GLAMOUR ROAD
"This book is also a celebration of the often-illusory and romantic attractiveness of the midcentury era and provides the reader with a unique vantage point to jump in and explore. It is beautifully designed and illustrated extensively, with a visual fancy that explains and contextualizes their unique point of view. More than just a car book, it is a deeper dive into how the design world became a catalyst for change, and explains how women, fashion, and the advertising world profoundly contributed to the social realignment in American culture."
Susan Skarsgard, Designer and Author; Founder, GM Design Archive
Glamour Road was featured in a 6 minute segment on CBS News, air date March 12, 2022. Tom Dolle and Jeff Stork were interviewed by veteran reporter and CBS Producer Barry Petersen.
Jeff Stork & Tom Dolle
Schiffer Publishing, March 2022
Size: 12" x 9", 425 color & bw images, 256 pp
ISBN13: 9780764363900
The postwar world provided an explosion of opportunity—new ways of living, new communities, and even new roads to drive upon. There were vast new markets, but the American automobile industry needed to shift its marketing and product design to reach them.
Glamour Road looks at the intertwined relationship between the auto industry, the NY fashion world, Madison Avenue, and the prominent designers and tastemakers of the day. It details different approaches each automobile company took in its quest to appeal to the emerging markets of women drivers in the 1950s and the Youthquake of the 1960s.
Technological innovations, the use of color and textiles, planned obsolescence, relationships with icons of the fashion industry, and the inclusion of women themselves in the design process transformed the American automobile into more than mere transportation—it became the ultimate fashion accessory.
Included along the way are humorous hits and misses, with previously untold recollections from industry insiders and over 400 vivid images from vintage marketing and sales materials—many unseen for decades.
Anyone with an interest in midcentury modern automobiles, product design, fashion, merchandising, and the great designers of the era, should take a ride down Glamour Road.
Susan Skarsgard put it best in the book's Foreword:
"This book is also a celebration of the often-illusory and romantic attractiveness of the midcentury era and provides the reader with a unique vantage point to jump in and explore. It is beautifully designed and illustrated extensively, with a visual fancy that explains and contextualizes their unique point of view. More than just a car book, it is a deeper dive into how the design world became a catalyst for change, and explains how women, fashion, and the advertising world profoundly contributed to the social realignment in American culture."
Media and reviewers: please contact me for a reader copy or to be put on the Review Book list.
George Smart interviews Tom Dolle & Jeff Stork for US Modernist Radio (29:00—52:36)