From Sweeping Elegance to Bars of Soap, the Decline of Automobile Design
For the most part, elegance has been erased from modern life in the name of—what?—easygoing, laid back, take it as it comes and isn’t Steve Jobs the coolest guy you ever saw?
I’ve chosen automobile design as my benchmark, but I really think it began with the demise of the Borsalino hat
I know, I’m wandering a bit off subject, but stay with me. Borsalino was (and is) an Italian hatmaker, hand crafting the best of the best since 1857 and my father owned three of them. Dad was a refined guy of modest means but tastefully attired from the top down and the top wore a Borsalino, cocked a bit over one eye, Bing Crosby style. Not to put too sharp a point on it, but who can you say that about today?
The late 1930s were elegant times for beautiful cars, most everything French, some things Italian and the longings of a pre-war world. America had a hand in that game and I offer the 1939 Lincoln Continental cabriolet as evidence at the top of the page. I actually owned a 1948 model I bought for not much in the 60’s, hoping to restore it but never able to pop for the dough. Even unrestored it was elegant to drive. With a V-12 engine hiding under that long hood, you could drop the clutch from a dead stand-still and it would move off without so much as a shudder.
Lincoln still makes a Continental, but the photo (below) quite easily makes my case for the loss of elegance in automobiles worldwide. Today a Mercedes looks like a Chevrolet and you have to get close enough to read the badge to tell one from another.
A decent case can be made for World War Two as a bookmark for the end of the age of elegance
We came away from that war a sober, frightened nation in many ways, segueing seamlessly into a Cold War with various communist countries and it seems that some of the American swagger was lost, perhaps for the best. On the downside, I can remember grade-school drills where we all crouched under our desks in case of a nuke. Even as a kid, I wondered what the hell the adults were up to, threatening such mutual destruction.
As for automobiles and unlike Europe, America was a wide-open-spaces country without much public transport infrastructure and the car was king. It’s a handy metaphor to say America was driven, from its automobiles to its newborn capitalism and a frantic need to succeed.
But we fell flat on our ass in the automobile business. The over-sized, over-chromed land cruisers we built during the fifties couldn’t survive the onslaught of European and Japanese competition as gas prices rose. There remains a Ford and General Motors but Detroit is a ghost town compared to its earlier dominance.
In Detroit and elsewhere, the wind-tunnel traded off sweeps of curve for bars of soap
Aircraft design, if you will. What was the key to building jet aircraft, barely made a discernable difference to an automobile drifting down the highway at 80mph but the advertising agencies, with Detroit terrified of Japanese imports, touted a mile-per-gallon saved here and a less expensive body-panel there. They came late to the game, these Madison Avenue types, but they had learned that the public could be sold almost anything if a well-known celebrity leaned on the fender and smiled into the camera. All the better if her blouse was worn off-the-shoulder. Quarter-windows disappeared because they cost an extra three bucks.
As for the decline of the men’s hat, the automobile is suspect there as well
You could comfortably wear a hat in a 1939 Lincoln, hell you could wear a top-hat in Lincoln’s earlier models, but such is not the case in the 2023 offer. Flattened rooflines are the culprit, allowing an extra mile-per-gallon in every hundred. Bucket-seats as well, allowing a driving position from flat-on-your-ass. Where the hell can you even put a hat in a car today? And all for what? I have a prejudice, developed over a long life, that each decade both design and civility-wise is much the lesser of the one preceding.
Elegance, I fear, is in the eye of the beholder and, in 1939, a man would open the car door for a lady to enter. It’s now readily assumed that, if a man does the same these days it’s either a new car or a new girlfriend. All such jokiness aside, when the hat disappeared, the necktie followed, then the suit, the topcoat and overcoat as well. Most CEOs headed to office now step out of their chauffeured limousines dressed appropriately for either Aspen or their office. Who last saw Bill Gates, Jamie Dimon, Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos in a suit or tie? We no longer open car doors (or any doors) for women, lest we be verbally spanked or glared-at by a feminist.
As a society, we are a sullen, silent bunch these days,
afraid even to make eye-contact, as we grieve for the times of Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Audrey Hepburn (and those magnificent hats of hers), as well as the sweep of a long fender.
My god those were elegant times and we are spiritually the worse off for their loss. Say what you will, I blame the demise of the Borsalino hat and automobile design’s infatuation with the wind-tunnel.