FASHION Magazine

In 1953, the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted a show that treated the automobile as an aesthetic achievement. In a Talk of the Town bit published in The New Yorker, the writer Brendan Gill played the Philistine, thinking old-fashioned thoughts about function and price as he was led through the exhibition by a curator from the museum’s department of architecture and design. The punchline of the piece occurred when, stopping by a Siata, the cool—Steve McQueen owned one—Italian sports car, Gill asked, “Handle nicely, does it?” The curator answered, “I don’t drive.”

Bill Blass, the American fashion designer, told a similar kind of joke in his memoir, Bare Blass. He confessed that “for eighteen years, beginning in the mid-seventies, I endorsed a line of Lincoln Continentals for the Ford Motor Company without knowing how to operate one.”

After reading those things, I—a non-driver for whom torque is something that happens on an ill-fitting T-shirt—felt less like a poseur going off to interview Max Wolff (page 78), a car designer now relishing his opportunity to reimagine the Lincoln.