The 1950s has been characterized as the golden years of the Finnish design. The purpose of my paper is to examine how the appreciated modernist industrial design became part of the daily life of Finnish consumers in the form of tableware. How did the taste of consumers develope and how ...
(Show more)The 1950s has been characterized as the golden years of the Finnish design. The purpose of my paper is to examine how the appreciated modernist industrial design became part of the daily life of Finnish consumers in the form of tableware. How did the taste of consumers develope and how it was moulded, and what this meant in terms of gender, class and age?
The breakthrough of the modern form language into Finnish households cannot be taken for granted. Significant resistance was met. The functionalist puritanism of the designers claimed plain and simple, monochrome objects with no frills or decorations. Frequently, the manufacturers had different opinions. The concept and practice of ‘everydayness’ of the designers and the consumers did not overlap. Plain and grey was not always preferred by the consumers, even though it also meant more economic production and lower prices.
The gender aspect on the dynamics of the processes of design, marketing and consuming is interesting. Firstly, many of the top designers were male and the consumers predominantly female. The Finnish fields of industrial design in ceramics and glass were gendered: men were designing, women were decorating. Furthermore, masculine and feminine attributes can be given to the forms of design themselves. Potentially, the taste considered ‘kitsch’ or ‘bad taste’ can be interpreted in terms of femininity. For example a heated discussion around Olga Osol’s decorative Myrna tableware and Kaj Franck’s “revolutionary” Kilta, both products of the Arabia Company, offers a fruitful example.
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