Streamlining

PurplePrice Mag · October 26, 2026 · 3 min read

Streamlining (from streamline, the line of air or water flowing around a moving body) is the aerodynamic style that dominated American design in the 1930s. Rounded teardrop shapes, long horizontal lines, smooth glossy surfaces, chrome: born to make trains, aircraft and cars go faster, these shapes were applied to everything, even to objects that do not move at all, such as refrigerators, radios and pencil sharpeners.

Designing a way out of the crisis

Streamlining was born during the Great Depression that followed the Wall Street Crash of 1929. American companies, with sales falling, discovered that a product with a new, modern look sold better. A new profession was born: the industrial designer, called on not to invent the mechanism but to give it an attractive form. Compared with Art Deco, from which it derived, the style stripped away ornament and staked everything on pure line, suggesting speed, progress and optimism at a difficult time. The general public discovered it at the 1933–1934 Chicago World's Fair, A Century of Progress.

The great designers

The most famous name is Raymond Loewy, a Frenchman who emigrated to the United States, who received his first commission in 1929, to restyle a Gestetner duplicator, and went on to create the Coldspot refrigerator for Sears, the Pennsylvania Railroad's S1 and T1 locomotives and, in later years, the Lucky Strike pack, the Coca-Cola bottle redesign and the Shell and Exxon logos. His philosophy was summed up in the acronym MAYA, "most advanced, yet acceptable". Norman Bel Geddes, a theatre designer, popularised aerodynamics with his book Horizons (1932) and designed General Motors' Futurama at the 1939 New York World's Fair, a gigantic model of the city of the future with motorways and cars. Henry Dreyfuss designed the locomotive of the 20th Century Limited train (1938), Bell telephones and John Deere tractors, and became a pioneer of ergonomics with his book Designing for People (1955).

Trains, cars and appliances

The symbols of Streamlining were trains. In 1934 the Burlington's Pioneer Zephyr, a diesel trainset in gleaming stainless steel, set speed records and enchanted the public. That same year the Chrysler Airflow was one of the first mass-produced cars designed on aerodynamic principles: too advanced, it was a commercial failure, but it showed the way. Soon the teardrop shape invaded the home: refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, toasters, radios and irons became smooth, rounded and shiny. In Europe the style appeared in the interiors of ocean liners such as the Normandie and in the architecture of Moderne.

Critiques and legacy

Supporters of European "good design", linked to Functionalism, criticised Streamlining as mere commercial cosmetics: aerodynamic shapes on stationary objects, to push people to buy. The debate between style and function would accompany design throughout the century, up to MoMA's Good Design exhibitions. But Streamlining created the figure of the industrial designer as an independent professional and showed that design could be a decisive economic tool. Its soft lines have returned several times, from the cars of the 1950s to the "blobject" design of the 1990s.