THE BACK PAGE
The Sheer Look
Modernism and Major Appliances
By Sandy McLendon
They descended on America’s print media in the winter of 1956. They were tall, preternaturally elegant women, making a mysterious sign with their forearms and hands, looking for all the world like high priestesses of a cult. They were product models for the Sheer Look, ad-speak for a new direction in major appliance styling originated by Frigidaire that is still influential today.
Before the arrival of the Sheer Look, appliances were rounded at the edges and heavily laden with mock-heraldic emblems in chrome, completely at odds with the modernist aesthetic of the midcentury years. Vintage photos of Frank Lloyd Wright and Case Study houses clearly show how the bulbous appliances compromised the sleekness of early-1950s kitchen designs.
Frigidaire had long been a leader in appliance styling; the look it introduced in its 1948 models was created by Raymond Loewy. His designs hadn’t eliminated curves from Frigidaire’s appliances, but they had predicted the advent of the radically pared-down aesthetic in their relative simplicity. The next step for the company was the Sheer Look, designed in-house by a team headed by Leroy Kiefer, who had studied architecture at the University of Michigan. For the first time, major appliances had the same Miesian simplicity and elegance as high-end residential architecture of the day. The new style was not solely about outward appearances, however. The curvaceous look of older appliances had come at a high cost: the deeply-drawn dies needed to stamp their rounded fronts and tops and the chrome plating on their enormous emblems were expensive. In addition, chromium was sourced largely from politically sensitive regions, like the Soviet Union and Rhodesia. The cabinets of Sheer Look appliances were much cheaper to produce: their right angles were formed with shallower dies, and slender bands of stainless steel sufficed as ornamentation. Frigidaire went so far as to jettison the jukebox-like pushbuttons and dials on the control consoles of its washers and dryers in favor of the “Control Tower,” a minimalist pod on a stalk.
Owned at the time by General Motors, Frigidaire employed a marketing strategy borrowed from GM’s 1948 introduction of tailfins on Cadillacs: the automobile company tried new styling directions on its “prestige” brands first, so that consumers would see the new looks as desirable. The “T-square tight” styling of the Sheer Look was available initially only on more expensive Frigidaire models; lesser lines got rounded cabinets carried over from previous years, securing the cachet of the Sheer Look and completing the amortization of old dies.
The Sheer Look was a resounding success — with one exception: the Control Tower, which lasted one year only. By 1958, the Sheer Look laundry appliances had regained the complex control consoles, complete with built-in fluorescent lighting on the most expensive ones that consumers had come to associate with quality.
Not to be outdone on either stylishness or manufacturing efficiencies, other brands rushed to square off their own product lines; General Electric even introduced squared-off styling the same year as Frigidaire. By 1960, the Sheer Look had taken over the entire industry and rounded appliances looked dated. Sheer Look clones weren’t always as handsome as the originals; what was Miesian on Frigidaires could be banal on other makes. While Frigidaire stopped using the term “Sheer Look” in its advertising after 1959, for better or worse, the Sheer Look, as an industry-wide aesthetic, persists today.
Vintage Sheer Look appliances are the ne plus ultra of appliance collectors; Control Tower washers and dryers are among the most rare, expensive and desirable machines to be found. While parts and service are not easy to come by, Sheer Look owners gladly mount extensive searches for obsolete parts and learn how to perform their own repairs. They’ve even been known to pose for photographs with their treasures, making the Sheer Look sign.
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