For a change of pace, I decided to post some images of 1950s styling studios. In every case, they are staged photos intended to promote the idea that Corporation X is a really future-oriented place. At the same time, care was usually taken not to reveal style features slated for near-term production. One way of achieving this was to release photos taken a few years earlier in advanced design studios, where car models and renderings still looked flashy, but were no longer likely to have future production features.
Some of the images below are poorly identified as to the manufacturer and, especially, the year they were taken. Regardless, I hope you enjoy viewing these carefully posed peeks behind various styling curtains.
Gallery
The Internet source of this image had it that it was from Chrysler Corporation. It shows a corner of an Interior studio. Probably from the early '50s.
A Ford Motor Company studio as photographed in the mid-1950s.
Not necessarily of a studio -- most likely a public display of Ford advanced designs. The models look like they are from the very early 1950s, some perhaps from the end of the 1940s. If this was indeed a public display and not one intended for company management, none of those models were recently made.
Another Ford photo, perhaps taken 1952, give or take a year.
The renderings in the background are of Oldsmobiles showing features current around 1952.
A Studebaker photo from around 1950. That's Raymond Loewy touching the model. Bob Bourke is behind him.
I don't have any information regarding this photo. The renderings look like GM thinking in the late 1940s, but I cannot rule out Ford.
Again, I have no information. The spaceship-like rendering subjects suggest this is a Ford studio.
Readers with solid information are encouraged to provide sources and dates in comments.
The dashboard they are working on in the first photo is for the 1955-56 Dodge.
ReplyDeleteOn the page for 8/23/18, re- third frame down from top, containing "Advanced Styling" in very-vintage font: Bill suggests that it's possibly a public-media display, possibly Ford, probably "very early 1950s." Look at the first & second cars from the left... Does it seem to anyone else that they really look like 1961-62 Thunderbirds?
ReplyDelete"Bill" in my comment above should have been "Donald." Donald, please forgive. The certain explanation is that a guy named Bill (Billy) and I were downtown on our bikes out front of Union Motors, waiting with bated-breath, as they at long-last tore down the paper covering the showroom windows... on one of the first, always very hot, nights of 7th-grade --in September 1961. Actually, the TBird was unremarkable from the 61s we'd marveled at there on our same bikes the year before, but next to it was a pearl-white Galaxy500-XL stunningly, as had been rumored, with absolutely no fins(!) So it was worth pedaling the 4-blocks downrown afterall. Anyway... Bill's (Billy's) last-name was PETTINGILL. So, with Billy P. and 1962 Thunderbirds on an old brain like this one, the DONALD rightfully claimed by PITTINGER was hijacked by Pettingill's BILLY (Bill). [Actually, soethig not too far out of character!] Again, this clarification to fellow-readers and apology to Donald and his SUPERB BLOG.
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