Glamour Road: Color, Fashion, Style and the Midcentury Automobile (Hardcover)

This highly visual book explores the seldom-told story of how glamour, fashion, design, and styling became the main focus of automotive marketing from the post-war 1940s through the 1970s. With the expansion of the American suburbs after WWII, women suddenly needed cars of their own. By adopting the fashion industry's yearly model changes, as well as hiring many designers and stylists from the fashion industry, 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 American post-war prosperity. The dramatic photography, elegant fashion, and use of colour and materials in mid-century automotive marketing created a groundswell of demand for new cars. Much of the marketing imagery of the period has not been published since it first came out, and this book features some of the best.