Fashion and the Car in the 1950s

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 Bazaar (Fig. 1) and realize that the imageries of high style and high octane are inextricably 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 themselves, 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 considering 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 intellectually 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 argumentation, 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. 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. …