Retro Fever : Maybe it’s nostalgia. Maybe it’s hesitant designers. But everything old is cool again--especially in transportation.
He was a cop hurt on the job but damaged deeper by the harshness of his city. So he moved from Los Angeles to Port Angeles, to find softness and more of himself at the oars of a new Whitehall rowboat reproduced from an 1820 design.
* A public relations executive suffers travels and clients that are national, incessant and debilitating. He fights meltdown aboard a 1995 British motorcycle that’s a replica of a 1956 Triumph Thunderbird.
* Overhead, most weekends, getting a crow’s-eye close-up of the Hollywood sign, is a corporate pilot who earns clemency from fully automated, over-regulated flying in the engine songs of a biplane reborn from Smithsonian blueprints for a 1935 Waco.
In a buzzword: Retro fever.
In tighter context: Cop, publicist and pilot are players in an enormous resurrection of things of yesteryear. It’s a mass advance to the past that designers, manufacturers and consumers say is much more complex than attempts to dilute modern pressures with symbols of simpler times.
Could be, believes one expert, today’s designers are intimidated by fresh, risky ideas. So they pander to a safe sense that if an item was, it must have been good.
Others speculate that the rebirth of Harley-Davidson motorcycles, mahogany launches, electric boats, leather aviator jackets and chunky Waring blenders reflect a subconscious appreciation of quintessential design. Or maybe we’re petrified by the looming millennium and are clinging desperately to the known, the secure, the past.
“In the year 2000, we will start looking forward,” says Greg Bagni, a vice president for Colorado-based Schwinn Cycling. “But right now there’s a new century coming and people are looking back. Because we know what was there, and we don’t know what is ahead.”
With that in the corporate thinking--plus this year’s centennial of the opening of Ignaz Schwinn’s first bicycle factory in Chicago--Schwinn recently launched a line of cruisers remanufactured from ‘50s plans with springer forks and “big old daddy fenders, sofa saddles and balloon tires with blinding whitewalls.”
Early demand for the $450 bicycle, says Bagni, outstripped production by more than 50%. Last month, Schwinn announced it will reintroduce its classic Black Phantom that was every newsboy’s plea to Santa for Christmas, 1949.
“It’s a piece of jewelry,” Bagni adds. “We’ll make 5,000 to retail for $3,000 apiece. They’re all sold.”
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Retro designs are visible wherever adult toys are us. From Sharper Image stores and Hammacher Schlemmer catalogues to the Smithsonian gift shop.
The going price of grandpa’s days is as low as $129.95 for a Benrus repro of its original World War II hack watch. Or as high as $250,000 for that reborn, wooden-winged Waco built by Classic Aircraft Corp. of Lansing, Mich.
Making retro hot rods and accessories is huge business for Boyd Coddington of Stanton, founder of Hot Rods by Boyd. Ten years ago, sales of his replica Deuces and Woodies totaled $2 million. Last year the take was $20 million.
“Maybe people are losing their identity and all modern cars do look alike,” suggests Coddington. “So to be different you lower a new Camaro and put on different wheels. Or people get tattoos and pierce their chins.”
Or they pay $100,000 for a 1995 Coddington that’s a copy of a chopped and channeled 1932 Ford.
There are replica Wurlitzer jukeboxes undetectable from originals except they play CDs. One company is remanufacturing hickory-shafted putters mimicking 18th-Century Scottish golf clubs; another is building a 1920 field telephone fully updated with a 10-number speed dial.
But the richest neighborhood down this memory lane seems to be around big-buck personal transportation--boats, planes, cars, bikes and motorcycles.
When its bare-knuckle, $56,000 Viper sports car was introduced in 1994, nobody at Chrysler claimed it was anything but a ‘90s variant of the ‘60s Shelby Cobra. Chrysler continues in full pursuit of the past with a two-seat Prowler styled after Mel’s Drive-in hot rods, and a bosom-fendered Atlantic concept car that plagiarizes shapes from Bugattis of the ‘30s.
Jack Crain is a Chrysler design chief. He is a parent of the Viper, which has been built, the Prowler that might go into production and the Atlantic that probably will remain a styling exercise.
These vehicles, Crain says, represent a return to days when motoring meant romance and adrenaline pumping at 30 psi.
“People are estranged by today’s automobile technology,” he says. “But on these niche vehicles, there’s more [parts] exposed, you see shapes that are familiar, not something that came from a wind tunnel.”
From Honda through Kawasaki to Yamaha, Japanese motorcycle manufacturers are building fat, powerful, heavy cruisers that clearly knock off the straight-pipe exhausts, fenders and yards of chrome that are Harley-Davidson’s American heritage.
Harley-Davidson finds no flattery in this imitation. Yet, acknowledges Louie Netz, director of styling for the Milwaukee company, customer insistence on that certain look has produced a perfect irony: Harley-Davidson knocking off Harley-Davidson.
He says it begins with guarding “heritage, image and an intangible mystique” by preserving in today’s bikes the unmistakable sight and sounds of yesterday’s Harleys in saddle bags and streamers. As with Winchester carbines and Rolex watches, Netz adds, that confines the company “within certain boundaries of an overriding philosophy that says we’re going to evolve, not revolutionize.”
The payoff to such dedication, he adds, is that Harley sales increased 50% in the past four years.
Triumph is another company padlocked to its past. Before last year’s launch of its high-tech, high-performance bikes in the United States, the British firm took a hard look at its former colony.
It found potential customers who remembered when, and who wanted one bike the company was not making--something combining the teardrop gas tank, badging and balloon-exhaust looks of a 1969 Bonneville and a 1967 Tourist Trophy. Without, of course, shin-scraping kick starters.
The answer was to remanufacture instant heritage in the $10,000 Thunderbird, now accounting for 35% of Triumph’s U.S. sales.
Michael Lock of Atlanta, a marketing executive for Triumph, believes a portion of retro fever has been authored by hesitant designers. But only in response to apprehensions from above.
“Business life is fast and cheap these days,” says Lock, “and there is a lot of fear in corporate circles. Fear of standing out, fear of the risky decision and fear of failure.
“So you go for the safe option. But it’s not designers. It’s bureaucrats, the dreaded committee that makes all the decisions.”
Retro building and retro enjoyment seem harmless pastimes.
Yet automobile designer Harry Bradley, with credits ranging from the Mazda RX7 sports car to Oscar Mayer’s Weinermobile, sees sinister signs in “this curious intellectual anomaly . . . that speaks to the fact that creativity and science are beginning to part ways.”
He says designers aren’t daring, because consumers pay only lip service to designs, ideas and products that stray from norms.
“They look at a proposal and say: ‘What a wonderful, exciting design.’ But would they buy it? No. They don’t want to be the first on the block with it.”
Purchasing replicas, it should be noted, is often more expensive than buying true antiques. An original Triumph restored to mint condition costs $5,000, compared to $10,000 for a reincarnation. An antique Waco biplane can be had for half the price of its clone.
But, say owners, originals of any form of travel, from Radio Flyers to Chinese junks, are usually short on safety and reliability. Modern copies don’t require constant repair, round-trip travel is guaranteed, maintenance doesn’t cost an arm and a mortgage, and parts are readily available. So is insurance.
So Duffield Electric Boat Co. of Costa Mesa continues, as it has for 25 years, to make a variety of turn-of-the-century electric boats that are surreys with isinglass curtains you can roll right down. In case there’s a change in the weather.
“They’re cute and stylish,” says Duffield Vice President Gary Craine. His company makes about 300 Duffies a year, from 14-footers for $6,500, to 21-footers with stereo and bar for $25,000. “But it’s not about boats. It’s about lifestyle and partying in your floating living room while gliding silently on secluded, restricted waterways.”
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Psychology and market dynamics are generally lost on buyers. They have personal reasons for living somewhere in time.
The ex-cop is Peter Joyce, medically retired from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department and reshaping his life as a student builder of wooden boats.
Which is why he bought a Whitehall rowing boat, one of a series of lap-straked classics in fiberglass built by Harold Aune, co-founder of Whitehall Rowing & Sail, of Victoria, British Columbia.
The vessel is in fiberglass, but shaped just like Squire Trelawney’s wooden gig from “Treasure Island.” Its original blueprints are at the Mystic Seaport Museum at Mystic, Conn.
“It represents a return to quality, economy and aesthetics,” Joyce says. “I bought one as something to pass on to my kids.”
Of course it’s his escape. “When I’m rowing into a cove, the only sounds are the splash of oars, the sea birds, the waves,” he says. “You arrive, silently, easily, while the raccoons and otters are still there. You’re so much closer to everything. And much closer to yourself.”
The public relations executive is Joe Molina of Woodland Hills. He owns a 1992 Harley-Davidson Heritage Softail, all turquoise and black with whitewall tires.
“But a Harley is retro down to the fact that it shakes me to death even on a short trip,” he says.
This year, Molina was hired to promote the U.S. arrival of Triumph. Interests conflicted when he bought a Thunderbird demonstrator and found it provided “a Harley attitude with a British flair.”
“It’s not three tons of chrome with 50,000 flames on it,” Molina says. “Its a purer form of nostalgia and understated cool. For the past is always greener. Even if in reality, it wasn’t.”
Jack Elliott flies corporate aircraft for Northrop Corp., builder of B2 Stealth bombers. It is regimented, formal flying guaranteed to crimp the seat of any flier’s pants. So Elliott and partners have bought a Waco Classic, a ‘90s copy of a ‘30s biplane that once barnstormed America’s pastures.
In this life, Elliott uses it as the slow, low, warmly romantic centerpiece of his Great American Fun Flights offering joy rides from Hawthorne Municipal Airport.
“It takes me back to a time in aviation I was born 30 years too late for,” he says. “We’ve never brought anyone back from a flight over the Queen Mary and Dodger Stadium, who didn’t get off with a smile on their face.”
