-garde than those of the Loewy offices in America. Loewy’s Paris operation played an important role in promoting the spread of American-style industrial design and the culture of consumption to postwar Europe.