A History of Scholarship on American Automobile DesignEmergence of a Critical Popular Literature In the late 1950s, however, there was a change in the tone of the popular literature on auto styling. Critical voices began to appear in this field that had previously been almost uniformly laudatory. The 1950s was, of course, the heyday of American automobile styling. In postwar America there emerged a broadly shared, mass prosperity that brought millions of working-class consumers into the market for new cars. In order to differentiate their cars from the competition and stimulate product turnover in the market, automakers turned to the stylists, who superficially changed the aesthetics of cars every year and consistently made all cars bigger, more powerful, and more glitzy. The heightened competition among stylists for newness and distinction drove auto design to dizzying heights of frivolity and absurdity. Functionless tail fins soared to the heavens, and chrome decoration spread like a cancer. By 1957, however, Americans were beginning to question such automotive extravagance. The first postwar recession in America took the wind out of the sails of consumer exuberance, as did the Soviets beating the U.S. into space with the launch of the Sputnik satellite. These events made Detroit’s chromed-up, befinned dinosaurs look rather wasteful. Reflecting this critical mood of the public
were two best-selling books, Vance Packard’s The
Hidden Persuaders (1957) and John Keats’s The
Insolent Chariots (1958). Both books condemned auto stylists for appealing to consumers’ deeply buried emotional needs, rather than their rational needs for efficiency and safety. Packard’s book argued that auto design was part of a larger attempt on the part of advertisers and merchandisers to manipulate and control consumers by discovering their repressed needs through psychological testing and then incorporating them into advertising and product design. In his book focused exclusively on autos, Keats agreed, arguing that cars were designed and marketed to appeal to the emotional needs of “daydreaming nitwits.” Both focused on sex as one of the most important “hidden persuaders” designed into autos. Keats claimed that stylists consciously and deliberately designed into cars sexual symbols, like penile
hood ornaments, bosom-like
bumper bullets, and vaginal
grilles. These critical books certainly seemed to resonate with the mood of American consumers, who were feeling a bit guilty about their frivolous products and feared that somehow they were being manipulated behind their backs. But the factual content of these popular criticisms of auto styling left a lot to be desired. The authors were correct in stating that merchandisers of this era were researching the emotional appeal of automobiles, but wrong in arguing that this research determined auto design. The automobile stylists were very protective of their autonomy, and fought hard and successfully to eliminate the influence of the marketing staff on design. They believed that they knew consumers better than the marketers with all their surveys, and by the 1950s stylists had almost complete control of auto design. This is not to say, however, that the stylists themselves did not appeal to consumer emotions in their designs. They obviously did, for when they spoke of their designs their comments were laced with words like “excitement,” “freedom,” and “fun.” But their emotional appeals were not conscious and calculated, as Packard, Keats, and Nader argued, but intuitive and unstudied. Car designers in these days worked by visual intuition, relying on a general feeling for what looked exciting and fun drawn from the larger culture. They rarely sought to give any verbal rationale for their designs; on the contrary, there was an informal prohibition against such talk in the industry, captured in the common rebuke among stylists, “I can see, but I cannot hear.” <<Previous Section - Next Section>> |
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