The Glamour of Touring

When I think of glamour. I think Italian. Italian just about everything: suits, shirts, wine, boots, motorcycles, scooters, ties, opera singers, socks, movie stars, purses, beaches, sunglasses, cities with canals, and... cars. Cars cars cars.  The Italians are king of the glamorous car.

Here's a test. Picture a glamorous Italian car in your mind, and then answer these questions (mine are in italics):

• What color is it?   [RED ]
• What would it feel like to run your hands over its body?  [CURVACEOUS ]
• Who is sitting inside of it?  [ A GLAMOROUS COUPLE, DRESSED TO KILL ]

The notion of Italian design being red, curvy, and glamorous has much to do with the success of Italian coachmakers during the '50s and '60s.  By creating bespoke bodies for the most expensive cars of the period, these groups of designers and craftsmen created an aesthetic which was at once intensely emotional yet not grossly decadent, for it was rooted in the world of races such as the Mille Miglia, where light weight and slippery shapes meant speed and handling.  My favorite coachbuilder from the period is Carrozzeria Touring, for two reasons.

First, the brand name, and the way the brand name looks in the flesh.  Here's a snap I took of a Touring badge at the Pebble Beach Concours a few years ago:

Look at that badge.  The wings, the crown, the blue "T", the scroll, and the allusion to the home city of Milan.  Sotto voce, it says "made in Italy" with all that goes with the phrase.  And then there's the "Superleggera" script above it.  This was a masterstroke of branding:  Touring developed a way of constructing car bodies that saved weight and hence added speed.  Over time this method of construction -- "super light" -- became as big as the master brand of Touring, to the point where it required equal billing on the panel of a car.  I love the way the phrase rolls off the tongue, as well as the way its idiosyncratic cursive font is rendered here in polished metal.  So elegant, unique, and beautiful, it positively oozes glamour.  To ride in a car with a Superleggera body is to inhabit the world of a James Bond or a Sophia Loren.

And then there are the car bodies of Touring.  More than just machines for transportation, Touring created one-off pieces of sculpture that by all rights should have a spot in the Hirshhorn.  And so strong was the Touring aesthetic and what it could do for an individual automotive marque that even non-Italian makes got in on the action, too.  Here are three of my favorite Touring-bodied cars, one Italian, one English, and one Spanish:

• the Ferrari 166 MM Touring Le Mans Berlinetta
• the Aston Martin DB5 (Mr. Bond, your Touring-bodied car is waiting...)
• the Pegaso Thrill

What beautiful cars.  Especially the Thrill, which is the car pictured in the photo at the top of this post.

The era of Touring is over.  The pendulum has swung, and I'd wager that the next decade will be one of extreme rationalism, as "pure" shapes such as the Mercedes-Benz Bionic win in a market looking for extreme efficiency and minimal carbon footprints.  As such, they're the right solutions for the time.  I'm excited by the new Chevy Volt, and I see the need for the football-shaped Prius, but they're not glamorous.  I'm more than a little sad to see the passion go.  Red cars with curvy bodies whooshing their nattily-clad occupants through the night, well, that was glamour.