The 1950's
It Was A Great Time To Be Alive!
The Automobile Was A Status Symbol
Dad bought a new car every two years as we have a 1951 Pontiac, 1953 Pontiac, 1955 Buick, 1957 Chevy, and a 1959 Chevy. Dad was a "GM Man".
As more and more cars were sold in the early 1950s, just simply owning a car was no longer a sign of high social status. Everybody had a car! So advertisements tried to create market niches for various vehicles, and sold the postwar car as a symbol of whatever variant of the American dream took your fancy. John Keats declared, in 1957, that "Detroit believes, and operates on the theory that Americans don't buy automobiles, but instead buy dreams of sex, speed, power, and wealth." Cars got bigger, more powerful and grew fins!
I Remember The Fins!
The postwar era marked the emergence of all things American, and
in the 1950s, cars led the way.
The brilliant colors-pinks, blues,
yellows, and reds-soaring tailfins, and grinning, wide-mouthed
grilles of the 1953 Buick Skylark, 1957 Ford Skyliner, 1953 Firebird
III, and 1959 Cadillac tore up the country's pristine superhighways
and dotted the parking lots of new suburban shopping malls.
Stylists also offered consumers the dream of flight, and earthbound
autos sprouted tail fins, air scoops, jet exhausts, and canopy
windshields. Plagiarizing jet plane and rocket design was popular
because these connoted advanced technology and exciting escape from
terrestrial worries and cares.
Cadillac ended up with the largest fins except for perhaps the
DeSoto which was soon to be discontinued.
The best looking was the Packard Caribbean convertible. Bright
colors, wow!
Colors Were In
The colors and the fins were a little much!
Changes Were Rapid
Despite the purely symbolic nature of
most of these 1950s features, stylists felt compelled to offer some
flimsy functional excuses for their design excesses, perhaps to assuage
consumers' guilt about such automotive extravagance. Tail fins were said
to stabilize cars in crosswinds, despite the fact that tests showed this
effect was achieved only at speeds higher than sixty miles per hour.
Big, heavy cars were said to be safer, for they "held the road" and
protected passengers in collisions. But in reality these larger cars
were more unsafe, for improvements in steering and braking lagged
substantially behind increases in power and size. Lower cars were said
to improve handling and lessen the dangers of rollover, but both claims
were largely erroneous. Finally, wraparound “canopy” windshields were
said to improve the driver’s vision by eliminating corner pillars, while
in reality the curved glass created dangerous distortions of sight.
