Author(s): Tom Dolle; Jeff Stork

Fashion

This highly visual book will appeal to automotive history buffs, classic car enthusiasts, and anyone interested in midcentury fashion and design. It explores how glamour, fashion, design, and styling became the main focus of automotive marketing from the postwar 1940s through the 1970s. With the expansion of the suburbs after WWII, women suddenly needed cars of their own, and the automobile industry made a direct appeal to the rising sophistication and influence of women. By perfecting the fashion-centric concept of planned obsolescence, it became the dominant economic engine of postwar prosperity. The dramatic photography, elegant fashion, and use of color and materials in midcentury automotive marketing created a groundswell of desire for new cars. Much of the marketing imagery of the period hasn't been published since it first came out, and this book features some of the best, with more than 400 photos, illustrations, auto brochures, and advertisements.