tupperware

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DSDN 171: RESEARCH PAPER

TUPPERWARE

The economic boom and promotion of consumer consumption in 1950s America resulted in the

myth of a post-war society of endless material abundance and relaxed social divisions of class. In

this vision of the ‘American Dream’, a suburban home full of the latest appliances was achievable

for all American families. Anything seemed possible in this era of optimism and through their

consumption of material goods, many Americans bought into this utopian promise. Because many

consumer products in Post-World War Two America were new technologies without stylistic

precedent, an eagerness to adapt wartime technologies and promote the ‘American Dream’ in this

Cold War era allowed mid-century Modernism to enter everyday life through these new products.

Tupperware is a consumer product which exemplifies the commodities which emerged in these

conditions. Created in the mid-1940s, Tupperware became incredibly popular in American

households in the 1950s. The result of experimentation with plastics during the war, Tupperware

was a part of establishing a consumer market for the post-war plastics industry. Because

Tupperware was a new domestic commodity which did not fit easily into the traditional categories

of homewares and furnishings, it was well suited to adopt a fresh aesthetic, that of mid-century

Modernism. Tupperware products also became a part of the proliferation of domestic imagery

centered around the American kitchen, which reflected the notion of consumer choice and

superior quality of life which was so key to the American psyche in the Cold War period.

Tupperware was designed by Earl S. Tupper, the owner of a small plastics factory, and was

released in 1946. The Tupperware range comprises of plastic containers for food storage, many of

which feature Tupperware’s trademark ‘Tupper seal’, an air and liquid-tight flexible cover.

Tupperware products are mass-produced, constructed through injection, compression, and blow-

moulding techniques. The cornerstone of Tupperware’s product line was the Wonder Bowl, a

tapered bowl, made, like most Tupperware products, from polyethylene. Flexible and durable,

polyethylene allowed Tupperware products to be produced in a variety of pastel colours. The

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smooth surface and unornamented forms of Tupperware products speak of how Tupperware’s

forms are dictated by its functions.

Tupperware played a large role in changing the prewar and wartime public perception of plastics.

It was not until 1870 that plastic came into use as a material, in a form known as celluloid, which

was then used in items such as billiard balls as a cheap and versatile imitation of more expensive

and rare materials, for example, ivory and tortoise shell. By the late 1920s, Bakelite, a hard, heat-

resistant plastic was being used for automobile parts, radio tubes, pipe stems, costume jewelry,

plastic dishes, and other more industrial uses1. During the Second World War public faith in

plastics was shaken due to the impact of the war on plastics manufacturing. This does not reflect

the significant developments in the plastics industry during the war. In wartime America, plastics

were produced for both consumer items and the military, with significant differences in quality

between the two. As historian Jeffrey Meikle says in an interview about the evolution of plastics,

“there's a real dichotomy with wartime plastics: you've got the high-tech stuff being used in the

war effort, and the less impressive stuff available to consumers.”2 The military benefited from

innovations such as clear acrylic, which was used for bomber and fighter plane cockpits. At the

same time, the quality of consumer plastics was extremely low due to wartime restrictions. Plastic

shower curtains disintegrated, baby baths cracked, split and peeled, and buttons melted.

“Indiscriminate mass production and the widespread misapplication of materials” resulted in “a

consumer public that commonly encountered disintegrating, combustible, and odorous plastic

products.”3

Consumer confidence in plastic goods was low and it was this negative public image which

Tupperware needed to overcome, and in doing so, Tupperware helped to improve the image of the

plastics industry as a whole. In order to transform the public’s perception of plastics, consumer

1  Jeffrey  Meikle,  “One  word…  Plastics”,  PBS:  American  Experience:  Tupperware!,  http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/tupperware/sfeature/sf_plastics.html.    2  ibid.  3  Alison  J.  Clarke,  The  Promise  of  Plastic  in  1950s  America  (Washington  &  London:  Smithsonian  Institution  Press,  1999),  41.  

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products needed to utilise the new material in appropriate ways, a task which was aided by the

post-war availability of wartime developments for the consumer market. Wartime industries, such

as the plastics industry were eager to secure a consumer market so that their new technologies

could be reapplied to peacetime purposes and remain in use. During World War Two, DuPont, an

American chemical company specialising in plastics, had developed ‘polyethylene’ which was used

for insulation purposes in small precision instruments, radar and radio equipment, particularly in

industrial and aviation contexts.4 After the war, DuPont distributed blocks of polyethylene to

plastics manufacturers such as Tupper, hoping they could invent new peacetime uses for it. From

this, Tupper produced his first Wonder Bowl.

Thus, from Tupperware’s very beginnings, it is a product which addresses the notion of

appropriate application of a material. Rather than wartime use of consumer plastics which were

used as cheap substitutes for other materials, Tupperware’s development starts with the material,

polyethylene, and exploits its inherent qualities. This is a continuation of the approach to

industrial design employed by the Bauhaus in the late 1920s, where the design process begins with

experimentation with industrial materials and processes rather than working from the designer’s

conception of what the product should be. What results is objects which celebrate their function

and their materials. From its very beginnings, Tupperware embraced plastic as a modern material

in its own right. The use of polyethylene adds to the design’s functionality, rather than the choice

of material detracting from its function, as was the case with melting buttons and disintegrating

shower curtains.

The use of polyethylene is so important to Tupperware’s strength as a product that early

advertisements and reviews of Tupperware products regularly emphasise polyethylene’s qualities.

Alison J. Clarke, a design historian, writes:

As early as 1946, Bakelite Review featured the tumblers and bowls of Tupper Plastics Incorporated as unique plastic items resistant to cracks, chips and peeling “even under the most severe strain.”

4  Modern  plastics  encyclopedia  (Bristol,  Conn.:  Society  of  the  Plastics  Industry,  1948),  165.  

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Beneath the slogan “For Lasting Service!” the housewares appeared as the fortuitous consequence of wartime technology: durable, reliable, practical and serviceable.5

Earl Tupper had such great faith in the potential of polyethylene that he called it “Poly-T: material

of the future”. He emphasised the functional potential that polyethylene homewares had to

improve the quality of life of American families, frequently encouraging the image of “fortuitous

consequence” that Alison Clarke describes. In a 1949 memo to his advertising manager, Tupper

wrote:

With the end of the war [polyethylene] was another young veteran that had accelerated from childhood to a fighting job… It had done its job well but like all young vets returning home from the wars it had never had civilian adult experience.6

However praise of Tupperware products was not limited to the functionality of its materials. In

1956, curators at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York included Tupperware

products in an exhibition of outstanding twentieth-century design. In the exhibition catalogue it

was praised for being “uncluttered” and for its “carefully considered shapes… marvelously free of

that vulgarity which characterises so much household equipment.”7 Indeed, their unornamented

silhouettes are one reason Tupperware products can be considered thoroughly Modern objects as

emphasised in MoMA’s arrangement of the Tupperware objects it chose to exhibit (fig. 1).

In this narrative of design history, Tupperware is a continuation of the Modern Movement which

at this time was beginning to influence American design. Modernist design was influenced by the

socially motivated ideologies of design reformers such as William Morris and A. W. N. Pugin in

19th-century Britain. Although they favoured handcraftsmanship over industrial production, their

production of “holistically conceived, well-designed and executed objects for everyday use.”8 was

united with industrial production and the concept of universality and standardisation as a tool for

improving quality of life by the Bauhaus in 1920s Germany, resulting in an ‘aesthetically pure’ style

which eliminated superfluous ornament and placed an emphasis on functional efficiency. The

5  Alison  J.  Clarke,  The  Promise  of  Plastic,  38.  6  Tupper  to  John  C.  Healy  (advertising  manager),  interoffice  memo,  14  September  1949.  7  Arthur  Drexler  and  Greta  Daniels,  eds.,  Introduction  to  Twentieth  Century  Design  (New  York:  Museum  of  Modern  Art,  1959),  75  8  Charlotte  and  Peter  Fiell,  Design  of  the  20th  Century  (Taschen,  1999),  476  

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Modern movement had begun to have an international influence and consumer products such as

Tupperware were easily influenced by this rational approach to design due to their lack of stylistic

precedent. Mass produced refrigerators became available in American stores in 1919 and between

1945 and 1949 20 million refrigerators were purchased. Tupperware was the first product to match

the new storage needs of the refrigerator unlike the porcelain or even “extra heavy pure processed

silk” food storage options which preceded it.9 It is through new and innovative domestic products

such as Tupperware that the Modernist style began to enter the American home.

The Modern aesthetic was a great selling point for the Tupperware range. In 1947, Tupperware

was featured in House Beautiful as “Fine Art for 39 Cents.” Their reputation for being ‘works of

art’ was encouraged by Tupperware’s marketing. In a 1960s video advertisement, Tupperware

containers are shown a grid composition (fig. 2) akin to those of the De Stijl artist, Piet Mondrian

(fig. 3).“The bowls were also praised for their “fingering qualities of jade” and likened to the

smoothness and iridescence of alabaster and mother-of-pearl while at the same time receiving

acclaim for their “truth to materials”.10 This emphasis on materials is another reason that

Tupperware can be classified as Modern. In the absence of ornamentation, the Modern movement

placed great emphasis on the material qualities and quality of craft of its designs, as can be seen in

the use of high quality materials such as marble in the Modernist architecture of Mies van der

Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion (fig. 4).

In addition to their aesthetic appeal, Tupperware products were functional utilitarian items. The

Wonder Bowl was acclaimed for its “fitness of purpose” and it is this meticulous consideration of

the product’s function which also places it firmly in the Modern Style. Its strong relationship

between its function and form is the result of Earl Tupper’s ambitions for his products as items

which, through their ease of use, would improve the standard of living of the housewives who used

them. Not only would they save time, but they also encouraged thrift, reducing food waste by

9  Sears,  Roebuck  and  Co.,  catalog  (n.p.:  Sears,  Roebuck  and  Co.,  1941  –  42),  886  10  Alison  J.  Clarke,  The  Promise  of  Plastic,  42.  

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enabling their users to preserve leftovers thanks to the airtight ‘Tupper-seal’.11 The list of

Tupperware’s benefits was long – in addition to being liquid and air-tight they were vermin and

insect proof, unspillable, unbreakable, unscented and lightweight. They could be used for mixing,

storing and serving, were easy to clean and their versatility and durability allowed them to be

promoted as a ‘household investment’. The money that Tupperware products could save a family

through the reduction of waste could then be used to purchase the other material luxuries newly

accessible in boomtime America such as cars and televisions.

This promise of a life made easier through the purchase of domestic products was part of a greater

shaping of consumer consumption patterns. “The message from advertisers was that every aspect

of life could be improved with a purchase -- the drive to work, chores around the house, even a

weekend barbeque.”12 The Cold War began in 1945, a year before Tupperware was introduced to

American consumers in 1946. The Cold War era saw the United States and the Soviet Union

engage in a military stand-off, instead competing in a battle of ideologies, played out through

economic and cultural competition. America was eager to promote the benefits of its capitalist

society in contrast to the Soviet Union’s communism and America’s economic boom in this post-

World War Two period provided them with great opportunity to do so.

In this new era of prosperity, rapidly growing young families were being housed by newly

developed suburbs such as Levittown, New York.13 The standard of living in America increased

markedly fueled by the consumer consumption of families buying into the “American Dream”.

Mass consumption “became a new vehicle for delivering the traditional American promises of

democracy & egalitarianism.”14 This promotion of the American way of life proved effective.

European economies were struggling after being devastated during World War Two and Jean

Dubertret, a Frenchman, commented on his first visit to the United States in 1953:

11  Alison  J.  Clarke,  The  Promise  of  Plastic,  38.  12  American  Experience:  Tupperware!  (PBS,  2003)  13  People’s  Century:  Boomtime  (PBS  1998)  14  Lizabeth  Cohen,  Getting  and  Spending:  European  and  American  Consumption  in  the  Twentieth  Century  (Cambridge:  Cambridge  University  Press,  1998),  112.  

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We were struck by the fact that everyone could have a car, a house, and a garden. [Americans] had everything: television, freezer, refrigerator, the lot. Everything. [We] were astonished to find these things available to everybody.15

Indeed, American post-war consumption of material goods was so high that during this economic

boom the number of television sets in American homes rose from one million to 160 million

between 1949 and 1959. However this vision of “The Good Life” accessible to all Americans did

not come about without heavy promotion in the form of visual propaganda centered around the

nuclear family and domestic life.

Tupperware was heavily implicated in developing and cultivating these images which promised

private luxury as a foil to the communist ideologies of Soviet Russia. The individual benefits

offered to Americans through capitalism are promoted in Norman Rockwell’s 1943 painting,

Freedom From Want (fig. 5) and in 1958 the famous “Kitchen Debate” took place between Richard

Nixon and the Soviet Premier in which Nixon boasted about the sophistication of American

domestic products saying “would it not be better to compete in the relative merit of washing

machines than in the strength of rockets?”. Tupperware’s endorsement of capitalist society and

understanding of American aspiration is evident in the names of its product lines, such as the

“Millionaire Line”. Tupperware advertisements of the time play to this promise of suburban utopia

for young families of the new America, which depict young couples and families enjoying the

benefits of Tupperware in their modern kitchens (fig. 6) & (fig. 7). It’s prowess as a domestic

product was emphasised and Tupperware was “seen to have a rightful place in the respectable

home”16.

The numerous competitions in which Tupperware was a winning product, such as the ‘Modern

Plastics Competition’ of 1948, and the 50 pages devoted to “plastics in postwar life” in the

magazine, House Beautiful, seemed to act as directions as to which products to buy in order to

fulfill the “intricacies of modern homemaking”.17 Tupperware was even prominently featured in

15  People’s  Century:  Boomtime  (PBS  1998)  16  Alison  J.  Clarke,  The  Promise  of  Plastic,  45.  17  Ibid.  

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Disney’s home of the future, Tomorrowland.18 Needless to say, Tupperware was consistently

promoted as a necessary item for the modern American home.

Tupperware’s advertisements implied that for an affordable price ‘The Good Life’ was available to

all American consumers. In 1947, a three piece Wonder Bowl set was priced at $1.39, less than the

price of a couple of pounds of bacon. Thus, in what seemed like an age of endless prosperity,

Tupperware was an affirmation to all American households that upward social mobility and the

‘American Dream’ was within their reach, encapsulated in the advice of General Motors sales

consultant, Kenneth McFarland, to Tupperware dealers to “sell Tupperware with your left hand

and sell America with your right hand.”19

In post-World War Two America, “the good purchaser devoted to 'more, newer and better' was

the good citizen.”20 This mass consumption in a booming capitalist society was encouraged by a

proliferation of visual images promoting the superiority of the ‘American way of life’, centered

around the domestic, in particular the suburban kitchen. Tupperware was intimately involved in

cultivating this image which was upheld as a symbol of the greater cultural superiority of American

life and America’s capitalist society over that of communist Soviet Russia. Tupperware, with its

Modern aesthetic, easily fit into this role of representing the private luxury available to all

Americans, an aesthetic which was dictated by its emphasis on functionality and its lack of stylistic

precedent. Tupperware products were also a part of encouraging the economic abundance of the

post-war era through its reappropriation of the wartime plastics industry, providing a consumer

market for an industry that was very much a product of World War Two. Tupperware is both a

product of its time - post-war industry and Cold War ideologies, and a timeless product - its

Modern aesthetic reflecting the Modern Movement’s aims for universal design transcendent of the

boundaries of national and historical style.

18  American  Experience:  Tupperware!  (PBS,  2003)  19  Ibid.  20  Lizabeth  Cohen,  Getting  and  Spending,  112.  

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APPENDIX OF IMAGES

Fig. 1 Tupperware containers and implements on display at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1956 © 1999 The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Fig. 2 Still from a Tupperware commercial, 1960 The Prelinger Film Archives. “Tupperware Commercial #2”. http://www.archive.org/details/tupperware_2 (accessed October 20, 2009)

Fig. 3 Piet, Mondrian. Composition in red, blue and yellow. 1930

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Fig. 4 Mies van der Rohe. Barcelona Pavilion. 1928

Fig. 5 Norman Rockwell. Freedom From Want. 1943

Fig. 6 Tupperware promotional image, c. 1946 Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Delaware

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Fig. 7 Image from Tupperware Catalogue, 1958 Tupperware Home Parties, Inc., Orlando Florida

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Meikle, Jeffrey. One word... Plastics. PBS: American Experience: Tupperware!, 12 Nov. 2003. (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/tupperware/sfeature/sf_plastics.html) American Experience: Tupperware!. PBS, 2003. Clarke, Alison J. The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999. Cohen, Lizabeth. Getting and Spending: European and American Consumption in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Susan Strasser and Charles McGovern. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Fiell, Charlotte and Peter Fiell. Design of the 20th Century. Edited by Susanne Husemann. Taschen, 1999. Icons of Design: The 20th Century. Edited by Volker Albus, Reyer Kras, and Jonathan M. Woodham. Prestel, 2000. Modern Plastics Encyclopedia. Bristol, CT: Society of the Plastics Industry, 1948. The Prelinger Film Archives. Tupperware Commercial #2 c. 1960s.

(http://www.archive.org/details/tupperware_2) People’s Century: Boomtime. PBS, 1998.