Design history publications on French industrial design are few and far between. It almost seems as if there was no French industrial design between Raymond F. Loewy and Philippe Starck, which is not true, of course, and was confirmed at the latest in 2016 by Claire Leymonerie’s publication “Le temps des objets. Une histoire du design industriel en France (1945–1980)”1. Nevertheless, she also noted a remarkable reticence of design history towards this topic. Admittedly, France lacked influential schools such as the Bauhaus in Weimar or the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, whose functionalist approach was critically reflected in the intellectual debates surrounding Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard in France. In addition, there is the persistence of the Arts décoratifs, which were oriented towards interiors, and the barely developed, weak organisational structures of French industrial design. Only French fashion and automobile design attracted international attention, as a glance at the proceedings of the pan-European exhibition Forum Design in Linz (27 June to 5 October 1989) reveals.2 This led the design historian Jocelyn de Noblet and admirer of the “école allemande” as early as 1973 to the exaggeratedly negative statement: “Il n’y a pas de design en France, il n’y que de brillantes individualités isolées [There is no design in France, only isolated brilliant individualists].”3

One of these individualists was the French designer Louis L. Lepoix (1918–1998), who is to be rediscovered at an exhibition and conference in Vienna in December 20234. In 1947, due to a lack of orders from French industry, Lepoix, who was influenced by Raymond Loewy, founded a design studio in Germany, which later became known as FTI Design (short for: Form Technic International) with its headquarters in Baden-Baden (from 1952) and branches in Paris (1956–1983) and Barcelona (1965–1977). He subsequently worked for numerous well-known industrial companies (especially German, but also French and Austrian) and designed their capital goods (trucks, construction machinery, tractors, etc.) but also numerous everyday objects such as automobiles, television sets, lighters, walking aids, furniture, motorbikes and bicycles, parking meters, record players, radios, typewriters and door fittings. His best-known designs include the Bugatti 101 (1952), the Kienzle parking meter (1956), the BIC one-hand lighter (1971), the classic Ortopedia walker forearm support (1977) and the FZR „Side-car“ serving trolley (1979). Many of these designs proved to be extremely durable. The BIC lighter originally designed for Flaminaire is even still in production today. Under the impression of the oil crisis, Lepoix turned to ecological design. For urban mobility, he designed the small car URBANIX (1972) as well as numerous, fantastic-looking wind power and solar systems. At the end of the 1970s, together with numerous independent partners in Lyon, Toulouse, Strasbourg, Munich, Antwerp and Copenhagen, he formed the FTI-design group and took over its central marketing with his in-house graphic design department. However, the agency model did not prove to be economically viable and so the FTI-design group was dissolved again and the office in Paris closed in 1983. From then on, Louis L. Lepoix concentrated on his place of work in Baden-Baden. Until his death in 1998, his designs were awarded more than 300 international design prizes and in 1984, during his lifetime, the FZR serving trolley „Side-car“ was included in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Significantly, however, the database of the French design museums Les Collections Design does not list a single design by Louis. L. Lepoix, even though he was president of the Association française des designers, founded in 1969, and of the Chambre syndicale des esthéticiens industriel from 1970 to 19735.

So it is time to rediscover the international influence of French industrial design using the example of Louis L. Lepoix. The clientele included not only German and French companies but also Austrian companies such as Steyr-Puch and Jenbacher. We are looking for contributions that contextualise the work of Louis L. Lepoix. The speakers at the conference will be supported in their research by the Lepoix Archive in Baden-Baden and will have access to the archive (digital and analogue). The conference will take place on 8 December 2023 in Vienna. The organiser of the conference is designaustria (https://www.designaustria.at). Cooperation partners are the Society for Design History (https://www.gfdg.org) and the Lepoix Archive (https://www.lepoix-archiv.com). From 7 December 2023 to 11 February 2024, designaustria will present the special exhibition „Louis Lucien LEPOIX. With the Citybus to the Wind Turbine“.

To participate in the Call for Papers for the conference, please submit an abstract in German or English (400 to 500 words) and a vita (max. 200 words) via the website https://www.lepoix.info. Here you will also find a lot of other information about the Louis L. Lepoix as well as the exhibition and conference in Vienna.

Deadline for submission is 31 August 2023.

Submission Guide:

- The conference will be held in German and English
- By submitting your abstract you guarantee that you have the right to present and submit the content
- The presentation will last 20 minutes plus 10 minutes for discussion
- Each abstract will be reviewed by at least four peer reviewers. The reviewing will be done on an anonymous basis
- Submitters will receive a 50 percent discount on the conference fee
- The author(s) of the accepted paper must register for the conference by 15 October 2023
- The organiser will check whether it is possible to cover the travel costs from Germany, France and Austria in the amount of a second-class train journey and an overnight stay in Vienna

Notes:
1 Leymonerie, Claire: Le temps des objets. Une histoire du design industriel en France (1945–1980), St.-Etienne 2022 (First Edition 2016).
2 Gsöllpointner, Helmuth, Angela Hareiter and Laurids Ortner (eds.): Design ist unsichtbar, Vienna 1981.
3 Interestingly, de Noblet also ignored the work and influence of Raymond Loewy, whom he rejected as a stylist. Leymonerie. pp. 247–248.
4 Cf. on the work of Louis L. Lepoix Leymonerie, p. 278 and Louis L. Lepoix and Erika Kübler: 50 Jahre technische Ästhetik / 50 ans d'Esthétique Technique: Louis L. Lepoix Industrie Designer, Lepoix System, Baden-Baden 2003.
5 The BIC one-hand lighter can be found, but there is no indication that the design adopted by Flaminaire originally came from Lepoix. https://www.lescollectionsdesign.fr/ (18.05.2023); Lepoix/Kübler, pp. 274–275.