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The Calico Wall - I’m a Living Sickness

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Excerpt from: Deyan Sudjic, ‘Are You What You Own?’, Cult Objects, Paladin, London, 1985

Conspicuopus redundancy and the strange phenomenon of a driver’s watch. Why real men use Zippos, and when four-wheel drive is the only way to go shopping.

Consider the Jeep for a moment. What is it about original 1942 specimen restored to mint condition, its drab olive paintwork retouched with a reverence normally reserved for flaking Rembrandts, steel foot pedals worn smooth with age, and enough equipment lashed to the sides to dig it out of a shell crater, that makes otherwise perfectly sensible graphic designers go weak at the knees and use it on suburban shopping trips? There are more practical, and more economical, ways of intimidating the average hatchback driver into the slow lane, too. The four-wheel drive surefootedness of the Jeep and its progeny is spectacularly redundant for the everyday needs of people in artificially aged leather flying jackets and lurid green spectacles. And yet, without even a hard top, their expensive Hasslblads and miniature car stereos are permanently at risk from light-fingered passersby.

Driving a Jeep in town is a bit like buying baked beans in the food hall at Fortnums, or boiling an egg on a restaurant griddle. Rationally speaking, there is no call for all that excess potential. Yet there is something curiously comforting about it, something that marks the jeep out, as being not just any car, but something special.

In much the same way, the glossy black Mont Blanc Diplomat, a fountain pen as fat and as heavy as a torch, may be just the thing to dash off a peace treaty, but it seems a little excessive for a shopping list. It contrives, however, to be effortlessly superior to lesser breeds of writing implement. A felt-tip pen can be persuaded to slip across fine textured writing paper just as satisfyingly smoothly. And a 24-carat gold barrel will drop much more unambiguous hints about numbered Swiss bank accounts, social aspirations and a Bentley in the garage. But neither will have quite the same comfortingly balanced feel when deployed ready for action in the palm, nor do they have that little snow-peak white crown.

Brandish a Mont Blanc, and people will know that it is expensive. Yet it also carries, in coded but unmistakable terms, the message that this is no mere ostentatious status symbol. It is authoritative without having to raise its voice: it is the carefully selected possession of an individual of taste and distinction, one who is serious about getting the best, but who is aware that cost and quality do not necessarily go together. Showing people who understand the code a Mont Blanc is enough to set them off on a whole train of contingent deductions. Own one of those pens, goes the assumption, and you will also own this, wear that, live there and so on. In fact, the Mont Blanc’s elaborately archaic air is largely spurious. It is an upstart pretender, a fountain pen born of the Biro and Pentel era, and manufactured in Hamburg by a subsidiary of the Dunhill tobacco empire.

In moments of stress it is just as likely to drip ink over your fingers as any other make, yet even those who have had suits ruined by the propensity remain loyal. They find themselves making allowances, seduced by those buxom and highly polished curves. The reassuring feel of that comforting bulge in the jacket pocket, or in extreme cases, in the V-neck of the Fair Isle has become part of their identity. Heavens, you can’t discard all that just because of a leak or two.

Just why the appearance of an anorak anywhere but in the immediate vicinity of large quantities of snow should instantly raise hackles, when an oily looking Barbour – the Solway Zipper, to give it its full name – oozing brute integrity from its brown corduroy collar to its tartan lining is at home anywhere, is one of those great mysteries of the age that repay closer examination. Can you, for example, imagine a Barbour being turned away from Claridges? Scarcely. But nor is it the kind of garment which is likely to inflame passions in the public bar either. Equally a Jeep can confidently be parked in locations in which a Datsun would seem absurdly humble.

Clearly, there are forces at work here which run deeper than mere questions of fashion, status, or even sheer eccentricity, though all of them are involved. There is something about the honest-to-goodness, sturdy but simple lines of the Jeep that embodies in every nut, bolt, dial, gauge and switch that peculiarly American brand of gum-chewing nonchalance about machinery. As indeed it should be. One Karl Probst dashed off the design in a single weekend, presumably locked in the den with a catalogue of standard auto parts, an endless supply of Lucky Strikes, and a wet towel wrapped around his forehead. The U.S. Army invited both the engineering company Willys and Ford to compete for the contract, and to come up with alternative designs for a military vehicle. Probst’s design won, and went into production with both firms. The Jeep, aka the general purpose utility vehicle, may have been built in its millions, but each one of those machines shares an instantly recognizable personality that has the power to turn heads wherever it goes. The Jeep is a character in fact, in a way that the Morris Marinas or Honda Civics of this world will never be.

One theory for the name is that it comes from a strip cartoon hero of the 1930s, who was capable of doing anything, and it could, if true, have something to do with the affection that the jeep inspired early on in its life. After the war, General Eisenhower even went so far as to credit the Jeep, along with the rather less appealing DC-3, the bazooka and the atom bomb, as one of the four most important war winning weapons that the Allies possessed.

Those martial origins have not prevented the Jeep, like the Citroën 2CV, the Beetle, the Cadillac Eldorado, the Mini, and even the bulbous Morris Minor from coming to symbolize qualities that are recognizable not just to their drivers, who can bask in the reflected glory, but to everybody. They are vehicles whose shapes have worked their way deep into the collective unconscious, celebrated in film, advertising and literature. They have roots and breeding: they are not simply pieces of inanimate metal. The Mont Blanc shares many of these properties. Its flowing curves and baroque flourishes are the very embodiment of the fountain pen. If ever there was a way in which a pen should look, this is it. And that is a fact of life of which every advertising photographer and art director who has ever used a Mont Blanc as a prop is well aware.

And the Barbour. Made from specially woven twice waxed Egyptian cotton, with dull brass studs that fasten with a perceptible and deeply satisfying click that is helped by its patent ball and socket fixing device, and originally designed for grouse moor use, it now speaks quietly but effectively of quality and no-nonsense professionalism. It has the right stuff about it, occupying an aristocratic position at the top of the product family. Holland and Holland make the shotgun. Bang and Olufsen make the turntable. The Barbour is the jacket, even if its makers don’t possess a double-barrelled name. Naturally, aristocrats have to conduct themselves with a certain restraint. If they peddle their names too conspicuously, then they devalue them. It would be no good Barbour going into the monogrammed pullovers business if they want to keep their credibility. They would simply go the way of Levi Strauss. The original 501 straight-leg jeans still have conviction, but the company is now hopelessly compromised by countless Levis T-shirts, Levis polyester leisure suits and all the rest of the grisly evidence of milking a good name to death.

The short answer to the question of the Jeep’s enduring and curious appeal is that it is, like the Barbour and the Mont Blanc, a cult object. It belongs to a class of artefact which exercises a powerful, but mysterious fascination. By definition a cult depends on a group of insiders, tightly knit and linked by secret signs recognizable only to initiates. There is an element of all this to the jeep, the Mont Blanc and the rest. They have acquired their special status by degrees, initially appealing to small groups of aficionados. To that curious band of militaria buffs who spend their weekends in motley second-hand uniforms, polishing pet half-tracks and swapping anecdotes about the stitching on standard issue NATO canvas webbing, a Jeep will have a special significance way beyond the comprehension of most of us. It offers, for those who have a mind to, endless possibilities for debating the relative merits of the original Jeep, the sleeker, modern CJ7, or the licence-built Hotchkiss version. A whole cosmology can be constructed on the varying interpretations of the fold-down front window.

But the Jeep is more than that. It is such a potent symbol that it has acquired cult status among a much wider audience than the arcane and slightly dotty confines of the enthusiasts. And the jeep’s glamour has spread. Its concept has been borrowed by other vehicles, from miniature Japanese Range Rover look-alikes to crude Eastern European boneshakers named after appropriately primitive livestock. All of them aspire to the glamour of the Jeep by opting for matt black windscreen wipers or putting wire mesh over the headlamps.

Other cult objects have exerted an immediate mass appeal. There are many cigarette lighters, for example, but there will only ever be one Zippo. With its burnished steel case, fliptop cover and rolling flint, it is an essential prop for countless would-be James Deans. It was originally created in 1932 by George Blaisdell, who seems to have derived his inspiration from the Austrian army, and quickly went on to make a fortune from his instant classic. You don’t have to be a smoker, and legend has it that Blaisdell wasn’t, to appreciate the sculptural qualities of its shape, or the tactile attractions of that thumboperated flint. The simple undecorated case is essentially modern, managing at the same time to suggest the slick easy charm of Rick’s Café.

Little of this is likely to have been in the mind of Mr Blaisdell at the time. It was, if anything, an unselfconscious piece of design, much in the same way as the Jeep. Utility and cheapness came first, and yet somehow, magic was worked. Instead of looking like an awkward mess of expediency, the components fitted together in both cases in a way that seems all of a piece. Some cult objects, on the other hand, have been designed in the most calculating, deliberate way, setting out to tempt the customer with a stronger lure than simple utility.

Cartier are very keen to tell you that the firm’s founder, Louis Cartier, produced the world’s very first purpose manufactured wristwatch in 1904. Cartier made it for his Brazilian airship pilot friend, Alberto Santos-Dumont, to overcome the distracting problem of fumbling for a pocket watch at critical airborne moments. What they are rather more cautious in admitting is that the Santos watch, which they have been marketing since 1978, has little or nothing in common with that early mode. Santos-Dumont went up wearing a small round watch secured to his wrist with a supple leather strap. The Santos cleverly draws on the legend, and has been designed to look as if it is a neat and elegant piece of turn-of-the-century proto high tech, with its steel strap and decorative gold screws, but it is really nothing of the kind, being and entirely modern creation. That is not to say it hasn’t been an extraordinary success. It is manufactured in hundreds of thousands, and has been the victim of a determined counterfeiting attack, with cheap copies bearing the Cartier name, the characteristic roman numerals and those blue-black swordshaped hands turning up everywhere from Hong Kong to Berlin. Cartier have fought back with vigour, on one occasion going so far as to hire a steam roller to crush 3000 fake Santos into a metallic pulp. The Santos is a cult object of sorts, but it is too clever for its own good.

The genuine Cartier cult object is the tank watch, first produced in 1917, and a fascinating example of utilitarian instrument gauge looks used for a luxury product. The Tank, along with the early Rolex, rather than the Santos, has the strongest claim to be the earliest wristwatch; designed to be worn on the hand from scratch, and not adapted from the fob and chain. As such it has set the standard by which every watch that has followed should be judged. Yet it was entirely innocent of the calculating artfulness that attended the rebirth of the Santos, and even more so, of the Porsche wristwatch.

Decades after the Tank, the German family that gave the world the Beetle, lent its name, unwillingly in some cases, to a watch that glamorized Teutonic engineering efficiency in so seductive a way that it has had consumers with the price of a second-hand car to spare drooling ever since. By this time, design was out of its adolescent innocence. The Porsche watch took itself as seriously as a Bauhaus building. ‘I am a high-minded attempt to design a watch from first principles’, is the none too subtle message of its matt black finish and stark geometric shapes. It is, of course, nothing of the kind. The Porsche is a highly sophisticated example of a design that calculatingly adopts the visual language of engineering to give a serious ‘professional’ look to what is in fact a piece of (price apart) frivolous jewellery. Not surprisingly, the car firm’s none too pleased at what they see as an attempt to cash in on their reputation. For all its artfulness, the Porsche watch works. It was designed to be an instant cult object, and it succeeded. […]

(Source: vads.ac.uk)

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