Vermelho da vitória: o design de embalagens do batom nos EUA do período entre guerras

Abstract

Since Antiquity there’s been a condemnation of make-up, decorative devices and of the ephemeris. This phenomenon is related to the identification of women with certain products, such as the lipstick. Design research allied to the concepts of Material Culture can allows us to understand how artifacts fit into certain symbolic systems, such as gender. In this research, lipstick will be taken as a product of design, which emerged as an industrial artifact at the end of World War I, and that is a part of a sociocultural context that obeys the criteria of the time in which it was produced, that is, it will be understood as a representation of the complete series of objects to which the term refers and that has changed throughout History. The changes in the primary packaging design of this artifact, during the period between wars, reflect and reinforce gender norms and feminine identity speeches, according to Attfield (2000). Then, this study proposes to answer the following question: how was packing design of lipsticks influenced by the change in the social role of women during the interwar period, considering it’s variables for being an artifact of material culture? It was established that the general objective of this project is to analyze the meanings attributed to the primary packaging design of lipsticks made in the United States of America, between the beginning of World War I and the end of World War II, anchored by an adaptation of Gui Bonsiepe’s (1984 , p.34 apud LORGUS, ODEBRECHT, 2011, page 51) methodology. In this sense, an analysis corpus composed of nine lipsticks, commercialized and produced by the pioneering brands, was chosen: Coty, Elizabeth Arden, Helena Rubinstein, Max Factor and Revlon. The data analysis went through three moments: a morphological analysis, a material culture analysis and the discussion of the results found, which indicate the presence of three meanings: seduction, affirmation and confrontation. But before carrying out the analysis procedures, it was necessary to define the variables of lipstick’s primary packaging design as industrial and material culture artifact, that being: visual, material, temporal and signs. Thus, the relevance of this research can be resumed to the inauguration of an academic discussion on this topic, unprecedented in Brazil, and the proposal of a discussion on lipstick and their signs of female behavior, through the lens of design, more specifically, of packaging design.