Glamour Road: Color, Fashion, Style, and the Midcentury Automobile

This highly visual book will appeal to automotive history buffs, classic car enthusiasts, and anyone interested in midcentury fashion and design.

• Explore how glamour, fashion, design, and styling became the focus of automotive marketing in the postwar years.
• 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 more than 400 photos, illustrations, auto brochures, and advertisements.

With the expansion of the 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. Glamour Road takes the reader on a journey, detailing how women and fashion directly influenced the traditionally male-dominated auto industry in the mid-twentieth century.

Jeff Stork curates a large private automobile collection in Palm Springs, California, and Tom Dolle is an award-winning graphic designer and the creative director at Destination PSP, a product design company in Palm Springs, California. Together, Jeff and Tom produced the Cul de Sac Experience, which has become one of the most talked-about, photographed, and documented events for Modernism Week, celebrating classic cars as an integral part of modernist design.