STEPFORD
LIVES(continued)
i
enjoy giving a Tupperware party in my home. It gives me a chance to talk
to my friends. But really, Tupperware is a homemaker's dream, you save
time and money, because your food keeps longer.
WHERE THE HELL WAS THE DESIGN?
Designers of the time, of course, did their damnedest to get good-looking products into our houses, to no avail. A look into any textbook of industrial design will show, during the suburban decades of the past, any number of supposedly "successful" modernist designs, from the countless chairs of the Eamses to the Castiglionis' Arco lamp to the Vignelli plates. But it didn't seem to take, at least not on a lowest common denominator scale.
Suburbanites "completely rejected modernism," designer Bruce Hannah points out. "They just didn't want that stuff. It had nothing to do with their lifestyle." What did have to do with their lifestyle? Well, for one thing… leftovers.
THE DESIGN THAT KEPT IT'S CONTENT FRESH FOR YEARS
One product design that made a profound social, if not aesthetic, difference in suburbia was developed decades before Magistretti's Eclisse lamp had a chance to shed light on anything. And the task of living that this object was designed to accomplish was… to keep Monday's turkey potpie fresh until Thursday. It was called Tupperware.
Despite the fact that some of the earliest adopters of the indestructible containers were insane asylums, Tupperware found itself both at the MoMA and a prime position in American culture.
I bought the lawn in six-foot rolls. It's eay to handle. I prepare the ground and my wife and son helped roll out the grass. In one day you have a front yard.
The success of Tupperware as a product
may have been helped along by the anti-pedestrian layout of the suburbs;
in an environment not laid out for walking, people will not run into
each other naturally. No one strolls down to the store to pick op a
quart of milk. Earl S. Tupper and his ingenious marketing ploy took
up the social slack, by offering bored and isolated housewives the opportunity
to have contact with others in the quasi-social capacity of a Tupperware
Party.
With top sales prizes like tropical vacations and invitations to (purportedly Hefner-esque) bashes thrown at Tupper's mansion, Tupperware parties spread like a socioeconomic Melissa Virus. It was like a cult, but with potato salad. Who could have foreseen such a powerful and sorely needed role being played by such a mundane object? Tupperware was huge.
Fast forward to the year 2000, times have changed. Housewives are going extinct like pandas, and our homes have seen the addition of a second television with a keyboard and a small device attached to a tether, apparently for exercises, which lets you see everything from pornography to virtual auctions to a letter from your friend in Oslo. That ugly stuff we used to sit on in the '50s, '60s, and '70s is gone, or most of it. But we've still got plenty of leftovers in the 'fridge. I've still got my Tupperware. Of course the suburbs are still there, too. I'll drive through to see mom and pop once in a while, to bring them their second TV, which comes in five fruit flavors. They're waiting for me in the driveway as I pull up, and the crunch of gravel under my tires kind of sounds like… alien laughter. But I keep that part to myself.
With top sales prizes like tropical vacations and invitations to (purportedly Hefner-esque) bashes thrown at Tupper's mansion, Tupperware parties spread like a socioeconomic Melissa Virus. It was like a cult, but with potato salad. Who could have foreseen such a powerful and sorely needed role being played by such a mundane object? Tupperware was huge.
Fast forward to the year 2000, times have changed. Housewives are going extinct like pandas, and our homes have seen the addition of a second television with a keyboard and a small device attached to a tether, apparently for exercises, which lets you see everything from pornography to virtual auctions to a letter from your friend in Oslo. That ugly stuff we used to sit on in the '50s, '60s, and '70s is gone, or most of it. But we've still got plenty of leftovers in the 'fridge. I've still got my Tupperware. Of course the suburbs are still there, too. I'll drive through to see mom and pop once in a while, to bring them their second TV, which comes in five fruit flavors. They're waiting for me in the driveway as I pull up, and the crunch of gravel under my tires kind of sounds like… alien laughter. But I keep that part to myself.
Copyright © 2004 Totem Media, Inc.