Fashion and the Car in the 1950s

Fashion and the Car in the 1950s

Richard Martin

Edson Armi, describing the assumptions and ambitions of the late 1940s and early 1950s, analyzes,

Car designers, like everyone else, responded daily to the other “mass-culture” visual art, fashion design. The cultural conditions after the war affected similar changes in car and fashion design: Not only were the ideas expressed in these two arts alike, so, too, was the very timing of the style changes. By 1947, a postbellum fashion became all the rage and, like the postwar car, it combined a creative American style from the war years with a new European look. Like the postwar American car, the new fashion also fulfilled desires for lavishness, glamour, and certain shapeliness.’

To look at the cover of the September 1954 issue of Harper’s Bazaur (Fig. 1) and realize that the imageries of high style and high octane are inextrica- bly correlated (or car-related), one can explore Armi’s hypothesis of the linkage between car and fashion for the 1950s, not chiefly in terms of the products them- selves, but in their shared iconography, the power of image to persuade the public and the consumer that the life of fashion could become in the high-speed and high-style 1950s a fast lane of desires and images.

Contextually, we can only set this scene by con- sidering some long-forgotten columns written by the fashion designer Elizabeth Hawes for Pontiac Owners’ Magazine.2 Hawes was an American fashion designer, who in disillusionment with experiences of the couture in Paris in the 1930s, insisted upon an indigenous American style.3 Though always a designer, her chief occupation after 1938 is as a writer. Hawes offered a common sense as ready as Tom Paine’s Enlightenment reason or the Seneca Falls contention of rational equity in the nineteenth century. Hawes offered not the kind of verbally and intellectu- ally impacted and obtuse theory we so often hear about in the late years of the twentieth century. In fact, one of the tonic virtues of Hawes’s thinking and writing is its directness and plain language.

To see the cogent frankness of Hawes’s argumen- tation, consider her 1940 column in her regular series “Fashion of the Month” in, of all places, Pontiac Owners’ Magazine. Hawes tackles the question of women and trousers, a recurrent theme in her writing.

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In advance of war’s exigencies and Rosie the Riveter’s advent, Hawes calmly states, “Why should women wear trousers? Because trousers are the most comfortable things for active work or active sports and most of us girls are busy most of the time being something other than just plain glamorous. It is more important to be comfortable than to observe the traditions.” The argument for comfort is a standard of the dress-reform propositions about clothing for both men and women. Hawes wastes no time in justifying why pants are more comfortable than the traditional skirt, but addresses the arguments against women wearing pants with the eager elan of a philosophy student rising to the bait of an unconsidered postulation. She says, “‘But woman can’t wear trousers,’ a lot of people say. ‘They haven’t the figures.’ I say, then men can’t wear trousers either, because there are just as many men with round hips and protruding tummies as there are ladies.”

One can tell that Hawes is hardly making any friends with her argument for swollen men and unbuffed women, but her reasoning is undeniably correct. Moreover, one is relieved that Hawes offers a solution of demonstrated logic and of easy fulfillment. Looking again at menswear, Hawes concludes, “The aesthetic effect is often distressing, to put it mildly. Men have for years concealed their figures in trousers by covering up the whole business with a coat that hits them around the hips and covers all the bumps.” Significantly, without explicitly framing her argument in the spectatorship of men and men’s fashion, Hawes has employed her observations of men’s style and subjects men to the same language and judgment that would more customarily be addressed in 1940 only to women.

A later sentence in the same paragraph is telling, as Hawes, the discriminating voyeur, states of men’s bodies, “On the whole, only sailors have been allowed to show off their shapely figures.” Let the Tailhook party boys be aware that Hawes has been watching them for more than fifty years and bringing the evi- dence of their aberrational role among men to a reasoned argument about women. Ironically, Hawes despaired in the same journal, “It took a world war to

52 . Journal of American Culture

Figure 1 .

Fashion and the Car in the 1950s 53

get women out of corsets. It will probably take another to get them into trousers.” Hawes perceived that in 1940 the transformation was already under- way; we all know that the 1940s allowed trousers for women in consummation of Hawes’s prediction.

Her advice, of course, is that women consider suits or jackets as a means of camouflaging some aspects of the body. That simple aesthetic might now be taken from granted, so clear is it that the world of Donna Karan and bridge sportswear in America builds from these principles of dress for women. Hawes offered no specific polemic in her argument and yet she offered the foundation for a logical and behavioral usurpation of male prerogatives in dress to re-distrib- ute and effectively appropriate the power vested in menswear. Further, that Hawes’s rostrum is a column in Ponfiac Owners’ Magazine might suggest that she has chosen to move into a place most commonly associated with men to speak of women’s rights and men’s flaws. Perhaps not as logically, but equally contrarian, Hawes would later advocate men in non-bifurcated garments that she compared to and designated as kilts.

It might seem that Hawes was a prophet, one who reasoned what American fashion should be and watched i t become such style in her lifetime and let us watch its further evolution in the same direction. In like manner, therefore, in another column from the same magazine, Hawes spoke to her convictions about American fashion in a manner that presaged the great design statements of American fashion in the 1970s through the 1990s. In a column entitled “Sport5 Clothes ... 24 Hours a Day,” Hawes exalts the American ethos of robust activity and of sports competition as evident in the busy and effective lives of American women. Daytime wear for most women, Hawes argues, is invariably sportswear. What Hawes argues even further and with some novelty in the early 1940s is that the sportswear separates so widely accepted for daywear can be taken to eveningwear. She derides stores for offering only the most embellished and ridiculous in long dresses and advocates long skirts and evening blouses and the accommodations of daywear to evening dress in lieu of the traditions of formality. In fact, Mainbocher evening sweaters in the mid-I 940s would prove lastingly effective in a way that Hawes might have been predicting. Unheated rooms, under war’s deprivations, led the American designers to bring the reason of sweater dressing, layering, and separates from their sportswear heritage into t h e evening hours in a manner both elegant and enduring. It did not take an imminent war in Europe, but only good reasoning, for Hawes to affirm, “It was always in the cards for America to develop her own designing

and the sports-like form which it is taking comes logically out of the very active lives we American women are leading more and more every day.”

Meanwhile, Hawes advocates the menswear char- acteristic of certain basics remaining available in the market. In another in her Pontinc Owners’ Magazine series, Hawes advises, “When American women find something they want, they go right on buying i t no matter who tells them to do differently. They have been buying simple shirt-like dresses for about fifteen years and the chances are they will continue for as many more.” In fact, that forecast was understated as the basic shirtwaist continues until the present as a staple of women’s apparel. Of course, the shirtwaist for women is undeniably an adaptation of the man’s shirt. American fashion of the 1930s to the present has repeatedly pillaged the male wardrobe for advanta- geous ideas for women’s clothing and Hawes would, I am certain, approve of all of those appropriations not only for their radical redistribution of power, but for their practical utility.

But, I offer Hawes as writer in Pontiac Owners’ Magazine only as an example of the now-surprising juxtaposition of fashion thinking and the imagination and culture propagated by the car in America. Her pragmatism and her propensity to sportswear made the fit work very well, though perhaps the Harper’s Bazaar cover will also serve to convince us of the resemblance and resonance at high-end economics and finesse. The automobile has been a principal breeding commodity for the modem social structure and for the contemporary cultural construction.

Another primary text is John Weitz’s 1958 Sports Clothes for Your Sports Car. This small book, written by a professional fashion designer and a sports-car aficionado, also speaks to the liaison of the 1950s between car and costume. Weitz proposes that the sports-car desire is inherently

a “fashion” urge-the thing that makes a man want to grow a mustache or a woman says she can’t live without a certain dress. Many sports-car fans will find this statement hard to swallow. There will be particularly loud protests from those who bought sports cars jus t because they felt this “fashion urge.” ... To those of us who like the way the sports car looks and sounds, why deny a little vanity? Why hide the urge to be different? .... The world’s taste level is growing up; good taste is simplicity, and the sports car, automo- t i v e l y speaking, is simple both i n line and purpose. Visually, it is an official attack on vulgarity. Therefore the sports cur is itselfa FASHlON. Naturally, it goes hand in hand with other fashions of the day, from our way ofthink- ing to our style of dress. Therefore, in this book I shall treat


the sports car as a stage or background or foil for fashions in clothes. Just as riding a good Irish hunter requires formal riding habit, and a good quarter horse demands Western garb, so a sports car should be complimented by the clothes of its d r i ~ e r . ~

Weitz provides some examples of his contention of the sportswear to sports-car connection. He sketches siIhouettes of the 1920s and 1950s and find them similar, but he also argues for the similar ethos of the two eras.5 Arguing that the 1950s sportswear looks and efficiency echo those of the 1920s, he also sees the interest in sports cars in the two affluent periods as similar. Weitz is making an argument as a legalistic brief his historical data is certainly argu- able, if not absolutely certain. More importantly for intellectual history is the fact that he constructs such a comparison and sees in his own terms the relations between the beginnings of sportswear style with Chanel, Patou, and others in the 1920s as having a real counterpart to the 1950s with American ascen- dancy in free sportswear styles and in the attractive- ness and allure of sports cars in these two periods.

His analysis touches on specific garments and styles, notably the car coat, one of the most remark- able connections in the 1950s between the car and a specific garment classification. Of course, there had much earlier been apparel inventions such as dusters that accompanied the automobile, but the 1950s car coat is most indicative of the post-war period in its specific name and its accommodation not only to the car but to the culture of the car.

The car coat was supposed to be short enough so that the wearer could easily slide into and out of a 1950s car. Weitz criticizes that most car coats in 1958 are cut too long for the sports car, though, of course, the length may have more determined by feasibility in sedans. He says, “I recommend a length which hits just under your ‘seat’ when standing. Longer lengths are cumbersome, constrict your legs and bunch under your derrikre, but be sure the pockets are large and roomy.”6 One important feature of the fashion diction of the car coat of the 1950s was that the term was first used for such short coats for women, but it came to cross over equally for menswear. The assumption thereby was of a kind of equity of gender vis-a-vis the car. That is, there seems to have been an assumption that the man was always the driver and, in fact, even the chicest magazines of fashion of the 1950s had all but given up editorially on the image of the chauffeur- driven vehicle that had obtained in advertising and imagery of the 1920s and saw it retained only in advertising for the most expensive cars, Cadillac and

Chrysler Imperial, in particular. The back seat-also associated, of course, with 1950s sexuality, though in a very different way-constitutes a different status in an era of the family car as opposed to the epoch of chauffeur-driven vehicles. The woman might slide into the seat as either driver or passenger in almost the same way the man might, yet even in the 1950s we are still far from Thelma and Louise. To be sure, this is what social historians have long told us of the 1950s culture which brought women to empowerment as drivers, but fashion history verifies the tale in inventing a particular style in womenswear at the moment at which women were assuming the literal driver’s seat.

Perhaps less politically correct today would be Weitz’s pre-feminist observations on women’s beauty and the sports car. In fact, Weitz also claims a kind of knighthood romance for men who drive sports cars, but goes on to say of the women and the car, “But what is motor sport without beautiful women? Courageous gentlemen and admiring ladies have been linked since heraldic days and, after all, motor sports are chivalrous and daring.”’ His was not entirely the bourgeois role because of Weitz’s exclusive interest in the sports car, not the sedan or station wagon, and sportswear, but that narrower focus only proves the point of vestigial attitudes, by his example.

In fact, the high-style affiliation on the cover of Harpers Bazaar for September 1954 is clarified if we proceed by one month to October 1954 (Fig. 2), where we reckon with the same imagery once again, now not of pumps and tires, but of the radiant woman captured in a perfect moment on a rainy night, in the back seat of a car. If one could wonder if these two rainy-scene car covers might have been photographed on the same day, their immediate succession tips us off to the pervasiveness and the persuasiveness of the automobile as the conveyor of style in 1954. If man is, to Protagoras, the measure of all things, the 1950s woman is the measure of the car which contains her as a vessel. It is as if she is framed by the windows and roof of the car in a portrait style new to the twentieth century. The woman of the 1950s was, in fact, repre- sented in large part in association with the car.

Armi has argued for the similarity of car design and the woman’s suit of the 1940s, claiming, “As the single monocoque set America apart during the war, the unified and continuous lines of the American suit contrasted with the sculpted appearance of postwar Parisian design.”a Armi further argues that the 1950s design template is set by sculptural, female form often voluptuous and sensuous, in which the curves of streamlined and Dynaflow design were, in fact, akin

Fashion and the Car in the 1950s 55

Figure 2.

56 Journal of American Culture

to an exoskeleton for the beautiful women who might be at the car, in the car, and even driving the car.

Armi points out’ that Harley Earl liked, among his fraternity of designers for automobile exteriors, to refer to rounded shapes as being like women’s bot- toms and creases in a surface as “baby assing” and the pointy bumpers of the 1950s as “Dagmars,” an homage to a buxom TV personality of the Jerry Lester generation of the Tonight Show. But anatomy is des- tiny and descriptive for all of us; while one would not be surprised to find the 1950s car described in terms of the body and the female body in particular, the ref- erencing has to be taken in a long historical perspec- tive. Ships were and are known as female; Gothic cathedrals had buttresses that were in some architec- tural and engineering argot an anatomical part, but they also were a structural vision that made the build- ings stand up. It is perhaps not fetishism as much as analogy-seeking to speak in such a vernacular of the body and the car design, even as “Body by Fisher” had done at least since its advertising of the 1920s.

Moreover, when we look inside that September 1954 issue of Harper’s Bazaar, we can see exactly how the car and apparel are drawn together. Part of an article on new trends in clothes, images are clustered under the rubric “American Sports Design: The Clothes, the Cars” (Fig. 3) very much in anticipation of Weitz’s formulation. Our image is of the Chevrolet Corvette in white with a red interior in the foreground, attended by a woman in a red broadcloth car coat. Harper S Bazaar proclaims,

Two things starting here. Clothes for the open countryside that draw not only on a authentic native talent for sports design-but on a new kind of life that’s being lived, presently, out of town. And the first American sports cars: those small, spruce, low-sprung vehicles built-for-two whose primary motivation is speed; secondary, rakish appearance; tertiary, tall talk about gear ratios, getaway, direct drive and cornering.

Perhaps most indicative is the description of the specific image. “The three-foot coat, a double- breasted run of scarlet, seen through the cockpit of a car that stands less than three feet high.” In other words, there is a specific calibration being made between the length of the car coat and the small scale of the car itself. This analogy is not merely in terms of woman and car, but of a kind of measured minimal- ism, a certainty that the modem exists in the elimina- tion of all that is inessential and in reducing both apparel and industrial design to the fundamental with a rigorous sense of denial. Harper’s Bazaar testifies to

a modernist conviction, one that is evident in the copy, but that is also to some degree evident even in the image in its composition in white, black, and red, the new white and red replacing the dry-docked boats of the background.

But the car metaphor was not restricted to Harper’s Bazaar. Its great rival, Vogue, treated car design in a similar way, as, for instance, in the February 1, 1955, issue (Fig. 4). The article is called “Americans in fashion: how they dress for where they’re going,” suggesting that mobility and dress are interrelated. The copy tells us that these women have been fortunate enough to travel in the new 1955 cars and they are, of course, riding in considerable style in mink with pastel mink collar, mink cardigan with a mink border, and Persian lamb with Norwegian blue fox collar. But what is that we note of the cars and coats, even if the Vogue writer has not chosen to men- tion it? The two-toned cars and furs are directly analo- gous: the light and dark bi-colored contrasts of the cars-modish in the mid-1 950s-is the direct point of stylish comparison with these extravagant fur coats. Here, we support the idea of a specific relationship between garments and preferences for style along with the styles of automobiles. It is not clear which came first in a chicken-and-egg problem concerning sportswear and sports cars, two-toned cars of the 1950s and clothing of like two-colored contrast, but perhaps we are dealing with the kind of cultural moment and question to which the answer is that there is no answer necessary.

Armi had wondered if the Adrian suit of the 1940s was the ensemble equivalent to the car and if sportswear and separates dressing in the 1950s would not be the analogy of that period. At least impressionistically, he is certainly correct: two-toned cars and separates dressing both attested to efficiency, speed, mobility, and the design ideals of the 1950s in America.

Look, for instance, at a Harper’s Bazaar ad (Fig. 5 ) in 1954 for Cadillac. Extolling the car’s virtues, it reads in part: “Little wonder, then, that the ladies of Cadillac families regard their motor cars with such deep affection-just as we know you will, once a new Cadillac comes into your family.” Of course, the ad plays on family as kinship and domestic sign, but also with some insinuation of pedigree, as in the better families that may be able to afford a Cadillac. But the ad also shows the total absorption of the Cadillac sen- sibilities into the woman who owns i t or vice versa. The Wedgwood blue and white of the Coupe de Ville is exactly the same as the woman’s dress, not only in the choice of the two colors, but the relative roles of the white stole and the white top of the Cadillac. Even

Fashion and the Car in the 1950s . 57

before television invented M y Mother, the Car, advertising had clearly defined “My Wife, the Car.”

The story that David Halberstam tells so well in his book The Fifties of Ken Jones and Gerry Schnitzler making a compelling image for Chevrolet through advertising and television in the 1950s is that they always kept their image-making focussed on the dream and skillfully crafted the ideal of the American family comfortable in a Chevrolet.“’ What did happen in the 1950s was the car became assimilated and assumed. Even the imagery of fashion came to justify the car and, in engaging the car, justifying fashion in its forms as multiple as the design options of automobiles. As our blue-and-whites demonstrate, the bond was indivisible. It is said that Frank Lloyd Wright was convinced that occupants of his houses should only wear in those houses the clothing that he designed for them for that specific setting, but the result was something akin to camouflage with it becoming difficult to find the figure in the ground, as it would be here to find the woman in the car.

The foremost fashion photographer of the time, Richard Avedon, played in 1954 with the car as setting and frame in the series of photographs of hats by Balenciaga and Givenchy, with Avedon’s play in the series coming from the contrasts of black and white, interior and exterior, public and private. Once again, the story is not told by text, but Avedon’s now-famous acumen is to provide a kind of psychological tension, voyeurism exacerbated by the ambiguity between the public and private spaces of car and street. These images also suggest the association of the back seat with high-style Paris and the woman who buys the couture: would her American country cousin have been in the driver’s seat?

An advertisement from the August 1956 issue of Harper’s Bazaar (Fig. 6) confirms this imagery. Visually explicit, but verbally only implicit, the

Cadillac assumes the status of the French couture pic- tured above in the salon of Jean Dessb in Paris. Color affirms the relationship once again, with the azure blue car and the azure blue gown attesting to the like carriage of the beautiful and serious dress with the beautiful and serious automobile. In 1955, American fashion designers were recruited by Chrysler to design the interiors of cars which were then sold with this additional stamp of approval and design sensibility, but this motif, involving Tom Brigance, Anne Fogarty, Claire McCardell, Pauline Trigkre, and others, was a limited strategy, attempting to connect one aspect of the car and fashion design. In a last example (Fig. 7) from Vogue, October 15, 1959, the “Fords of Fashion” have literally been made i n PM suits by David Crystal. Armi’s correspondence of the suit and the car has been fully realized in this instance.

Much of the discourse about the automobile in the 1950s has centered on the issues of gender and domesticity. The intervention of the fashion designer in creating auto interiors, the role of mom as chauffeur, the emergence of the family car and its trailer- or home-like capacity to generate a complete environ- ment of family values are critical matters of the decade of the 1950s. It is without compromise to any of those important issues that I suggest that the imagery of style that fashion and the car propagated in the decade was a mutual one in which apparel and the car became indivisible, whether sports car or town car, high style or sportswear. In that compelling con- junction of car and clothing, there is an American dream of creation and consumption.

Cars and clothing remain linked. In the 1990s, venerable OldsmobiIe invited us to literally “wear a Ciera.” The car has long been our shadow vehicle or our image of aspiration. We have known for nearly 50 years that the car and fashion travel the same high- style highway.”


Figure 3.


American Sports Design: The Clothes, the Cars

0 Two things startitig here. Clothes for the open countryside that draw not onl) 011 at] authentic native talent for sports design-but on a new kind of life that’s being lived, presently: out of town. And the first American sports cars: those small, spruce, low-sprung vehicles-built-for-two whose primary niotivation is speed; secondary, rakish appearance: tertiary, tall talk about gear ratios, getaway; direct drive and cornering.

The three-foot coat (opposite). a double-breasted run of scarlet, seen through the cockpit of a car that stands less than three feet high. Coat, in Mayflower broadcloth, about $110; toothpick slini covert pants. about $35. Bonwit Teller: Hudson’s: Scruggs Vandervoort: Wanainaker’s. Philadelphia. Close on camera : the Chevrolet “Corvette.”

Covert pants and doublet (above,-and covert’s new i n the running an!rvhere you might have worn gra! flanriel before. Doublet. about $26; white silk blouse, about $15: pant5 cut like joclhpurs. rvith a tactical seam behind the knee to hold their leanness in line. about 536. Bonwit Teller: Frederick and Nelson : Julius Garfinrkel. All designs h! R. H. Wragge. All shoes at Bonwit Teller. The low-hooded car: Plymouth‘s “Explorer.“


Figure 4.


62 Journal of American Culture

Figure 5 .


Figure 6.


Figure 7.



Notes

' h i , C. Edson, The Art of American Car Design, 5 1. These columns, dated 1940, but not differentiated by

month, are in clipped form in the Elizabeth Hawes vertical file, Irene Lewisohn Costume Reference Library, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. All subsequent references to the Pontiac Owners' Magazine come from this source.

'On Hawes, see Bettina Berch, Radical by Design: The Life and Style of Elizabeth Hawes (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1988).

4Weitz, John. Sports Clothes for Your Sports Car, 13- 14.

sWeitz, 18-19. 6Weitz, 5 1 . lWeitz, 35. 'Armi, The Art of American Car Design, 5 1. 'Armi, 52-53. 'ODavid Halberstam, The Fifties (1993), 629-35.

"An earlier version of tlus essay was presented at the Indiana Historical Society symposium on the automobile and American culture at the Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg Museum, Auburn, Indiana, on 2 July 1994. I am grateful to C. Edson Armi, University of California, Santa Barbara, for his kindness in reading that paper after the symposium.

Works Cited

Armi, C. Edson. The Art of American C a r Design. University Park: The Pennsylvania State UP, 1988.

Halberstam, David. The Fifties. New York: Ballantine, 1993.

Weitz, John. Sports Clothes f o r Your Sports Car. New York: Sports Car, 1958.

Richard Martin is Curator of The Costume Institute, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Documents

Fashion and the Car in the 1950s