MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

In 1939, Donald Deskey prepared a drawing for a Perfume Industries Pavilion for the New York World’s Fair. The drawing is remarkable for many reasons, one of which is that its style is decidedly outside of Deskey’s personal idiom, with its bubbling fountain, elaborate arcade, and luxurious draperies. The drawing was never published, and very little is known about it; the building designed by Deskey was never built. Nevertheless,the drawing embodies what was believed to be the ideal of feminine beauty in the 1930s: an uneasy construct of largely unattainable beauty and glamour, gendered biases, and commercial imperative.

The America of the 1930s was scarred by the Depression, staggering unemployment, and insidious poverty. When the New York World’s Fair 1939 was announced in 1935, New Deal work programs were providing bare subsistence to countless families, and the Dust Bowl had become part of the regular vocabulary. As much as the Fair was intended as a display of American modernity, it was first and foremost conceived as an engine of economic recovery, a consumer-driven affair largely sponsored by industry. The Fair’s success depended on widespread attendance. The power held by women as consumers, who were responsible for as much as eighty-five percent of the purchases in the home, was not lost on the Fair’s organizers. Nor was the popular draw of movies and celebrity culture, and the attraction of Hollywood escapism.

This paper analyzes Deskey’s drawing through the lens of the patriarchal culture and gendered assumptions that existed in America in the 1930s. This gender-based analysis reveals that the drawing was the product of a male-dominated culture in which women were perceived as dependent (if not subservient). The drawing was likely made to attract corporate sponsorship by objectifying an idealized concept of beauty, in the hope of appealing to female consumers.