The Aesthete
I have an affection for lost causes, as my wife, children, friends, publisher and independent financial advisor can all testify. And can there be any cause more lost than Hillman? A brand so lacking in allure? Even in an age of revivals, no-one will revive it. Of course, Eastern bloc cars of the Khruschev-Brezhnev era were awful, often comically so. And this redeemed them. I have a special regard for the 1960 Syrena Sport, described as ‘the most beautiful Polish car’. That may seem an oxymoron. They made just one before the commissars decided it looked too much fun.
‘Hillman’ was last seen on the 1976 Avenger, a drab car with at least seven deadly virtues that lived until 1981, badged first Chrysler then Talbot. And what pitiably thwarted macho wish-fulfilment does that aggressive name suggest? Perhaps they considered and rejected ‘Punisher’.
But just as William Blake, mystically mooching on the beach at Felpham, could see a ‘world in a grain of sand’, so, if you are prepared to look closely, there are genuine treasures in Hillman’s neglected history. Weird design initiatives connect Ryton-on-Dunsmore with Palm Springs and Terrazzano di Rho.
The 1953 Hillman Californian was, like its contemporary Austin Atlantic and the later Nash Metropolitan, a bold (not to say shameless) project to sell American styling back to Americans. In this way, the Hillman predicted that brilliant legerdemain of Ralph Lauren who, from Brooklyn, sold the country house wardrobe back to the British. Alas, the take-up of the Californian was less enthusiastic Stateside than our take-up here of Polo cotton-Oxford button-downs.
But the Hillman Californian was not at all a shabby and amateurish effort. It was conceived at our moment of maximum infatuation with US culture, when ads in Vogue attributed the confidence and good looks of American women to nothing less than their free access to firm ‘foundation garments’. We thought even American bottoms were superior to ours.
No-one now knows quite how it happened, but the supreme leader of US Glitz, a fantastic vulgarian called Raymond Loewy, was hired to give an ordinary Hillman something of the debonair kitsch he had so lavishly distributed to his other big client, Studebaker. Who could no
