It was the Space Age, and a lot of auto and appliance manufacturers let their engineers and designers go wild with references to rockets, high technology and the anticipation of Robbie the Robot. It was the wonderful age before the little prick bean-counters were given command and ordained the ordinary.
It's also the age, slightly before the advent of 20th century feminism, that convinced me and others that the appliance manufacturers were spending much more money and energy courting the husband(buyer) than the wife (user). I think a lot of people involved in these decisions had a mistaken idea that if you made household chore appliances "cool" wives would consider the housework less onerous. All of the women in my childhood, without exception, couldn't have cared less.
The Kirby corporation still hasn't caught on that only Amazons with extraordinary upper-body strenght find their well-made, expensive vacuum cleaners desireable. Most women I know want lightweightedness over every other feature, including suction, in a vacuum.