Fashion 87 : Pickup Trucks Make Statement as Latest Trend in Accessories

Penni Krebbs, in her velvet minidress, pulls up to a formal art preview. The valet briskly opens the door--to her pickup truck.

Krebbs is an artist who hauls paintings in her truck. That’s why she bought it, she says. Not to be trendy. But like it or not, she’s a pacesetter when she gets behind the wheel.

Pickups are edging their way toward first place as the fashion-mobile for females. And for women who buy them, pickup trucks are a sort of fashion accessory, an expression of personal style.

Look at it this way. Plenty of women drive Jeep-type vehicles these days--vehicles that used to be “for men only.” Break one taboo and the next becomes irresistible.

You can be an urban, truck-driving mama in an old clunker. But more women opt for a recent-model “mini pickup” or “sport truck.” It’s a lightweight compact, not much bigger than a station wagon, that most major American and Japanese-import dealers sell.

“I don’t get the respect I’d get in a BMW,” joked Krebbs, who drives her truck everywhere. Maybe not, but there are other perks. “Men dig it,” she said. “They think it shows my independence.”

“It’s a bit of thumbing your nose to people’s expectations.” That’s why Pat Whempner Meiklejohn bought her pickup. She is a graduate architect who totes models of buildings around in the truck, which she purchased on impulse. Most men she knows drive one. “None of us really needs a truck,” she admitted. “It’s an image thing.”

As for the image, it’s hardly classical chic. Pickups have long been part of the wardrobe of stereotypical red-neck, blue-collar, rural American males. “That’s part of what makes driving one cool for women,” Meiklejohn said.

Writers like Sam Shepherd and Tom McGuane have helped make it cool. Their stories, set in the rural West, are sprinkled with spirited cowgirls. And plenty of urban truck-driving women can relate to them.

Fashion photography helped make the female trucker stylish too. You see the type in Bruce Weber’s rustic-glamour shots of the Southwest for Calvin Klein jeans ads and in Wayne Maser’s rowdy scenes set on dude ranches that advertise MGA denims.

But professional women who buy trucks say there is more to it than living out a fantasy. There is a practical reason. The price of a pickup is comparatively low. Most models start at about $7,000, and even with a sunroof, bucket seats and a sophisticated sound system, one can sell for under $10,000. Because there is no quota on trucks the United States can import, the cost is kept down.

As truck-driving Monica Dunahee found out, salesmen still assume that women do not drive trucks. When she went to chose hers, she recalled: “The salesman wouldn’t talk to me. I had to bring a man along. Then I’d ask the questions and the salesman would answer the man I was with, not me. It was very frustrating.”

Some women say they buy clothes to go with their vehicle. Dunahee said her vehicle goes with her clothes in an unexpected way. At the end of a workday in the offices of UCLA, she puts on the jacket of her conservative, pin-stripe suit and heads toward the parking lot. Her pickup truck awaits her.

The only time she has ever felt the least bit embarrassed , she said, was the night she pulled up to the Bistro Garden for dinner. She was wearing a red silk dress and was driving a pickup truck.

“I like having things in my life a little askew,” she said. “But that night I wished I was driving a Jaguar.”

Her husband thinks it’s cute that she has a truck, she said. But her women friends don’t comment at all. It doesn’t strike them as unusual.

However, she has definite reactions when she sees other women in trucks. “If the driver is young and cute, I think she must be a beach bunny,” Dunahee said. “If she’s beefier, I might think she looked less feminine.”

Amber Scott, competition surfer, is one of the beach-bunny truck drivers you see tooling along Pacific Coast Highway.

Scott said she bought a truck to carry her surfboard. A station wagon would do as well, she admitted. “But I wanted something a little more stylish.”

Her truck doesn’t affect her wardrobe. She wears a wet-suit top and a swimsuit bottom for driving, like the men she knows who surf.

But Alisa Wright says she changed her dress style when she bought a truck a year ago. “It’s become extreme,” said Wright, a free-lance hair stylist who can dress any way she likes for work. “One day I wear all lace, another day hiking boots and jeans that are five sizes too big and won’t stay up without a belt.” She’s talking about farmer-style jeans.

Her truck is for living out a fantasy, but hers sounds like a Hollywood cowgirl. “How great to drive up in a beat-up Ford Courier pickup and step out in diamonds,” she said with a sigh.

Wright declares pickup trucks to be “very in.” But she likes hers for another reason. “My dad and my uncle drove trucks, but I was never supposed to,” she said. “Now I’m proving that I can do it too.”