Dryden, Helen

Author: 
Carroll Gantz
Birth/Death Age: 
1887-1981
Helen Dryden

U.S. artist and industrial designer born in Baltimore with unusual artistic ability, designing and selling clothes for paper dolls that appeared in newspaper fashion sections. She trained in landscape painting under Hugh Breckenridge, and studied briefly at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, but moved to New York and began her career in fashion design illustration at Vogue magazine in 1909. By 1913 she was designing Vogue’s magazine covers, and by 1914, she was designing costumes for shows on Broadway into the 1920s. She left Vogue in 1922, and In the late 1920s, she became art director for the Dura Company in Ohio, designing chrome decorative objects, textiles and glassware. Dryden was at the time acclaimed as “the highest paid woman artist.” She was reportedly paid $100,000 annually by Studebaker 1934-1937 as a stylist, and credited in its ads as “the stylist” of the 1937 Studebaker President. Raymond Loewy, who was engaged by Studebaker as exterior body design consultant for the same model, received no credit (other than that claimed by himself). Soon, however, Loewy became primary stylist for Studebaker until its demise in 1963.

Sources: 
100 Years of Design consists of excerpts from a book by Carroll M. Gantz, FIDSA, entitled, Design Chronicles: Significant Mass-produced Designs of the 20th Century, published August 2005 by Schiffer Publications, Ltd.
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