Styling Gimmicks That Didn't Age Well
We’ve all fallen prey - every single one of us. Some decisions seem great at the time, are made with the best information at hand, and carried out with the best of intentions. Yet, the idea ends up aging like warm milk.
The same thing can sometimes happen with cars. Designers work their tails off, often hewing to current trends and - especially in large corporations like General Motors - work to fulfil a checklist which was buried on the fourteenth slide of a particularly lengthy PowerPoint deck. For every fender curve of a Jag E-Type or headlamp doors on an Alfa Romeo Montreal, there’s another styling feature which doesn’t age very well at all.
[Images: JoshBryan/Shutterstock.com, Gestalt Imagery/Shutterstock.com, Gary A Corcoran Arts/Shutterstock.com; Murilee Martin]
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Rear Window Louvers
There is an excellent argument that the cars on which these strange trappings appeared were much better overall than this one feature. Machines like the ‘70 Mustang and snazzy DeLorean are prime examples. Still, these things are rooted in their time, often fail and fly to pieces, and do no favors for rear visibility. Plus - adding it here gives us the opportunity to print the phrase ‘superfluous louvers’.
Dagmars
Those protrusions on the front of American land yachts in the late ‘50s? They’re called dagmars. Sure, it would be more politically correct to use the term chrome bullets and the like - but that’s what most people called them in the era. A quick Google search will reveal why. Gradually growing in size as Detroit competed in a mine-is-bigger-than-your battle, these arguably reached a zenith just as the country was plunging into a recession in 1958. Like louvers, they instantly date a car and added visual clutter when there was already plenty of it during that era.
Enormous Grilles
We finally grab something from the modern era, taking aim at pickup trucks and the increasing amount of surface area dedicated to grilles. Hammered with an equally sizable brand badge and plenty of brightwork, these could easily stand in for a different type of grille - one without the ‘e’ and intended to barbecue delicious cuts of meat. Will history judge them as harshly as we’ve judged the louvers and dagmars above? I plan to be alive to find out.
Silver-Faced Interior Panels
To be clear, this entry takes aim at a specific silver-faced interior panel. For a spell in the early to mid ‘80s, the crew at Chrysler slathered this stuff on its radio faces and several other flat cabin surfaces. It generally appeared on Chrysler products as a maybe a leftover styling idea from the late ‘70s and an apparent way of affordably giving Every Extended K an extra bit of differentiation from pedestrian models. It didn’t age well, both visually and practically with no shortage of examples in which the words (or silver itself) rubbed off over time.
