A handful of giant over-sized personalities created the auto industry and their influence is still being felt around the world. Among this group of innovators, charlatans, dreamers and engineers was Harley Earl, a larger than life figure who invented the notion of automotive styling as we know it today.
A new book, General Motors Styling, 1928 – 1958 from Tracy Powell, Managing Editor of Automobile Quarterly, the revered magazine of automotive history, takes readers behind the scenes of Earl’s design enterprise as it transforms the company and the industry.
It’s hard not to be attracted to Earl and taken in by his gifted showmanship. Powell wrote the book about the "Harley Earl era" inside GM Styling “outside AQ auspices,” but like all of the Quarterly articles it’s full of gems like “nifty, original illustrations from a few of the designers, some never before seen outside the studios,” according to Powell.
He traces the roots of automotive styling from the day Alfred Sloan brought Harley Earl into the company and asked him give the new LaSalle a stunning body. Earl knew how to create cars that got attention. He’d created a following in Hollywood by turning out one-off custom auto bodies for film stars who didn’t want to drive what everyone else had.
Word spread back to GM’s Detroit headquarters about this customizer on the coast who was causing a stir with his designs. Sloan thought that he needed something to make his company’s cars stand out and styling would be the thing to do it.
After Earl delivered a hit with the LaSalle, Sloan convinced him to forsake the glamour and sun of Hollywood for a career in Detroit as the first head of GM’s Art & Colour Section.
This group of designers and engineers eventually morphed into GM Styling and today’s Design Staff. They led the way as the first in-house design department at an automaker. Their styling magic was responsible for the creation of cars, trucks, trains, refrigerators and all manner of consumer products. Probably its most long lasting effect on society was in propagating Sloan’s concept of planned obsolescence.
Sloan reasoned that since cars were built to last for years (he never drove a K car) that the only way to lure a customer back to the showroom before rust turned his dream car into dust was to create some sort of artificial dissatisfaction for his purchase and hunger for something new. Style would do the trick as it enticed millions of people to sell or trade-in (at below market rates) their old heaps for something new. Usually the “new” car was only new on the outside. Most of the underpinnings, the expensive parts – engine, chassis and suspension – were basically the same as on the older one that had lost its ability to put a smile on its owner’s face. Changing the sheet metal became a much-anticipated annual ritual that earned GM (and Sloan) a fortune. Other industries learned from the automaker and industrial design entered every facet of our consumer culture. Earl was at the center of this shift and an understanding of his story and that of the people who participated in creating our modern material life is worth pursuing.
The book comes with a foreword by one of GMs former VPs of Design, Chuck Jordan. General Motors Styling 1927-1958 is available directly from the author via his website.
For more information or to order:
www.powellhousepub.com.
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