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   Prologue

They joked about putting it on with a trowel.  Each year the chrome was getting thicker, wider, more detailed.  It was becoming more body part than highlight, as it stretched from nose to tail, roof to roll pan.
   The rear quarter panels aped vertical stabilizers and delta wings.  The headlight surrounds, jet air intakes, the taillights, rocket exhaust.  But it was all cosmetic.  The body proportions were still high, occationally wide, and often, more remarkable than handsome.  But as GM’s design staff moved into their new architecturally modernist design center in Warren Michigan outside Detroit, they were at the top of their game. 
And the public seemed to love it. 
It was all a vision of the future from the nineteen fifties. 
Then, suddenly, over at Chrysler it was 1960.

I

   Suddenly it’s 1960 was Chrysler’s ad campaign slogan of 1957.  From GM and Ford’s perspective Chrysler had indeed jumped three years ahead in styling.  This was a dramatic turn-around for the Highland Park company.  The standing joke in Detroit was, ‘Leave a Ford and a Chevy in the same garage overnight, and nine months later you get a Plymouth’.  It was designer Virgil Exner sr whose ‘Forward Look’ design system had changed derision into begrudging admiration, and emulation. 
   Exner, like so many of his peers in Detroit had come through GM’s design system.  Hired by Earl in 1933, Exner became Chief of the newly establish Pontiac design studio in 1936.  His designs were marked by distinctive, well proportioned shapes, and futuristic detail.   He was then hired by the great industrial designer Raymond Loewy in 1938, as a member of the firm’s newly established automotive design group. 
   Nine years later, Exner’s rather conspiratorial part in the development of the post war Studebackers, led to his dismissal from Loewy, and hiring as Studebacker’s first in-house Director of design.  The impact of the ’47 Studebaker, on its competitors and the market, placed Exner at the forefront of American design.  In 1949 Chrysler decided to bring him on board as their first Director of design.  Much like Harley Earl’s entry into GM

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