AUTOMOTIVATED: 
STREAMLINED FASHION AND AUTOMOBILES
Open July 24, 2010 through January 23, 2011
CAR: 1937 Delage D8-120 by Letourneur et Marchand. The Margie and Robert E. Petersen Collection. Photo courtesy of the Petersen Automotive Museum.
APPAREL: Bergdorf Goodman, Evening Dress, 1938, rayon charmeuse with plastic buckle. Phoenix Art Museum Collection. Photo by Ken Howie.
The sleek coachwork of the fashionably long Delage Aerosport was designed by Letourneur et Marchand of Paris and featured a rakishly dipped beltline and a fin on the trunk. In the same way that automobile designers experimented with using new shapes to create more fluid and graceful lines on cars, fashion designers were thinking of how to achieve the same result with fabric. Their objective was accomplished by cutting fabrics, such as that used for this Mille Oppenheim evening dress, on the bias so that they would better follow the contours of the body.
During the last 100 years more attention has been devoted to the designs of apparel and automobiles than to the designs of any other consumer goods. Two of the most personally revealing categories of objects ever conceived, cars and clothing have been shaped by an almost universal obsession with speed and movement, the twin fascinations of the twentieth century. Combined, they express not only one’s individual personality, but also their financial and social status and style-conscious individuals—especially in Southern California—have collectively embraced cars as fashion accessories that they ultimately came to regard as additional layers of clothing. Cars are now as essential to one’s self-expression as hats, gowns, and jewels.
Appearing late in the 19th century, the earliest series-produced automobiles were crude, dirty, noisy, unreliable, and difficult to start.
The Petersen Automotive Museum Foundation is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization, governed by a Board of Directors. The Museum is located at 6060 Wilshire Boulevard (at Fairfax) in Los Angeles.
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