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Belle Kogan (1902–2000) was a Russian-American industrial designer and is regarded as the first prominent female in the profession in the United States (Godmother of Industrial Design) as well as one of the founders of the profession itself. - IDSA Design History Section - Belle Kogan In 1994, she was recognized as a fellow of both the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) and Industrial Designers Institute (IDI).
In 1920, she was forced to leave while in her first semester at Pratt to manage her father's jewelry store.Rice, "Belle Kogan Remembers" (1994): 39. During this time, she also attended the Art Students League in Manhattan.
In 1929, she was employed by the Quaker Silver Company, which trained her as a silver designer at Rhode Island School of Design and the Germany Art School in Pforzheim. In the summer of 1929, Quaker paid for Kogan to take a course at New York University that according to Kogan:
She was employed by the Quaker Silver Co. in late 1929 through early 1930, before leaving for Kunstgewerbe Shule Germany where she took art classes.
In July 1932, she opened her own design studio, Belle Kogan Associates (BKA), at 185 Madison Avenue in New York City with a retainer from Quaker and started designing houseware products for Bausch & Lomb, Bakelite Corp, Dow Chemical Company, Federal Glass, Haviland & Co., Libbey Glass, Maryland Plastics, Red Wing Pottery, Reed & Barton, Towle Manufacturing Co., and US Glass. Belle also was hired to make designs for Zippo Manufacturing in 1938. Five years later, she traveled throughout Europe to study trends in Scandinavian design and by 1939 found herself at the forefront of modern design in the United States.
She was one of the first industrial designers to experiment with plastics. Her early experimentation included celluloid toilet sets and clocks, a chrome-plated toaster with a plastic base, and Bakelite jewelry.Babbitt, "As a Woman Sees Design" (1935). She said:
In plastics the manufacturer has a material with tremendous possibilities. It is still in the active process of growth and development, but is rapidly gaining its stride. It is a material which no manufacturer, if he be alert and watchful of his competition, can afford to overlook. Radios, clocks, dishes, jewelry—all being developed in plastics today—have enormous significance."As a Woman Sees Design: An Interview with Belle Kogan," Modern Plastics, vol. 13, no.4 (December 1935): 16-17, 49, 51.Kogan believed that "good design should keep the consumer happy and the manufacturer in the black."Belle Kogan Associates brochure In an interview Kogan said, "Today there is probably no one group more keenly alive to the caprices and demands of the buying public as industrial designers. The designer's viewpoint, therefore, is a valuable one from the basis of manufacture as well as from the basis of merchandising and selling. It is a broad conception of the consumers' desire."
Kogan also provided designs for Ebeling & Reiss, Federal Glass Co., Red Wing Pottery and Reed & Barton. She designed melamine dinnerware for the Boonton Modelling Co. where she worked for a number of years. - Belle Kogan papers, 1920-1986 - Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution She employed a full-time staff a staff of three women designers by 1939.Jane Corby, "Smart Girls," Brooklyn Eagle (26 July 1939). Kogan was the focus of the 1946 one-woman show at the Philadelphia Art Alliance. By this time, she was considered to be the 'only woman freelance silverware designer'. Belle Kogan would continue to produce designs in America until 1970.
Women designers took a practical approach to the design of housewares. Kogan was very much at the forefront of this. She remarked that Continuing Kogan said,
The women of today those who belong to the middle classes (and these are the women who comprise the greatest group of consumers) want attractive things, things which are smart and things which are new. They are still interested in keeping up with the ‘Joneses.’ Items, to be readily acceptable, cannot, however, be too extreme in design. Such items do not fit into the average home, decorated as it is, with objects which are not too modern or severe in color or form.
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